CCA funded publication | The Employee by Joshua Schwebel

Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com> To: Fillip < ████████████████ >

Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 5:31 AM

dear Fillip,

I have long been a reader and admirer of your work.

I am a Canadian conceptual artist, working with transactions, delegated performance and institutional critique. I am in the process of producing a printed publication as documentation of a year-long project, funded by the Canada Council. The performance of the project is currently underway and is slated to conclude in September of this year, with the publication to be printed subsequently.

The work itself engages with the relationship between artist-run culture and funding, a subject I know is one of Fillip's concerns, and I am hoping you might be interested in publishing the forthcoming book.

The project itself is as follows:

Conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel has hired a grant-writer whose task is to write funding applications on behalf of the Forest City gallery. The Employee, the project’s title, is both a one-year employment contract and an artwork contributing to the structural support of the Forest City Gallery, an artist-run centre in London, Ontario. The founding members of FCG were instrumental in securing CARFAC wages for Canadian artists, yet the current structure only has the operating budget to support a single paid staff member on a part-time basis.

The delegated set of tasks comprising the artist’s project are for the Employee to apply for grants and obtain additional funding for the Forest City Gallery. These tasks at once the performance of an artwork and productive work supplementing the gallery’s limited staff. Schwebel successfully obtained project funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to hire the Employee as a delegated performer of the artwork. Any funds successfully earned by way of the project will be incorporated into the gallery’s operating budget, and potentially used to augment its future workforce. The work externalizes grant-writing and the administrative-economic tasks associated with the financial survival of the gallery, rendering this unseen work into a supplementary durational performance enacted peripheral to the exhibition space.

The publication will include documentation of the project in the form of contracts, transactions, notes, screen-shots, and photos, along with critical texts contextualizing the work and its engagement with the history of artist-run culture in Canada, labour in artist-run culture, the contract and wage as artistic medium, etc. I am still finalizing contributors, however, I have already confirmed the participation of Marina Vishmidt and Clive Robertson.

I would be delighted if you might be interested in taking this on, please feel free to get in touch with questions,

warm greetings and hope you are staying healthy!

Joshua Schwebel