Direction AXENÉO7 <███████████████████████ >
To: jonathan at arcco < ██████████████████ >
Cc: Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >, Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
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The Employee was a year-long conceptual artwork by Joshua Schwebel at Forest City Gallery in London, Ontario (2020-21). One of Canada's first artist-run centres, FCG has been publicly funded for almost 50 years, yet is staffed by a single, part-time employee whose disproportionate workload is not uncommon in artist-run centres in Canada. To realize The Employee, Schwebel obtained funding from the Canada Council for the Arts to hire a performer, “the employee”, who he delegated to write funding applications on behalf of FCG. Schwebel intended to reinforce the gallery’s capacity, while the gallery, in turn, provided the framework through which the performer’s administrative activities would be signified as art. Ultimately, none of the employee’s grant applications were successful.
This book, also The Employee, is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers reflecting on Schwebel’s work and their own labour contexts. As Dana Kopel, writer, labour organizer, and a contributor to this book, 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 the editors and Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Teresa Carlesimo, Bopha Chhay, Dana Kopel, Michelle Lacombe, Denise Ryner, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott and Marina Vishmidt.