Tao Wells: Artist, provo­ca­teur, bludger.

Artist and provo­ca­teur Tao Wells is caus­ing a mighty ruckus with his new art instal­la­tion project, The Ben­e­fi­cia­ry’s Office.

As part of the Let­ting Space pro­gramme — which pairs artists with unused com­mer­cial spaces — Wells has estab­lished a cor­po­rate office for the Wells Group, a PR com­pa­ny which argues that the unem­ployed are more envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly. A low­er income = a small­er car­bon foot­print.

But things start to get tricky because The Ben­e­fi­cia­ry’s Office is par­tial­ly fund­ed by — gasp! — tax­pay­er dol­lars in the form of a Cre­ative New Zealand grant. Wells has already had his dole cut off, a reminder that, babies, you do not mess with Work & Income, you mess around them.

And, as to be expect­ed, there’s a truck­load of out­rage over at Kiwiblog and at Stuff, with peo­ple who can­not believe that their hard-earned tax­pay­er dol­lars are fund­ing a dole bludger to artis­ti­cal­ly pro­mote being on the dole. And worst of all — it’s not even prop­er art.

Well, what­ev­er your feel­ings on the sub­ject, the Ben­e­fi­cia­ry’s Office is locat­ed on lev­el three of 50 Man­ners Street and opens for two weeks from this Mon­day, 18 Octo­ber.

UPDATE: The Dom­Post has an inter­est­ing fol­low-up sto­ry. On the sub­ject of employ­ment, Mr Wells reck­ons he’d be good at Paul Hen­ry’s old job:

I’m out­spo­ken, I’m not afraid to speak my mind, not polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect – and if all those peo­ple thought that that was impor­tant about Paul Hen­ry, then they should feel the same way about me. And I am unem­ployed.

The arti­cle also has a nice col­lec­tion of read­er com­ments, run­ning from the sup­port­ive to the out­raged.