Follow-up

I hope you are well. I am writing once again to check on the status of your text.

I am on my way to Canada to open an exhibition of work that I began before the pandemic! It will be good to finally close this project.

I need to hear back from you about your progress on the text. Do you have an idea of how much longer you will need? I would like to propose Feb. 15 as a deadline to see a draft. Does that seem achievable for you?

I will meet with the graphic designers when I am in Montreal next week, and it would be good to be able to map out a further timeline of how much longer we will need before sending them the publication draft.

One further question: as a complementary aspect of the work alongside the critical texts, I am compiling an archive of every email connected to the project. This record of the project as process contains over 3000 emails. With your consent, I would like to include our correspondence (relative to the project) in this record. I normally redact email addresses and other personal contact information, and I can attach copies of our emails as they would be reproduced, but do let me know if you consent to being incorporated into the material of the work in this more personal way.

My thanks, and warmly,

Josh

Dear █████████,

Good to hear from you. First, I look forward to seeing the draft. As always, I am available if you need any information, etc.

On the subject of the emails, I respect your wishes and appreciate your trust in having shared these personal matters with me. I will not reproduce the content.

I should give you some context, so that you don’t think I am a horrible friend, or perhaps worse, a sloppy artist. For me, the email archive is a way of representing the duration and magnitude of work involved in the project — these emails are constant. Collecting and showing them (online) is a way of showing the cross-overs between personal and professional life in art work, and the ways that we are always working. During the project, which overlapped with the pandemic, email and online communication was the only form of social contact, and the only form of work. Many, if not all of the people involved in this project have faced severe personal crises (you are not the only person connected to the project whose father died, I am sorry to say), and these crises are recorded through the emails. I want to include the consequences of working through these times. Many many people stopped responding to my emails, or respond very slowly. And I have noticed that one of the consequences of the pandemic and working through crisis is that communications have become unreliable. Burnout, exhaustion, and smaller collapses are, in part, because our field lacks structures or means of support for taking time off, for grieving, etc., especially as many people are always already working beyond their capacities. This is something I also want to make visible through this process. I am telling you this not to convince you to change your mind, but for you, as one of the few people who “reads” my work, to see the intention behind this request. I am sorry I did not explain this more clearly in my previous message. 

I am very, very grateful for your support of my work, and for our conversations, which I hope will continue past the conclusion of this project.

Sending you love,

Josh

Dear █████████,

Thanks for understanding this more, and I am really sorry for not having explained this more generously in my earlier message.

The website has not yet been designed, but I envision a “front page” of the website that will hold the conversations as a map that charts the magnitude and form of these conversations over time. I am working with the graphic designers to try to find an adequate visual inscription for this information, but I see it a bit like a subway map. Each point in the timeline will be another email, divided by sender, so that it forks or branches out from the initial project proposal, laid out over the four-year time-span of the project. I have opted to use the emails as the vehicle for communicating the project, rather than the grant applications, because the project is about infrastructure and process, about work; so it needs to represented through a corresponding (haha) form.

I would also be happy to talk about it, since it is still taking form.

One compromise in your case could be to redact the majority of our conversation. I could send you a draft with these redactions if you want, but it is also ok to keep the whole correspondence blacked out, and simply maintain these unreadable documents as placeholders to represent the fact that our communication occurred.

Hugs,

Josh