With its blue linoleum floor and rotary phone, the drab office at 112 West 44th Street has the trappings of a bureaucratic agency, but instead the enterprise is pumping out a stimulus package for artists. Through July 26, the storefront hosts The Work Office, a project started by Brooklyn-based artists Katarina Jerinic and Naomi Miller.
Jerinic and Miller intended to emulate the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed millions of people in order to build infrastructure, design public spaces and operate literacy and art projects during the Great Depression. On The Work Office (TWO) website, they put out an open call for artists to apply for ‘employment’ to complete simple conceptual assignments.
Those artists who are hired are invited to exhibit their projects at a Friday night ‘Payday Party,’ where Depression-era wages are also distributed to the tune of $23.50 per week. (For perspective, today’s minimum wage of $7.25 would have equated to just 46 cents in 1932.) It may not have the same perks as the forthcoming artists’ reality show now casting by Bravo, but at least TWO workers still have their integrity!
TWO is built on humor and genuine goodwill toward so many of the artists who find themselves without work these days. Positions for hire range from “documenting a need for repairs” to “building a bridge” or “designing a poster to promote something.” Applicants are vetted after submitting an online form, and may be invited to the midtown office for an in-person interview and registration. “We want to know who we are hiring, and trust them to hand something in on deadline,” says TWO’s co-founder Miller, in her complete deadpan role as administrator. The public is invited to attend the Payday Parties, the last of which will occur this Friday between 6PM and 8PM. The projects are also documented online.
In an interview last month, Miller explained that their ideas call upon the contemporary art medium of ‘social practice,’ which consists of social interaction between the artist and the public often with an outcome of political action or dialogue. “We’re not trying to be didactic,” she explains, “We do see it as a sort of performance, and it is conceptual. But it also looks like sociology and anthropology and it’s up to the artist to call it art.” Miller cites their interest in projects like the Chicago-based collective Temporary Services, which started as an experimental exhibition space, which blended in with the mundane storefronts of a working-class Chicago neighborhood. TWO’s approach toward offering ‘assignments’ for its artist-workers also evokes Learning to Love You More, a seven-year project documenting assignments by the public on the Web by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher.
While TWO’s midtown office hours close at the end of July (the space is on loan from Chashama), Jerinic and Miller just might find a way to keep the project alive in New York or in other cities. Meanwhile, they are reveling in the daily life of their own jobs administrating the project with tongue-in-cheek bureaucratic panache. They have received 150 applications, hired 47 so far, and shelled out a whopping $1,175.
