I’ve just put two-and-two together to realise that we met when I was working with castillo/corrales on Frieze Projects in 2015. I still have a copy of Crumpled, rumpled… on my bookshelf. Happy to be back in touch!
Thank you for sharing Marja Bloem’s email address - I’ve been moving forward with Art Resource for the rights clearance, but am more inclined to deal directly with the estate, so I will reach out to her as you suggest.
I’m happy to share more details about the book, which will have a lot of points of connection to Primary Information’s work. Take a look at the blurb I have pasted below and let me know if you’d like to discuss it further.
The Employee was a year-long
conceptual artwork by Joshua Schwebel. Responding to Forest City Gallery
(FCG)’s invitation to participate in an exhibition of institutional critique,
Schwebel obtained a Canada Council for the Arts grant to hire a
performer-cum-arts administrator who, over a one-year duration, submitted
funding applications for FCG. Located in London, Ontario, FCG is one of
Canada's first artist-run centres. It has been publicly funded for almost 50
years, yet is staffed and operated by a single, part-time employee. By
supplementing the underlying insufficient workforce of the gallery, and thereby
augmenting the gallery’s grant-writing capacity, The Employee exposed the
longstanding and otherwise unquestioned precarity of publicly-funded cultural
workers, revealing long-present fault lines in systems of funding and labour
within the so-called creative economy.
The Employee is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials
by artists and cultural workers intended to both reflect on The Employee
and to trace the systemically enforced disintegration of boundaries between
art-work-life leading up to, during and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a contributor to this book, the writer and labour organizer Dana Kopel
writes, “The Employee documents a year of precarious work as a lens into
the crumbling infrastructure of the regional gallery system and labour in the
arts more broadly; it prompts consideration of the often-detrimental ways that
contemporary art production relies on both corporate and corporatizing state
funding models that exist primarily to serve the expansion and entrenchment of
capital. In doing so, the work implicitly also poses the question: What can we,
as art workers, do about it?”
The Employee is edited by Joshua Schwebel and Lauren Wetmore and includes
contributions by Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Teresa Carlesimo, Bopha Chhay, Dana
Kopel, Michelle Lacombe, Denise Ryner, Joshua Schwebel, Camille-Zoé
Valcourt-Synnott, Marina Vishmidt, and Lauren Wetmore. It is designed by House9
and will be co-published by Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery in 2024.
