Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >
Dear █████ ██████ ███ ████ ,
Thank you once again for your support through this process to include documentation of Michael Asher’s works in our publication. Michael Asher is one of the most significant influences on my artistic practice, and it is very meaningful to me to be able to cite his works in the upcoming publication.
I’m writing to you as the artist behind The Employee project, which was an artwork out of which our publication manifested. I am writing now with an additional request for your consent.
The Employee was an artwork about the messy, imbalanced, and opaque intersections of art and paid work. I have linked to a summary of the artwork on my website.
One aspect of this publication that will exist in parallel with the printed book, is an extensive email archive cataloguing every communication in connection with the work and its publication. The email archive will be published as a website, where people can read through the correspondences that take place prior to artistic productions and publications.
In this regard, I am now writing to ask your consent to reproduce the emails we (Lauren, myself, and you as representatives of the Asher Foundation) exchanged in the process of securing permissions to reproduce the aforementioned images.
I have attached these emails below so you can see the content. As you can see from the attachments, I will redact email addresses and images (for which I can already assume would require an additional process of requests), but let me know if you would prefer specific redactions other than those I have already made, or have other concerns or stipulations with this proposition. To gauge the publicness attached to this email archive and our particular emails, know that this exchange is one of thousands. I'm aware that this is perhaps an unusual request, but also hope that your familiarity with Asher's work will allow you some leeway for interacting with artistic (unusual) requests and the potential they offer towards making an artwork possible.
I look forward to hearing back from you.
warm regards,
Joshua Schwebel