Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >
To: Anna Dezeuze <████████████████████████████████████ >
Cc: Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
Dear Anna,
I was delighted to receive your reply, and grateful to hear of the Canadian connection between us!
Please excuse my delay in response, which I must admit has been due to the nerves of professional admiration. Ever since reading your book 'Almost Nothing: Observations on precarious practices in contemporary art' I have been trying to strategise the best way to entice you to contribute to an upcoming book I am editing. The possibility of your participation feels so important to this project that making this first approach has taken on an outsized proportion.
So, with fingers crossed, I would be honored if you would consider contributing an essay to The Employed, a forthcoming publication intended to both reflect on and archive artist Joshua Schwebel's conceptual artwork The Employee (2020-21).
The Employed will thematize the precarity of publicly-funded cultural labour, and the disintegration of boundaries between art-work-life during the pandemic, expressive of neoliberal austerity politics and Fluxus-like mergers between art and life. The publication will include essays by Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte and Marina Vischmidt, and is set to be co-published by Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery by the end of 2022.
The historical trajectory and contemporary context of a "precarious aesthetic" that you establish in 'Almost Nothing' has been an essential framework as we have continued work on this publication. It is our hope that you would be sparked by an invitation to continue these inquiries into the current context using The Employee as a new point of departure for analysis. We are offering a fee of $600 to all our contributors, for essays around 2500 to 3000 words.
I completely understand that your schedule may not be conducive to writing projects at the moment, but Josh and I would both be so grateful for your consideration of this proposal and we are happy to discuss a timeline that works for you. I have attached a Publication Brief to give you further details about the project and would be delighted to arrange a video call to explore this possible collaboration.
With warmest wishes from Brussels,
Lauren