‘In Legal Terms: On the Artist’s Contract’ workshop by Joshua Schwebel

Rupert is pleased to invite you to the workshop ‘In Legal Terms: On the Artist’s Contract’ led by artist and current artist-in-residence Joshua Schwebel. It will take place on May 14th, 6-9pm at Rupert studio 4 (Pakrantė building 1st floor, Vaidilutės str. 79). The workshop is organized in the context of the 7th Rupert Alternative Education programme. The event is free, registration is required due to limited number of spaces. To register or ask further questions, please do not hesitate to write us at info@rupert.lt. Registration is open until May 13th. The event will be held in English.

Through this workshop we will examine the artist’s contract, both as an artistic and legal form. Artists have used contracts in their work as a form that appropriates the power of the law to designate the domain of an artwork. When exhibitions are organized in professional contexts, contracts also designate the expectations and conditions under which the work is produced, exhibited, and authored, as a legal tool available to artists and arts organizations to mediate power and to define specific relationships. We will look over a variety of these forms for agreements and discuss their usefulness and how they are or aren’t applicable to today’s art context.

Topics of discussion will include: How can the contract be implemented towards radical forms of redistributing power in the artistic context? How does the absence of a contract produce grey-zones or prevent transparency? Does the bureaucratization of creative practice destroy or support creativity?

The Status of the Artist Act in Canada, The Artist’s Contract by Seth Siegelaub, and a standard exhibition contract will be studied as sample documents. As a group, we will develop a list of issues that a contract might be useful to define. Artists and artworks will include Jesper Alvaers “Work, Work, Work”, Ben Kinmont “ethics in project art practices”.

Joshua Schwebel, based in Berlin and Montreal, often initiates site-specific interventions and installations as spatialized and participatory critiques of gallery and museum practices and conditions. Schwebel received an MFA from NSCAD University, and a BFA from Concordia University. His graduating MFA project incited strong reactions when he exhibited the Anna Leonowens Gallery completely empty, without any proof of work to satisfy the degree requirements. His work since then continues to provoke confrontations between the representation and recognition of art, through interventions, fugitive circulations, withdrawals, and displacements. These actions and their respective forms of documentation indicate points of tension between significance and its construction. At Rupert, he is exploring local artist-run spaces, the motivations behind opening them, their models of self-sustaining and operating outside or within the contemporary art institutional models.

Joshua Schwebel’s residency at Rupert is supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Office of the Canadian Embassy to Lithuania. Rupert programmes are partly supported by Lithuanian Culture Council. Rupert’s 7th Alternative Education programme is supported by Vilnius City Municipality and guests of Rupert’s charity dinner and other sponsors.