Dear Lauren,
My name is Joshua Schwebel. I am a Canadian conceptual artist who shares your interest in the intersections between artistic and legal forms, contracts, labour and institutional critique.
I am writing to you because I am working on a year-long project, described below, and was wondering if you might have time or interest in writing one of the texts that will compose a publication to conclude the project.
Here is a brief description:
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 which were instrumental in securing CARFAC wages for Canadian artists, yet only can support a single paid staff member.
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.
I am approaching you in part because of your writing on labour and art, but also because the project includes two custom-made contracts, co-written with my father, who is a retired lawyer. The contracts serve to define the work between myself and the gallery, but also between myself and the employee. They are also, naturally, documentation of the project for artistic purposes. I am always excited about entities that serve both a functional and artistic purpose, as I am sure you might understand. Having enthusiastically read your text about The Artist’s Contract, and discovering your involvement in the Art and Law centre, I felt compelled to contact you.
The concrete information for the publication is as follows:
The performance of the work will conclude mid-September 2021, and the publication will need to wait until after this date, because I would like to include some of the application responses as well as selected documentation of the employee’s work. The text that I hope you might write should be approximately 2000 words, for which I can pay $600 CAD.
If you are interested, I would be delighted to speak in greater detail about the project over zoom or another equivalent platform in the coming days.
I hope you are safe and well, and thank you for your work,
Sincerely,
Joshua Schwebel
