Help Wanted: The Complete Resource
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Help Wanted
by LG Williams
PCP Press | Available now on Amazon | View Sample
In March 2004, while living on the streets in Del Mar, California, LG Williams spent his days in a futile search for work at the Geisel Library at UC San Diego—popularly known as the Dr. Seuss Library. In a moment of last-ditch desperation, he turned the tables on his hopeless job hunt by transforming it into an art project that unexpectedly engaged internet audiences worldwide.
Crushed by homelessness and destitution, he inverted the employment script, recasting his struggle as a month-long international exhibition in which fictitious Craigslist.org postings (then one of the largest online platforms for classified advertisements) sought to hire “skilled employees” in the arts, ultimately drawing thousands of responses worldwide.
Help Wanted: The Complete Resource documents this unprecedented intervention. It was one of the earliest large-scale art projects to generate sustained public engagement through conceptual deception on a commercial digital platform at the dawn of the Web 2.0 era. The project was staged simultaneously across multiple cities—including New York, Los Angeles, London, Boston, Seattle, Dallas, Miami, Vancouver, and Honolulu. It involved five distinct “Help Wanted” personae, each advertising fictitious positions and seeking to hire skilled employees in the arts. By inverting the traditional artist’s role from job-seeker to employer, Williams shifted the frame from job-seeking to job creation. This approach transformed desperation into a conceptual framework that laid bare the absurdities of both employment culture and the art world itself.
Williams’s postings displayed a distinctive blend of employment language and playful absurdity. The role of Artist/Fix-It-Man required candidates to:
“Maintain manly unkempt look with prerequisite guru smile.”
“Monitor three television sets while simultaneously petting a dog.”
The posting for Commercial Artist/Artist/Director emphasized:
“Comfort with artsy, novel, sexually inventive gender-benders and lifestylers: drag queens, hangers-on, and social curiosities, political and Hollywood celebrities.”
The position of Painter (Fine Artist)/Gambler sought applicants who could:
“Win a small sum in a casino, rent out a villa, stock it with food & drink.”
“Maintain a fascination with Proust and photography. Rembrandt, Raphael, Van Gogh, and Velázquez are dope.”
Other listings veered into comic excess:
“Independent, self-motivated Artist and Fix-It-Man. This is a full-time role in a precarious situation… Cuddly; able to monitor three television sets while petting a dog or cat and (international) porn programming. TV satellite proficiency or mastery of Brittany Spears or Outkast a plus.”
Unlike static online archives, Help Wanted functioned as a live performance space where economic transactions became conceptual provocations. Over the course of its run, the project generated more than 5,000 active replies—approximately 500 of which are preserved in this publication. Responses ranged from genuine job offers and résumés to philosophical rants, confused inquiries, hostile threats, glowing compliments, and even five unsolicited marriage proposals. In aggregate, the exhibition likely reached an audience of 200,000 to 500,000 readers across participating cities—making it one of the largest art audiences of 2004.
Williams took a conceptual cue from Dr. Seuss’s inversion of narrative and turned the job-hunting process on its head. After years of struggling to secure stable employment while surviving on precarious work in the illegal weed industry, he became a reluctant expert in employment rhetoric, mastering its manipulative grammar and aesthetic forms. In Help Wanted, he redeployed that hard-earned knowledge as art, laying bare the absurdities of labor language in real time.
Beyond its conceptual scaffolding, the project was also haunted by the recent death of Williams’s close friend and mentor, Wally Hedrick (1928–2003), the Beat-era painter and co-founder of San Francisco’s Six Gallery. Known for his black paintings protesting war and consumer culture, Hedrick embodied the ethos of resistance and refusal that shaped Williams’s praxis. Just months before his death, Williams curated Hedrick’s War Room installation at the 2003 San Francisco International Art Fair (documentary photograph)—a cavernous environment of tar-black canvases denouncing the Iraq War. Help Wanted was dedicated to Hedrick’s memory, extending his spirit of dissent into a new digital terrain where censorship, erasure, and economic precarity became the material of the work itself.
The aftermath laid bare the realities of early internet art. Williams attracted one of the largest art audiences of the year and pioneered a model that would later become foundational for social media performance. Yet he received no gallery representation, no sales, and no recognition whatsoever. He remained broke and unhoused, eventually relocating to Honolulu—a move he described as allowing “homeless artists [to] more easily live homeless and penniless as an artist.”
Help Wanted stands as both a major artistic achievement and a critique of art institutions. It revealed the intersection of precarity, performance, and digital platforms long before such concerns became central to the gig economy and social media art. The project demonstrated how the boundaries between creativity, art, and online performance were collapsing, making Williams’s intervention remarkably prescient and enduringly relevant.
The complete resource—roughly 500 preserved exchanges, exhibition data, and critical commentary—remains an encyclopedic record of a radical experiment in which censorship, deletion, and economic precarity themselves served as the medium.
Intervention and Exhibition Ephemera — Archive Materials
* Artworks from the Help Wanted series are available from Erik David Gallery, starting at $25,000 each.
Standout Passages from Help Wanted
“This is genius. Are you the Andy Kaufman of Craigslist? If so, marry me.
(Seriously, I’ll relocate.)”“Your ad is the first thing that made me laugh today. I’m a paralegal in Boston, and my life is a slow-motion car wreck of fluorescent lights and missed lunches. You’re offering to paint, gamble, and consult on art history all in one? I’ll trade you legal briefs for brushstrokes. Or screw it, I’ll just marry you. I don’t care if you’re homeless, you sound like an upgrade.”
“Your ad made my day. I don’t have a job, but I do have a couch. Want to crash and have some fun?”
“I don’t know what your deal is, but this is brilliant. Craigslist is filled with lies and scams, and you post something that reads like a manifesto hidden in the employment section. You exposed the whole charade. You should know, though, the moderators will delete this — not because it’s wrong, but because it’s too right.”
“I can’t tell if you’re brilliant or just broke. Either way, call me.”
“Here’s my résumé. I’m not joking. Your ad gave me the courage to admit I’m an artist stuck in a cubicle. I don’t even know if you’ll read this, but thank you for posting. If you’re hiring, I’ll work for free. Just let me be part of whatever this is.”
“Your post inspired me to quit my office job today. If you can do this, why the hell am I filing spreadsheets?”
“Help Wanted? How about Wife Wanted? I’ll marry you tomorrow. Forget your pants, but your paints!”
“This is either the most idiotic thing I’ve ever read or the smartest. Either way, I owe you 10 minutes of my pleasure. So, if you’re still single, consider this my proposal.”
From The Back Cover
Help Wanted: The Complete Resource documents one of the earliest large-scale art projects of the Web 2.0 era. In March 2004, while living on the streets in Del Mar, California, LG Williams inverted the artist’s role from job-seeker to employer, posting fictitious “Help Wanted” ads across Craigslist.org, then one of the largest online classified platforms. Each of five personae advertised absurd positions—seeking “skilled employees” in the arts with qualifications ranging from monitoring three television sets while petting a dog to demonstrating proficiency in Britney Spears or Outkast.
What began as a last-ditch gesture of desperation quickly evolved into a month-long global exhibition staged across multiple cities, including New York, Los Angeles, London, Boston, Seattle, Dallas, Miami, Vancouver, and Honolulu. The postings drew over 5,000 replies, from résumés and job offers to hostile rants, philosophical screeds, glowing compliments, and even five unsolicited marriage proposals. Approximately 500 of these responses are preserved here, alongside exhibition data and critical commentary.
Dedicated to Williams’s late mentor Wally Hedrick (1928–2003), Help Wanted stands as both artistic achievement and institutional critique—a radical experiment in which censorship, deletion, and economic precarity themselves became the medium.
“A radical document of early internet art, Help Wanted reveals how economic precarity, censorship, and digital platforms became raw artistic material. Essential reading for anyone tracing the origins of online conceptual practice.” — Dr. Wallace Berman, Curator of Digital Collections, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
“Williams transformed the futility of job-seeking into one of the most prescient acts of job creation in the cultural sphere. This volume preserves that improbable history with rigor and wit.” — Professor Peter Sellers, Department of Theater and Performativity, UCLA
“Help Wanted is both archive and performance, a testimony to how conceptual art survived in the shadows of homelessness, deletion, and neglect. Williams’s project is as relevant to the gig economy today as it was at the dawn of Web 2.0.” — Dr. Fiona Apple, Senior Fellow, Centre for Digital Culture, University of London
“Few projects have so clearly anticipated the entanglement of labor, art, and digital platforms. Williams’s Help Wanted deserves recognition as a cornerstone in the history of 21st-century conceptual art.” — Constantine P. Cavafy, Art in America
“An extraordinary record of absurdity turned into art. Help Wanted documents not only a vanished internet, but also the radical persistence of an artist who refused invisibility.” — Catherine Humpme, Senior Critic, Artforum International
Book Details
Format: Full Color, Paperback
Page Count: 355 pages
Language: English
Dimensions: Approx. 8.5 × 11”
ISBN: 1546474706
2nd Edition Publication Date: May 3, 2017
Publisher: PCP Press
About LG Williams
LG Williams is a Los Angeles–based artist whose positions have included Endowed University Instructor at the Academy of Art University, Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-in-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, and Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. His work has been shown internationally—including at the Internet Pavilion of La Biennale di Venezia—and has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement, La Stampa, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail.
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About PCP Press
PCP Press is an independent publisher of avant-garde books and insurgent authors. Founded in 1990 in San Francisco to champion subversive and esoteric art, PCP has since published books, special editions, and rare interventions with figures such as Wally Hedrick, Wayne Thiebaud, Dave Hickey, Raymond Pettibon, Bryan Reynolds, and LG Williams.
More information and titles can be found at www.pcppress.com
