Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>
To: Leigh C. LaBerge <██████████████████████ >
dear Dr. La Berge,
My name is Joshua Schwebel. I am an artist working with institutional critique and delegated performances to address the labour practices and value of labour in the art world.
I am writing to you because I am at the beginning stages of a project described below, which will culminate in a publication. I am also in the midst of reading Wages Against Artwork, and I am blown away by the accuracy and pertinence of your work in its description of our current artistic/labour conditions, but more selfishly, to my own project and practice.
In a previous project I addressed the devaluing of cultural work by using my exhibition budget to compensate otherwise unpaid interns working in the administration of the organization in which I was invited. In another project, which took place in the context of a group show involving many works that required audience participation, I offered people minimum wage to complete the other artists' works, recommodifying participation as otherwise unpaid labour.
My current project, entitled The Employee, takes place in the context of a regional artist-run centre in London, Ontario, the founders of which historically led the struggle for artist-fees to be paid in Canada, but which currently operates with a single paid staff member. For my work I have hired someone to support the Forest City Gallery’s single-person staff for a one-year term. This supplemental employee is tasked with writing grants and managing fundraising for the gallery, and is funded by a grant awarded to me from the Canada Council for the Arts, the very same organization responsible for (under-)funding the gallery. The delegated set of tasks comprising the project are at once the performance of an artwork and productive work benefiting the gallery. The project externalizes grant-writing and the administrative-economic tasks associated with the financial survival of the gallery as a supplementary durational performance enacted on the administrative margins of the exhibition space.
Any funds successfully earned by way of the project will be incorporated into the gallery’s operating budget, and potentially used to bolster its future workforce.I am writing to you because I would like to invite you to write a text for the publication on the project. If you are interested, I would be honoured to speak to you in more detail. But in practical terms the text should be approximately 2,500 words, for which I can pay $600 CAD. Given that the project will unfold over the course of this year, the deadline reamins far in the future (likely September 2021).
And regardless of how you respond to this proposition, I would like to say that I am very grateful for your book, and find it inspiring to read how you so lucidly synthesize ideas that I have been struggling over for years.
warm regards, and wishing you good health,
Joshua Schwebel