The Beneficiary’s Office

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.