Lauren Wetmore <██████████████████████ >
To: Dana Kopel <██████████████████████ >
Cc: Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
Dear Dana,
It was lovely to meet in person last month, I hope life has been sweet to you since. When do you start your journey West?!
I am writing with all my fingers crossed that you will accept an invitation to contribute to a forthcoming catalogue I am editing, to be published in 2022 with Art Metropole. The Employed is both a reflection on and an archive of artist Joshua Schwebel's conceptual artwork The Employee (2020-21), and a documentation of thinking on labor and culture right now.
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 another soon to be confirmed contributor. We are offering a fee of $600 to all our contributors, for essays around 3000 words, with a (flexible) first draft deadline of early August.
I've attached a publication overview to give you a bit more information, and I would be grateful for the opportunity to jump on a (video)call to tell you more about how we have been envisioning your potential contribution. As other contributions span historical and theoretical discussion of cultural labor, as well as art historical precedents to Josh's project, we are excited by the possibility of your text combining your lucidity of prose when writing about artists, your adept analysis of contemporary practices, and your experience of the intricacies of cultural labor.
There is so much more I would like to discuss with you around Josh's practice and this book, but I will leave it here for now in the hopes that the invitation has sparked your interest!
Excited to continue the conversation,
Lauren
P.S. I along with his website, I really recommend taking a look at Josh's recent artist talk It's Not Working for KW Berlin.