Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >
Dear Lauren,
It has been such a joy working with you on the Oeil de Poisson text.
As you may or may not know, in parallel with that publication I have also been trying to put together a publication for The Employee project. It has run into several major roadblocks, generally because every single person I have tried to include has been in a state of depression / burnout / health breakdown! for the past two years (not due to the project but because of the state of the world and their precarious employment conditions). I am now really at a loss with how to pull the publication together, since among the no-response after saying yes-es was the person I had tapped to edit the publication.
I listened to the Dana Kopel conversation yesterday (excellent. I had already read her text last year and silently raged along with her, but it was so brilliant to hear your conversation with her), and I had a sudden, perhaps crazy, revelation that you would be the dream person to invite in as an editor. I have been trying to find someone who can work with precision in language, who has a knowledge of contemporary art, a level of anger that matches my own, and with whom I have good communication, and you tick all those boxes.
I envision publication as both an archive of the project’s year-long duration, and a selection of written reflections from invited writers. But I am struggling to make decisions about how granularly to archive the project - do I include every budget from all of the grant applications?
It would be great to have an editor (perhaps you :)?) to consult with to make these structural decisions. In addition to this, I have received one out of the the three commissioned texts, ███ █ ████ ██ ███ ████ ███ ██████ and I am not actually sure how to make concrete suggestions ██ ██████████ ███ ████████ ████ █ ████████ █████ . So basically the job would be to help figure out an organizational structure for the publication (what to cut, what to keep), and how to divide / categorize the content. As well, I would lean on you to co-edit contributors’ texts.
The timeline is somewhat open, in that I am sort of hoping to finish by the end of the summer, and I can offer you $3500 CAD, which I know is maybe not great, but maybe is ok (tell me if I am way off base). Art Metropole has agreed to act as a publisher / distributor, and the invited writers are Marianne Bourcheix-Laporte, Mitchell Cumming, and Marina Vishmidt. I would like to see if you think it would be a good idea to invite in an additional writer and if so, if you have any suggestions for who it could be…
Anyways, if you don’t have the capacity to take this on, that is also ok. I understand and will continue to ❤️ you hardcore regardless. But yeah, let me know what you think.
I really don’t want to pile things on, but I would also love a way to continue having reasons to engage…
x