Art Metropole

#15605

The Employee

Artist

Joshua Schwebel

Editor

Lauren Wetmore

Price

$40.00

Date

2023

Publisher

Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

9781989010242

Size

15.2 × 29.9 cm

Length

300 pp

Genre

Social Practice, Contemporary Art, Available for Wholesale , Economics, Performance Art

The Employee was a year-long conceptual artwork by Joshua Schwebel. Responding to Forest City Gallery’s invitation to participate in an exhibition of institutional critique, Schwebel wrote a Canada Council for the Arts grant to hire a performer-cum-arts administrator who would write funding applications on behalf of the commissioning space. FGC in London, Ontario, is one of Canada’s first artist-run centres and its founding members contributed to the conception of CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens). It has been publicly funded for almost 50 years, yet is staffed and operated by a single employee. By supplementing the insufficient work-force of the gallery, The Employee commented on the precarity of publicly-funded cultural workers and exposed long-present fault lines in systems of funding and labour within the creative economy.

This is a publication of critical texts and first-person testimonials by artists and cultural workers intended both to reflect on The Employee and to trace the systemically enforced disintegration of boundaries between art-work-life leading up to, during, and beyond the Covid-19 pandemic. The methodology of The Employee is most accurately described by Lise Soskolne, director of W.A.G.E., who writes: “artists must acknowledge that their labour is not exceptional in its support of and exploitation by a multibillion-dollar industry, while simultaneously putting their exceptionality to work by engaging their own labour on political terms, and as a political act.” As a contributor to this book, Bopha Chhay writes, “Witnessing The Employee necessitates an acknowledgement that an uncritical participation within these systems upholds a false idea of the neutrality of these organizations, thereby actively denying the reality of current challenges and social responsibilities.”

The Employee is edited by Joshua Schwebel and Lauren Wetmore. It includes contributions by the editors as well as Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte, Teresa Carlesimo, Bopha Chhay, Dana Kopel, Michelle Lacombe, Denise Ryner, Camille-Zoé Valcourt-Synnott, and Marina Vishmidt. Art Metropole and Forest City Gallery are co-publishers of The Employee, and the book is designed by House9 Design.