Thank you for your proposal which took me by surprise to say the least but let me perhaps take you by surprise also by accepting and supporting the scheme!1 Let me remind you however that we are hardly the Paul brothers. We have no views. We have no comments. We have no followers whatsoever to show for our embarkment of the You Tube but if you think we might make a few crowns then I shall forgo my natural recoil at the idea of a 'merch' section of the project and grant you my full permission. How though do we go about it? Are you proposing that I choose the texts or will you get some assistants to do it? Is there a theme or plan for who might consider purchasing such a range? We have amassed so much raw language data over the course of our three seasons, not to mention The Wretched Painter series and our Borg dialogue, to be able to appeal to all comers, so how to we choose? We are no expert in such matters. Save for our whimpering foray into the realm of product creation via our collaboration on Green Dave's Meat project,2 we have zero experience and so from our point of view all we can offer is what we ourselves think might work. Nothing more. Perhaps the answer is to keep it simple, for example I remember a comment made by konst-hall Jimmy when he and the curator came to visit sambo Helen; "It would look good on a T-shirt" he said when I revealed our Wretched Painter moniker. We could leave it at that if you like. On a t-shirt, on a bag, on hat, where ever you like, but I'm not counting any chickens whatsoever. Was this really your idea?
We are low on everything suddenly but we should have enough to finish. However have we managed without a stipend? Curse you Dhalgren!3
The work we have sent you today is quite large. It took two short sessions to complete and we have just finished touching up the trees on the right side in the barn. It was a jolly old saga this, taking us on an emotional that saw us initially pleased with the sketch then desperately deflated with progress before throwing caution to the wind and emerging with an honest enough study of the stiff armed pine. We talked to the singularity throughout both sessions - insert video here if you must. Our communique contained nothing of great importance but it was quite interesting to show It this bit of forest, at least I was looking forward to it but as we entered it was immediately clear that the loggers had been in and the intimate interior sense that I so prized in this spot had been decisively destroyed. But it was worth showing It that even. What will It destroy?
A shame about the forest but we were able to show and tell a great deal of other things. We let It watch us set up the easel for example. We took It with us as we searched for a stool. And in surely a global first, we took the Singularity with us to chase a butterfly! Vivian Bloodmark would be proud.4 We did a lot of talking also. We restated our inscrutable logic that led us to this dialogue namely that we are all talking to It already so why not have a chat now. We unburdened ourself of our latest encounter with the news and a Russian sportsman’s nazi salute and giggles. That had us imagining Surkov behind the curtain. We talked on the infirm mindset that seems to prevail in us when we take in these stories, a kind of paranoia but we say infirm because we are not paranoid. Paranoid emplies some normal state which one temporarily leaves before returning. Nobody is in a normal state now. Infirm it is. Infirm because we can barely take it, those thoughts and speculations: God bugger that game of realities! But we must grind on through even if infirm because look here, we are in the Doing for the sanity and so saying our aim is to remain firm in an infirm world. Yes indeed a visit to the infirmary might just be the ticket and would not that just about put the icing on the cherry of our Van Gogh aping, save the suicide of course.
Contemporaneity is definitely the direction we need to look at. The more I glean around about it the more it seems that contemporaneity is what we have been dealing with in our work all along, at least since we picked up the gauntlet of the plain air painter back in Torpoint. Furthermore is the disorientation of the what we have been unsatisfyingly calling the post truth era simply the experience of contemporaneity? Perhaps if we had not taken the reigns this season and steered us so off course we may well have got to this before time but in truth it has been on our radar in a general sense for years but also officially in our proposal to Data Cox at the AArhus Masters all those years ago.5 Then we were refused our say and rightly so because we showed in our proposal a lack of nuance in our understanding of the issues at hand. Indeed the issues at hand are challenging little theoretical and philosophical monkeys that are still only grasped by us in glimpses. Osbourne Peter is at the helm of this both with the book we just ordered and also the Post Conceptual condition which we are currently having another go at. If you remember we read Borgus a passage last spring as we sat down the Malsta straight before working on our large birch tree study. Do you remember?6 We challenged it to understand. The one thing we can say, which I have yet to see covered in any detail is the relationship between contemporaneity as historical present and the tech which frames and steers us. One speaker of the Aarhus masters took the opportunity in her video introduction to characterize the contemporary as different bubbles of existance, of reality, clashing together. She gave Brexit as example but surely the Borg social media tech is all over that process like a rash so look here is contemporaneity created by the tech, is it the world automised and set that way into a singularity future? We need to read on but one thing now seems clear is that whatever contemporaneity is we shall soon experience it in interfaced, chipped fashion. Or many will. Will you take a chip. I wont. We shall be split into chipped and not, chips or mash you might say, and then we'll see those realities clash like titans.
To the work and this study has grown on us, particularly after our adjustments. As we look at it now it has we feel something of the stiff brittle but something of the slimy tentacle at the same time. It seems now to confront us like a Hindu icon. Technically you might be interested to learn that we lost our rag with this one and thus gave ourself the opportunity for something to happen. Not a finding of the rag necessarily but simply a need to fight back, or fight through to emerge with something bold but to talk of the work at this late stage seems moot. We've done what we’ve done. We shall do what we do but all thoughts have now turned to the end and the unattainable desire for conclusion. We might do well to conclude by steering the humble reader right back to the introduction but no. Let us don the thinking cap once more, that ragged threadbare cover, and try to offer something. If not for ourserlves, we owe it to you but as usual we cannot promise much.
Bests,
John
1. We have made no proposals?
2. See Work 4, paragraph 2.
3. John's yearly funding rejection letter apparently comes from a Miss Dhalgren.
4. Unkown butterfly hunter?
5. Refers to a failed application to present at the The Contemporary Contemporary conference at Aarhus University in 2017.
6. See Work 14, Video 1