Shock Treatment – An Assistant's Hair Raising Tale

Submitted by Emmett

During my time as an artist's assistant and gallery intern (mostly unpaid) I have been called upon to put my body on the line on a number of occasions in the name of duty. All too often have I been put in a situation that I knew wasn't really right or safe and yet I felt obligated to do it, thinking that I would be judged harshly if I refused. Many's the time a blatant lack of health and safety consideration from my bosses, who of course wouldn't dream of undertaking the work themselves, has almost come back to haunt me. A situation that no doubt may at any time have ended up in me coming back to haunt my employer in a more worryingly literal sense!

If I wasn't handling dodgy chemicals I'd be trying to work up the top of a rickety ladder or else grappling with some gruesome looking power tool that was constantly threatening to lop off a limb if my attention wavered for a second. Then there was the time that I nearly got electrocuted, trying to hang a light in a leaky old warehouse, again at the top of a ladder that to put it politely was probably somewhat in need of replacement, or to put it more accurately, looked as though it had been used to scale the city walls during the seige of Troy. 'If...I...can...just reach the wire...BANG!' and a flash of fire and a cascade of sparks that gave November 5th a run for its money. Cue me flying backwards away from a blazing stump of wire and just managing to hang onto the ladder, with the help of a convenient roof beam, dangling there in a pall of smoke like some crazy bat out of hell, clinging to the rafters and checking I still had all of my extremities. That wasn't the only time I had a run in with 240 volts, there was the shock from the watery expulsions of a dodgy boiler that was leaking into a lightswitch, then there was that incident that involved a viscious strike from a particularly aggressive toaster, sending me richocetting across the kitchen like a marble in a washing machine.

Let us not forget the occassion on which I was required to rewire the lights of an entire gallery in an ancient warehouse that was more crypt than business premises and had fittings coated in more rust than your average bayonet unearthed from the soils of Ypres after the best part of a century. Bear in mind I was effectively rewiring the entire building here, something that firstly didn't seem to have even been checked let alone done for about 30 years and secondly was not especially easy given my extensive electrician training (5 minutes on how to wire a plug in science class at school...which I have long since forgotten...'was it the blue wire or the yellowy greeny one I was meant to stick here?'). Just imagine my joy when I discovered that having struggled for multiple hours to rend a rusted up fitting from the ceiling (again precariously perched on some furniture item or other), resorting ultimately to stabbing at it repeatedly with a screwdriver, that the electrician that installed it was obviously about as accomplished as me in the field and that he obviously hadn't thought it important to ensure that any of the lights were earthed. After moving and rewiring the lights I made sure I earthed them with a piece of paper clip that I found lying around, hopefully that's what I did anyway, if I got my colours mixed up again I probably just wired the steel light-fitting directly into the live current. Oh and there was the time that I was drilling some holes in the gallery wall and thought it perhaps prudent to casually ask my boss if there might be any wires or pipes on the otherside of the wall. No, no she assured me, of course not, and so foolishly trusting her word I happily drilled away, sticking about 9 holes through the wall. It was only later on when I unlocked the cupboard that backed on to that very wall that in fact there were wires running behind it and that actually I'd missed them by about approximately half an inch.

So far I've managed to escape the art world relatively unscathed, touch wood, with only slight nerve damage in one hand, but I think that these working conditions, conditions that rival a Victorian factory in their interesting approach to workers safety need to be drawn to people's attention. At lot of time and words are expended on the problem of low (no) paid workers in the arts being exploited (I say a lot, in reality a small amount), what rarely gets mentioned however is the sometimes shockingly bad conditions that these people are required to work in (for their low or no pay). It's time that the arts took some responsibility and instead of preaching all that stuff about radical politics from the gallery wall whilst chuckling with the patron over a glass of bubbly actually started looking a bit closer to home and took out a book from their local library about a worker's right not to go home of an evening in the back of a hearse.