Re: publication updates

Hi Lauren,

I am just running about 5 minutes late.

See you soon,

x

hi Lauren,

Thanks for sharing these texts. I’ve given some thought to a strategy.

 

As I was reading these texts (which are both excellent, no qualms with the quality of either as a potential contributor) I was remembering what you said when weighing the two - ████ ███ ████ ████ ████ ██ ████ ██ ███ █████████ ██ ████████ ███ █████████ ██ █ ██████████ █████. I think that a book like this is a really good opportunity to expand the voices around your work, and if ███████ is one that you want to reach for - then let’s do it! If he declines or backs out, then we can always pivot to █████████, with the knowledge that he is a good safety net.

Let me know what you think about that. 

If we decide to move forward, I agree that I should write the invitation and to help bolster my request it would be great if you could provide me with some language about what exactly excites you about his writing and where you see his ongoing investigations as aligning with your practice and The Employee specifically. I would combine this language with brief descriptions of the other two texts and my own notes.

Have a lovely evening!

L

Dear Lauren,

Thanks so much for your reflection and encouragement.

After re-reading the ███████ text, and thinking about your recommendation, I agree that it makes more sense to reach for what would be more exciting for me, in the hopes that ███████ is available to work with us.

What I am hoping that the text can achieve is somewhat more difficult, since it’s a bit like ordering from a restaurant that has no menu, but…

First and foremost it is necessary to speak to the project as an artwork. How is it an artwork to pay someone to augment the administrative staff of a small artist-run centre? Not so much in terms of “it’s an artwork because the artist designates it as such, performative speech acts, blah blah”, but in a consideration of the administration of the self as a form of governance and a reciprocal performance. How much of the cultural work of budget administration and the administration of the self is a performance? I would also like to look at the project in terms of institutional critique in times of neoliberalism, when the institution is as much within the self as it is an structure. I would like to also wrestle with the question of what can an artwork do, what can art do, what can critique do — do in terms of make things different, in terms of act or function.

What it is that excites me about █████████ writing is the very unornamented, unacademic way that he says very precise things. I appreciated the first-person voice of it, especially in a text about the self in self-organizing. I think that some of the key questions in the text ███ ██████████████, about the relation between small arts organizations / individual cultural produces and large institutionalizing funding structures are very pertinent to this project.

In very concrete terms, the paper should be around 2000 words in length, and the deadline for the first draft would be end of June (or?), and I could offer a payment of 600 CAD.

Let me know if there is more that should be added to this, and let him know that we are very available to meet to describe the project in greater detail, that documentation in every form is available, etc. etc.

I hope you had a great weekend! And that you are trying to find calm in the midst of your packing process.

x