Distance in Proximity

Friendship as method, as developed by Lisa Tillman and others, can be understood as both the approach used within community-based art and a methodology adequate to convey these practices. This article examines one particular example of community-based art, Spiral Garden in Toronto, Ontario, to develop and elaborate friendship as a relation of distance in proximity. Building upon Levinas’ notion of unconditional hospitality, the author argues that art practices can preserve a necessary space between friends in order to resist subsuming the friend into the self. If friendship as methodology is a type of narrative ethnography, as Tillman-Healy asserts, what style of writing might adequately evoke research objects to which we are deeply attached?