Process Letter to My Advisor 5.3

Dear XXXXX,

How’s life? So I’ve been back in New York for a couple days, and on the first night it actually snowed! Can you believe it? In the morning it was around 80 degrees in Louisiana and by the time we drove up north it was snowing… So anyway I am home. Buffalo. The return drive cross-country is never as much fun as the initial drive out. We planned on spending a day in New Orleans this time (never been), but by Sonora, Texas we were both sick and had to be resigned to bed rest at the La Quinta in Baton Rouge. There’s nothing worse (okay I’m sure there are many things) than being sick in a roadside motel on a road trip, so at that point we loaded up on vitamin c and took marathon shifts driving back up the coast. It’s kind of a blur of small towns after that point, but we’re back (and missing the sun we had in LA).

So for this packet I’ll keep it fairly short, as it seems a little redundant to write much of a process letter on top of a lengthy process paper. In this packet I am including an annotation on Thomas Hirschhorn’s monograph and tried to draw parallels between some stuff I’ve done and his ideas. I also completed and included my process paper and tried to construct a cohesive narrative of my Goddard experience, while keeping an eye on the bigger themes and questions involved. The main theme here is a recurrence of a crisis of faith in ideas and how that figures into the ways I create. In a lot of ways I am still concerned with being able to pull my manuscript together. There is a pull between wanting to structurally pull it apart a lot more and “finishing it up”. Finishing it feels like a closing up process whereas if it wasn’t on an academic timeline, I’d be more interested in opening it up and exploring on a level that isn’t really feasible on this timeline. That’s not necessarily bad. Stalking America is still baking, and that’s part of the process. If I focus on some restructuring and pulling it together (after all it is almost due… crap, is that true?), while thinking of it as a version or workshopped version (in the film or theater sense of the word)… while keeping in mind what it may be in a “finished” form may be different from my thesis… then it seems good and healthy. Is that true? Let me know what you think!

Also, I’m including a copy of Agnes Martin. My boyfriend already copied it for his use as well, so I’ll send you his and make another one. I hope spring finds you well; after all, it’s a comin’, right?