Re: Update

I am so sorry to have been out of contact the last long period of time. I am not great at keeping in touch, but I have had you on my mind and am wondering how you are doing.

I wanted to also let you know that the show at Clark is finally underway. The opening is planned now for October 28.

I will send you some documentation if you are curious.

What have you been up to?

my best,

Josh

First, apologies for taking some time to respond. I wanted to make sure I was able to do it properly.

I am happy to hear from you and to know that your project at Clark is finally happening! I would love for you to send me some documentation, as possible. I followed from a distance the developments of The Employee and caught the last portion of the most recent performance... which I thought was fantastic! I listened to the whole CCA presentation on their new digital grants and enjoyed every bit of institutional critique irony at play. The best moment was the "ostie d'câlisse" from the performer at the end of the talk. I don't know if it was spontaneous or scripted, but to me it was a perfect moment of performance!

I am also sorry I haven't kept in touch. My mental health took a pretty bad turn in the late spring and summer of 2020 and I ended up spending 2 months in hospital. I'm doing a lot better now, but I don't have as much energy because of my meds... but they are keeping me more emotionally balanced than I've ever been, so things are pretty good. Something great that came out of all that is that my partner and I moved so we could get a dog. We now have a six-month-old havanese who has become the love of my life and is the best anti-anxiety treatment! Meet The Captain:

Work-wise, I've been pretty busy with different projects... and I keep pushing back my dissertation research. It's not ideal, but it feels a lot less urgent than the other things I've been working on. For the last year I've been working with the Independent Media Arts Alliance on the development of sectoral standards and tools for online presentation. The production of a new fee schedule for online and offline presentation is the biggest part of the project and I am quite proud of the outcome. The new fee schedule is a lot more comprehensive than the last and is more oriented towards the needs of the artists with a lot of increases for larger-budget presenters. The new fee schedule should be published on IMAA's website soon, but here is the almost finalized version, if you are interested: https://docs.google.com/document/#redacted

I've also attached a book chapter I published in the last year that connects with the conversations we had in winter of 2020 and   critiques the CCA's Digital Strategy Fund. You might appreciate it given the last The Employee performance... Speaking of it, that reignited my interest in writing about your work. I can't make any commitments right now, but I want you to know that writing about your work is in the back of my mind.

Thank you for reaching out. I would love to know how you are doing as well.

Big hug,

Mariane

it's great to hear from you and I am glad that your mental health is more or less evening out. I was low-key worried about you!

Congrats on your adorable pupper! I am sure he will help. Dogs are the best. Also, the work with IMAA sounds really interesting and important. I am happy to hear that you continue to pursue this kind of advocacy. It is so needed.

I will absolutely send documentation from the show at Clark when I get it. 

Thank you also for this pdf of your text. I think I had seen it before, but reading it again reminded me that you would actually be ideal as a contributor to the publication I am putting together about The Employee, and I would be really happy if you could imagine writing a text for the project.

The publication will assemble the documentation of the work and allow it to reach a secondary public.

As a starting place I would like you to write about the work in relation to the larger neoliberal shift of Canadian cultural policy away from long-term operating funds and towards project grants and how The Employee critiques this. I am open to other approaches as well, but I think it woudl be great if you could talk about how this project critically addresses the politics of arts funding in Canada. I think you know this material closely and can speak about it with excellent authority. I would be happy to speak about this more in a zoom meeting -- to show you through the documentation of various forms of disciplining artists into administrators, or describe how the London Arts Council calls its arts funding "investments" while programming its own arts events on the side for which it doesn't pay CARFAC fees ! .

I would like to have first drafts of texts by the end of January, and I can pay $600 CAD for a text around 5 or 6 pages in length.

Would that be of interest to you?

big hug to you too!

Josh

The Captain IS the best, he's just made so many things in my life better!

Thanks for the offer of contributing to your upcoming publication. Yes, I am absolutely interested and would love to sink my writing teeth into this topic in connection with the project. In addition to the ideas you've outlined, I think it might also be interesting to touch on the ways in which ARCs have institutionalized precarity through their labour practices. The irony being that the ARC model discursively positions itself against precarity and institutionalization. Financial need and lack of funding is partly responsible for this issue, but there is also a problem within ARC culture that accepts precarity as a given reality. In the work I've been doing with IMAA, we've been talking about the need to shift the paradigm of "more programming is better" and instead think about how to better allocate resources by programming less but better. This can manifest in different ways, like allocating resources for accessibility services (a major blind spot in ARC culture), but also provide better working conditions for staff and artists. A parallel shift at the level of the arts councils is needed in terms of rethinking what artistic excellence means... 

On a related note, the Ontario Arts Council is now mandating orgs (with operating funding I think) to pay staff living wages. Some organizations are scrambling because this will mean big increases to their staffing budgets. It's absurd coming from organizations who supposedly abide by certain values, but don't put them into practice. Some IMAA members pushed back on aspects of the fee schedule that would mean they'd have to pay more artists fees... 

All this to say that I think orgs are negotiating precarity on multiple fronts; yes from lack of funding but also from their own policies and practices. Perhaps this is just another manifestation of the self-precarization of cultural workers? 

These are my thoughts for now. Let me know what you think.

I'm pretty slammed until December, so I won't be able to properly start working on the text until then. Perhaps we can meet early December to talk about this. Please don't take this as a mark of under-enthusiasm, I just won't have the necessary brain power until then.

Talk soon,

Mariane

excellent that you would like to contribute a text. I think you are absolutely on the right track with what you have sketched out above. The question of the culture of precarity is very much what I want this project to indicate. Moreover, it's important to contextualize this project within the history of FCG as one of Canada's oldest ARCs and one whose members were intensely involved in founding CARFAC and negotiating for artist's fees. So it is especially pertinent to investigate the culture of precarity there.

Anyways, as you wrote that you need until December to get into this, I will leave it there, but I am SO grateful and excited that you want to give some of your brilliant energy to this project. It appears that we have a good deal to talk about!

Thank you for so clearly articulating your availability -- I appreciate it.

Looking forward to speaking then and to being back in contact.

warm greetings,

Josh