Discussion

An Assistant's Dream

2010-06-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

Update from the previous post...

Funnily enough, after I wrote that text I had a dream that I was back working for her. I dreamed that her studio was in a derelict warehouse and I lived there sharing a dirty old black sheetless mattress with another assistant. The other assistant and I were collecting glasses and doing the washing up from a wild party the night before. The artist was sat at the table drinking tea. The other assistant suggested I clean up the mouse skeleton under the sofa. I was annoyed that I was asked to do this as I would have been happy to do it on my own volition.

Not sure what this means, other than that it brings up phrases like “skeletons in the closet,” and, it’s about vermin. Which reminds me, she used to affectionately call us call us mice…

Not Spilling the Beans

2010-06-02T03:25:00.000-07:00

An Assistant's Story from an anonymous ex-assistant gives a positive reassessment of assistants:

I worked for a famous artists a few years ago for a period of three years. During my employment I often dreamed of the time when I could “spill the beans” on all that went on in the studio, her home, social life, international trips and exhibitions. I looked forward to the day when I could have my say, an exposé and, perhaps, claim something for myself. However, as the years have passed this ambition now feels so cliché and really quite sophomoric. Perhaps, I am getting old and am less of a crackerjack, but, now, all I have is gratitude.

Okay, maybe a bitter taste does still linger, but the bitterness, I find, so embarrassing. To be an artist assistant is quite a normal thing for an artist to do at the beginning stages of a career. Regardless, to be an artist and work as an artist assistant can sometimes be a little painful on the ego.

Today, I looked back at my diary which included some journaling, press clippings, photographs, invites, notes, cards and random bits and bobs. The remnants that I sifted through today I am so fond of and so grateful for. It is so strange to see myself in the pictures – posing in some, working away in others + a few of me dancing on tables with my boss. In some, I see what a hardedge I had during those times. I worried that I had put myself in a vulnerable position - one that I could be taken advantage of or one where I might have my artist self sucked out of me. So, I maintained quite a “nobody is going to mess with me” attitude. I imagine now that this wasn’t very comfortable for my employer. Looking back I wished I’d been a bit more forthcoming. It was a fantastic opportunity and I am ever so grateful to have had it.

To be an artist you have to be so headstrong; you have to believe in yourself and your convictions. It is lonely and often you are working against all odds. Being an artist often feels like the hardest job in the world and, sometimes, we could do with a little help.

Assistants discussed on Radio 4

2010-05-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

Grayson Perry is amongst the guests discussing artists that employ assistants to create their work for them (amongst other subjects). Listen to it here until next Wednesday.

We don't expect architects to build their own buildings. On the other hand, how would we feel about a novelist that didn't write their own novel, a poet that did not write their own poems?

Food for thought.

Lunchtime seating arrangements

2010-05-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

An assistant's story from RP

i work in an art making studio in london. we don't solely work for artists, there's museums and theatre, but mainly artists.
Every year I have to sign a confidentiality form, so that way I cannot post any photographs of the work I’m doing and most of all, who I am working for.
Some artists are very particular in not wanting people to know they don’t make their own work. Some will actually thank the studio and all the people involved, in the exhibition catalogue.
These are big artists with big projects, I’m talking turbine hall and recent RA retrospective material.
But not all artists are the same.
Some you won’t see until the polishing is finished. We get instructions and plans from one of the studio directors that have previously met with the artist. There was actually one of these artists that would have his personal assistant come down to the studio and photograph everything we were doing because he would have anxiety attacks if he went there himself. Things look pretty rough in the making but come on!
Some other artists are actually interested in the making of their own work. They will go to the studio on a daily basis, talk to you and even work alongside. These are a very rare and appreciated kind.

Personally, I don't think artists should have to make their work, especially if it goes beyond their skills. I am not in any way offended by doing what I do, and I get paid, relatively well and regularly. This allows me to have my own studio and make my own art work, and even use the studio’s equipment to do it.

It is always fun to go and see the exhibition of “your” work and have invigilators saying things like, please don’t stand so close and don’t touch the artwork. Dude, last week I was having lunch sitting on it!

An Assistant's Story?

2010-05-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

Another angle on Assistants submitted by the famed poet Anon...

"A friend of mine has for years worked for the fourteen secret masters of the universe. His name is Monty Cantsin and he does everything in the name of Neoism. He doesn't get paid by the fourteen secret masters of the universe for his labours for neoism and so this would count loosely as him working working as an artists assistant. I am not lieing. Have a google and SEE".

Grin and Bear it - An Assistant's Story

2010-05-04T07:48:00.000-07:00

An Assistant's story from Christelle

Ever wondered why since October 2009 I haven’t really been where I wanted to be?
Here I am, sitting by the window of a little flat stuck in Brockley: it’s a sunny day, yet the thoughts in my head cloud my soul.

I have a Ba/Hons in my right pocket, and dreams in my left pocket, but then again I wonder: why have I not found a bloody really good job or PAID internship?
Oh, well I AM doing an internship actually, but it’s not paid, oh no never; it’s what’s en vogue, UNPAID LABOUR…It’s as if employers are taking the piss with this recession time and all, there is a masquerade in place I tell you ( but never mind, not now).

So I do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of everything, and because I am a perfectionist I do it the best I can , saying to myself: “ Go on Christelle, you know it’s for a brighter future. Get the experience you need, and move on. It doesn’t matter if you get paid or not, your dream is to have your own art gallery, so do your best”; that’s what keeps me going.

The internship is part-time, and I also volunteer on an ad-hoc basis for another organisation; I am investing my time and moral health into two art galleries at the moment. Six odd months ago, I graduated…Six odd months down the line, I see the work I do going into the hands of someone who doesn’t even participate in “travel expenses”; it’s not very fair, is it? Six odd months down the line, I feel the urge to roar and to grunt like a bear. Sitting by the window, is a brown-eyed bear wondering when the salmon will come her way.

I am a writer, amateur photograph, project assistant, events assistant, marketing assistant, gallery assistant and a bear: I am an intern.

An Assistant's Admission

2010-04-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

An assistant's admission, submitted by R.

"When the artist I work for walks into the studio my knees actually shake with nerves".

thanks for that R!

By Accident or Design

2010-04-19T07:30:00.000-07:00

An 'assistant' story submitted by Lucy

Several years ago I worked at the *** in London as a design intern. It was around the time that they were re-designing their famous acronym to create a new brand for the institute. The process was very nearly complete and the new brand had been rolled out across almost everything.

One morning the marketing director ask me to do a 'quick, little design job'. I was in my first year at LCC, studying design. I knew very little, especially about the dangers of stealing parts from a new re-design to create a piece of work, and doing it without the approval of the agency who had done the job! Regardless.. I designed the small A8 'sign-up' card using various different elements of the new re-design; stealing bits from other InDesign documents, etc. A week later, I was very excited when the front desk called me to say that the cards had arrived from the printers. "My first print job... and for ***!" I thought, happily skipping down the stairs. Later, with the box of cards in my arms, I opened it up to have a look at one of them and proudly smiled.

As I jumped into the lift to go back upstairs (which at the *** is literally the width of two average-sized people) a man stepped into the lift with me. He took one look at the small yellow card in my hand, and his faced turned to thunder. It turns out he was the creative director of the agency that had *just* finished the re-design, coming in for a meeting to discuss the handover. He looked me straight in the eye and said, "Who... did... that?" He was furious... which, now with my own studio, I would have been too. We live and learn...

The Rat Race – An Assistant's Story

2010-04-15T07:29:00.000-07:00

Submited by 'Rrose'

At one time I worked as an assistant for a particularly eccentric artist who for reasons best known for herself used to keep a pet rat, known affectionately as Micky, in the studio with her whilst she worked. She would often go away from the studio to meetings or on business and I became accustomed, along with looking after the studio, to looking after the rat, I didn't really mind it and actually became quite fond of the thing. It was nice to have some company during those long days alone in the studio, albeit from a rat, and at least this rodent was in a cage, unlike the multiple mice that seemed to make the studio their playground everytime my back was turned. When by boss was away I would look after Micky, making sure he had enough food and water and if she went away for a particularly long period, changing his bedding material and cleaning out his cage.

Now the particular studio in which we were based at that time was below ground level and very close to the river. As a result of this it had been known in years gone by to be particularly prone to flooding. One especially wet August my boss happened to be away, out of the country on business, I was looking after the studio, and as usual looking after Micky. All had been going fine for about a week and then one extremely rainy night I got a call from the janitor of the building in which the studio was based saying that the basement area was flooding and that I should get down there as quickly as possible in order to save the work and equipment. I drove down as fast as I could and was relieved to find that the water was only a few inches deep at that stage and most of the things were undamaged. I was also relieved to discover that Micky was safe and sound, sat in his cage on tp of the table. With a little help from the janitor I managed to move most of the stuff upstairs into a dryer and safer area between some of the offices, it was not ideal and thinking that I couldn't really leave Micky up there in someone else's office like that, I decided to take him home with me and look after him there for a while. So sticking his cage on the passengers seat I drove home and eventually arrived back, very late that night, at my flat. However, unbeknown to me, my boyfriend at the time had been nurturing a covert phobia of rodents and seeing me arrive back bringing with me a live rat into our small, one-bed apartment sent him totally up the wall. He inisted that first thing in the morning I got rid of 'that thing' and took poor Micky back to where he came from. Reluctantly I agreed and so the next day, whilst I couldn't sort out the mess in the studio being as it was still (by now) about a foot deep in water, I nevertheless took Micky back to the building. Initially I took him up to the office where our stuff was being stored but the ladies up there likewise freaked out at the sight of this apparently disproportionately alarming small mammal. After hearing their protests the long suffering janitor informed me that the building had a no pets policy and despairing of where to store the poor little fellow I was forced to sneak him back down to the studio, despite its flooded state. I made sure I gave him enough food to last him a little while, and if I'm honest, as something by way of consolation for his unfortunate plight. I left him, sat in his cage on top of the table, high out of reach, or so I thought, of the water.

That night it rained heavily once again and the next day I thought I'd better go back and check on the studio and on Micky. When I arrived I was worried to see that the water had risen considerably and it was then that the sad truth presented itself to me. Bouyed up by the rising waters, the table upon which Micky's cage had been resting had floated up and overturned sending the poor, unfortunate rodent sliding down and plunging to a watery grave. Trapped in his cage he had been unable to swim and had sadly drowned in the rising flood waters. I panicked, how was I going to break it to my boss that her beloved pet had met such an unfortunate end under my care? I spent the rest of the week worrying, deciding not to tell her over the phone, I awaited her return with anxious anticipation. When she arrived back she was obviously concerned to see the state of the studio and examine what had happened to all of her stuff, when I eventually nervously plucked up the courage to tell her about Micky she was naturally upset but didn't say really say too much about it. She said that she didn't blame me for what happened but after that I always suspected that she might be holding it against me, things never quite seemed the same after that and I left my position a few months later. I do feel a little responsible for what happened to poor, old Micky, to this day I still imagine him trying to swim free but being trapped in the sinking cage. I don't think however, that leaving that job overly affected my artistic career, at least I like to think not. It would be a strange thing not to make it as a successful artist over the sad fate of a drowned rat.

The Colour of Money – An Assistant's Story

2010-04-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

An Assistant's Story – Submitted by Monty

I once worked for a fairly well known artist in London whose works were entirely produced by a series of assistants in the form of a production line, the only hand that he laid upon them was to add a signature at the end of the process. Upon my leaving his employment he decided to present me with one of the paintings by way of a thank you for my work there over the last couple of years. In fact the painting that he chose to present me with was one that ironically had actually been largely produced, that is to say painted, by me. When I drew this to his attention he commented that I always was the best one at producing his paintings, that I produced them more neatly and effectively than any of the other assistants, in fact even than him, he joked. Thanking him for his gift I asked him if he might sign the painting, as he did all of the others that left the production line and hence actually imbue his seemingly generous gift with some monetary value. He laughed, he couldn't do that he was afraid. So it was that I left with what could have been a potentially valuable 'original' of this famous artist, that could have been worth multiple thousands of pounds, in fact painted by me and no different from those many others that did sell for big money, aside from the simple fact that it didn't bear his signature and hence was worthless. It was then that the true ridiculousness of this scenario really dawned on me, not necessarily the mass production of art works per se, rather the extraordinary sums that the work of a few big-name artist 'brands' can command when quite literally the same work without the name cannot. It seems like there are two art worlds at work here, those that work for the love of it and those that work for the love of money.

Assisting Art Through the Crisis – An Assistant Story

2010-04-14T07:26:00.000-07:00

Submitted by Luther

A few years back I undertook some work for someone who is now quite a well known painter, back then he was getting pretty well known but not quite at the level that he is now. It was always clear that he was going somewhere though, he had that gift of the gab, a certain confidence or social skills that put people at their ease when he was taking to them. In fact I often wonder if he talked his way to success, he certainly didn't paint his way there, that was my job! To be fair, the ideas were his, he would knock them up on the computer in an a fairly slick, almost industrial process that was more like a graphic design or advertising studio than most people's conception of the artist's studio. It would be my role to scale these up and paint them up to a stage of near completion with my steadiest hand. At which point he would usually dash off a few finishing touches and sign the piece and then I would ship it off to his dealer. The industrial nature and professionalism of what I did surprises a lot of people that I talk to about my time there, but I guess that artists have always employed assistants or workshops, right back through history so I'm not sure why people are so shocked. Its essentially a branding thing I guess, do top fashion designers actually make their own clothes? Sometimes, but more often than not it's their assistants that undertake the majority of the leg work, and why not? If you don't buy into the whole touch of genius thing then things that can practicably be carried out by skill labourers can be without really affecting the end result in any obvious way. I know to some people that's kind of incomparable with the prices that people pay for these things, I mean if you are buying an original so-and-so, you expect them to have at least toiled a bit to get it to you right? But I don't think that you necessarily should, its the brand that a lot of these collectors are buying into, a commodity like aluminium or timber or something, its an asset in a portfolio that just happens to be one that they can stick on the wall and enjoy too. In that respect its also a status symbol, like a Ferrari or something, but those are still produced in a factory right?

I think that a lot of people thought the recession, the financial crisis and the art price crash was going to be bad news for artists assistants but I reckon that it might have actually done them favour. The artists needed to churn out smaller, more saleable works, more quickly and on a more mass-produced scale and hence they needed their assistants more than ever. I reckon its a combinations of artists assistants and unpaid interns in a lot of galleries and cultural institutions that have got a lot of the art world through this crisis. I don't know if they'll get to reap much of the rewards when it all comes out the other side but maybe a few who work out how to play the game and talk the talk and charm their way up the ladder will. I don't know, I was always a bit too reserved and retiring for that, whenever I used to get taken to these art events (which wasn't that often, although to be fair I did get to make a few) I used to hover in the corner, I didn't want to take any limelight. In hindsight perhaps I should have put myself forward more assertively, it was a great opportunity I guess but although I still make work and exhibit widely I don't think that it was the big break that many people who do it hope it will be. For me I was just grateful to be doing the thing I loved, all be it for someone else. I just wish that I could have maybe got a bigger share of some of the financial rewards that my work produced maybe that's all! I guess things could always be better but on the whole it was definitely a good experience.

Revenge is a dish best served full cream? - An Intern's Anecdote

2010-04-14T07:24:00.000-07:00

(Courtesy of Guardian Media Monkey)

Outrage at Grazia magazine after an intern who was sent out regularly to buy skinny lattes for the beauty desk announced at the end of her stint on the mag that she had in fact been buying them all full-fat ones. Cue much spluttering from the staff and a mass rush to the nearest set of weighing scales. Actually Monkey just made that last bit up, but feels after pulling a stunt like that, the intern’s future in the industry is assured.

Hidden Messages - An Assistant's Admission

2010-04-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Submitted by Ned

When I used to work as an artists assistant, for someone who I'm not going to name for reasons that will become apparent, I gradually got fed up with the temper tantrums and being a general skivy so after a while I started to paint various rude words an phrases onto the canvasses, before painting over them again later. I always used to worry that it would show through when dry, one day later on but it never did. It was a small consolation that despite my under appreciated efforts, that there were a lot of rich buyers with disparaging and insulting remarks about themselves hanging up in pride of place on their walls, while they sat under them smug and oblivious. I later found out that there were once rumours going around that the late Alexander Mcqueen, during his time as a tailor's assistant used to sew derogatory comments into the lining of the suits of royalty, I don't know if that was true but I like to think so. My messages are probably still out there somewhere, I often wonder if they might turn up in a restoration years down the line. Whenever I feel irritated I like to think that the messages are still out there, hiding inside people's pictures, hanging over them unawares. Who know's, if you own a piece of art from this artist, there might be one in your piece!

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Assistant

2010-04-08T07:21:00.000-07:00

An article on artist's assistants by Graham T. Beck

Written for The Brooklyn Rail, a US based journal of art, politics and culture, Feb 2008

originally appearing at the page linked here

Behind every great artist there is an assistant. Or more accurately, behind the artists most often called “great” there are two, or twenty, or enough for a full-time accountant. Many of my friends are artist’s assistants. I worked as one. My girlfriend is an assistant; my sister is too. When I first became involved in this peculiar profession, I was struck by the variety of tasks collected under that one umbrella, but the art world is big, studio habits are varied, and methods of fabrication so specialized that the required labor is as diverse as its results. Depending on who you ask, being an artist’s assistant is a lot like being a friend, or a secretary, or a 19th-century factory worker. Wages range from paltry to lawyerly; work spaces from stately to slovenly to simply unsafe. Some spend their days in business-casual and others in coveralls, but what they all share is unfettered access to the personalities and studio workings that others only glean from CVs or biographical blurbs. There are stories of ungainly tantrums, eye-popping extravagance, clichéd eccentricity or profound compassion; these accounts are traded by artist’s assistants like baseball cards or bragged about like battle scars. It would be a gross understatement to say that it’s engaging to talk with assistants about their workdays; it’s often like hearing from a star-struck therapist freed from the binds of doctor-patient confidentiality.

Much has been written on the impact of outsourcing on art and art-making, but only a few splatters of all that spilled ink define assistants as much more than mindless matter in the service of something larger. Sure, like most employees these days, the job description of an artist’s assistant could be summarized as doing what one is asked when one is asked to do it, but there seems to be so much more to the vocation than that. Artist’s assistants are the junior members of the creative class, the chorus at openings, and the raw material of future stars. Their role is part of a long tradition, but it also reflects a professionalizing of the art world that’s anathema to what many look back on as the good old days. It’s a sensible step towards becoming a self-supporting artist, but it pivots on a nepotism that makes “sensible next steps” seem absurd. The job revolves around an artist’s singular personality all the while proving that singularity is a myth. It is a paradoxical position that bespeaks much about the current art world, its rules, and the pitched field of competition these days.

More than 30,000 people got a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2005. That’s a good-sized town of educated artists eager to work. They have dedicated years and tens of thousands of dollars and made innumerable sacrifices for their dreams and understandably want to be involved in the object of their study. The problem is that not all of them can be. In a recent issue of Frieze, Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art, cites the staggering number of MFA grads and adds, “Match this total against the number of galleries or jobs available and the picture of a chillingly social Darwinist art system clearly emerges.” It may not be as ruthless as survival of the fittest, but for young artists searching for jobs as assistants, it’s a cutthroat world of connections and called-in-favors. Considering the competition, it’s easy to understand why the people who get in are happy to stay, even when the conditions become the stuff of legend. A few years ago, one friend of mine who was hired as a studio assistant / mold-maker didn’t meet her famous employer until more than a month into the job and the first time they spoke was at a holiday party three months later. Listening to her reflect on her stint is to hear a string of horror stories that for libel’s sake is best kept in the realm of gossip. Still, she laughingly told me she was thankful for the opportunity.

This particular artist employs dozens of assistants and I’ve known a good deal of them. They told me that the workweek could be seven days long with 18-hour shifts and no overtime pay. One confided in me, like an Upton Sinclair character: “In his studio, people come in and they get chewed up and spit out and it keeps going.” This assistant has a college degree, an impressive resume that could place him in a number of other fields, and plenty of friends willing to do him favors. Still, he did two tours of duty in this dehumanizing studio, and when he finally left, it was to assist someone else. There is something about working for an artist that keeps him in the field. Every assistant I’ve spoken with admits to a similar attraction. It has something to do with practical education and the tradition of artists and apprentices.

The European apprenticeship paradigm is far older than our current conception of the artist. Before Western artists were designated as conduits for god, before they were cultural barometers and long before they were Vanity Fair cover stories, they were artisans whose careers and practice were regulated by guilds or confraternities most often named for Luke the Evangelist, the patron saint of painters. Under these trade associations, which were the governing bodies of artistic commerce from the 14th to the 18th century, an artist could make and sell his work only after becoming a Free Master; a rank achieved through years as an apprentice (think indentured servant), and a few more as a Journeyman (a hired hand). Of course, this regulated ascendance is a far cry from the current reality facing young artists, but the notion of on-the-job training persists and seems to imbue many young artists with the extra-vocational impulse to seek out apprentice-like positions.

The schooling of an assistant is an education of anecdote and experience about money and the market, a reality as hidden from art students as the Tooth Fairy’s identity is from incisorless kids. Anyone who has worked for an artist will tell you that living and hearing the stories, dealing with the issues, and making another person’s career run smoothly is a crash-course in the other side of art. Assistants experience gallery negotiations long before engaging in their own. They learn about collectors, dealers, consultants, and curators through interactions or gossip. They find out how to deal with fabricators, handlers, and preparators. They know to plan for language barriers and time differences. The Artists Rights Society, author percentages and other insider secrets are the everyday of assistants. In my talks with friends, I’ve heard about practical gestures (“She gave me her whole mailing list”) to fundamental observations (“Seeing how you go from research to material tests to process to display to lighting to getting people to talk about it and getting it sold”) to deeply personal anxieties (“Knowing that no matter how successful you are you’re still always worried”). In all of these instances, knowledge flowed from employer to employee. In the best cases, the artist-boss is aware of his or her mentoring role and at times intentionally focuses on it, but most often an assistant’s lessons come through osmosis or the trial-by-fire moments of making and coping. One told me his boss recently said, “I love working with you, but I’ll have done my job if you leave.” In studios, turnover is only slightly less regular than graduation. No one on either side of the assistant/artist relationship thinks of it as permanent arrangement; a year or two, or a few more at most, is a fair run. Only when the influence goes in both directions, or circumstances make the bond more symbiotic than usual, might an assistant’s tenure last longer. It’s a short-term job in which unorthodox education balances the equation and shared experience humanizes idols. These are the fringe benefits that an assistant expects, but it seems to me that there is still something beyond these practicalities.

Being an artist’s assistant means you’re taking part in a prescribed art world. It is a definable, describable job attached to a recognizable name that assuages aunts and uncles and grandparents at holidays. It is a passport to a world that has been worshiped and studied but always at arm’s length. “Being an assistant makes me feel like I’m participating in the art world and in the discussion,” is what one friend said to me. “When we finish a piece in the studio, I feel pride. It’s not about authorship, but about the larger conversation that I’m taking part in.” I have friends who are employed by famous artists, cool artists, the type of artists mentioned at parties with knowing, quiet confidence. One of these friends recently told me, “I think that who you work for says something about you as an artist. Maybe that’s a weakness of character, but it’s true. There are lots of uninteresting artists doing really big public projects who need a lot of assistants. I would not want to be in a situation like that.” In her cohort, big public projects are not a desirable conversation. Instead, working for the “right” artist, laboring under his or her name, and learning more than the most inside insider is key to projecting a certain identity as an artist. In a world that hinges on expression, the opportunity to align yourself with something, to have that thing be noticed by people, visited, and talked about in a certain way is a step in the right direction, a sustaining taste of what almost every assistant wishes would come.

But what exactly is coming? The current art world is the only one I’ve ever known, so I can’t say for sure but I think what’s happening to artist’s assistants right now is evidence of a new arrangement for young artists. Facts and figures and everyone involved agree on how unwieldy the art world has grown, that its base has outpaced its upper-ranks, and that this unbridled growth (and the money that made it happen), as well as the glut of young artists, has created more tiers than ever before. It feels professionalized and systematized and filled with the calculating logic of industry. Contemporary critics tell me this is not the way it used to be—they fondly describe an idealized world where art making was its own reward—and although they sometimes sound like my parents’ friends lamenting the lost spirit of the 60’s, I believe the lessons at the heart of their tales. What I wonder is how the art world portrayed in their stories actually felt to young artists back then, whether it seemed no different than the current one does now? Did it feel like something you needed to work your way up in? Or did it feel like a place where making work was all it took to be an artist, and being an artist was the way to make it in the art world? For artist’s assistants, for young artists, and for art lovers, this is a pressing question: Have the first few years in the art world always felt like an associate’s position or is that new? It is one thing to look at art works made today and say they’re too glossy, or too commercial, or too big for their britches, but it’s a much larger issue to consider the impact of this type of work and its mode of production on the generation of artists raised in its midst. Right now, artist’s assistant jobs keep people employed and interested and in studios making art. They also keep young artists convinced that there is always something more to learn and always another hurdle on the way to success. It is an eternal delay of readiness, the paying of dues at a phantom tollbooth. If this is new, repercussions are surely near; and if it isn’t, it’s propagating now like never before. Just take a look at next year’s crop.

An Assistant's Tale of Woe

2010-04-06T07:20:00.000-07:00

Gallery Girl (an anonymously submitted tale, courtesy of Interns Anonymous)

I graduated in July 2009 having already done a substantial amount of work experience in between university engagements. I went straight into an internship as a gallery assistant at a contemporary art gallery in East London. I was paid expenses up to £10 a day. However I worked with them for two months (July & August) and did not receive my August expenses payment until December. I have to say I learnt a great deal in this time; in my final week I was actually the manager of the gallery (the manager of the gallery was at this time still an unpaid intern herself, but with the promise of paid work when her 6 month internship was complete).

In September I began a six-month internship at a major national museum, working on exhibitions with six other interns. I am the youngest (I’m 21) and least educated (I only have a BA). I am also the only one still living with my family. As I am only required to work four days per week, I began another internship (in the absence of a job and with the need to do something else other than this first internship), at a small local authorities gallery. This second internship has been incredibly rewarding; I have been able to co-curate an exhibition which has been a fantastic opportunity to complete, and this organisation has always been very grateful and supportive of the work I have done for them.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for my primary internship at this major London museum. My job role from the outset has been Personal Assistant to the Head of Exhibitions in the department, which is different to the other interns who are each allocated to individual exhibitions. I believed that undertaking this role would give me a greater insight to the running of the museum, but my manager has mainly ‘kept me in the office’ unlike the other interns who are much more involved with communicating with various companies, collaborators, and departments of the museum, as well as attending relevant meetings. My manager sees me as quite literally her Personal Assistant. My main jobs are checking her emails, scheduling appointments and completing her vast amount of petty cash claims (for which I am required to make up the circumstances as they are almost always for personal or internal meetings). Other inane tasks she has required for me to do include buying her opera & theatre tickets, booking her car valet service and completing her daughter’s visa waiver forms for a family holiday to the US. In a similar vein, the interns were on one occasion required to work as waitresses for a department-organised event (which was particularly painful for me as this is what I do at weekends to earn money).

From the outset I have resented these tasks. I always felt that doing this internship was just about ‘getting a reference’, and that was it. I have never enjoyed it, and it is severely unlikely that I would accept a job offer in the department, let alone in the job I am doing now. I have nonetheless worked hard and have had very few absences.

On Friday morning (my only day off from them) I received a phone call from my manager that can only be described as a tirade of insults about the work I have done for her. Amongst other claims, she said I was uncommitted, came and went as I pleased and was always ‘last in first out’. I can’t express how untrue these claims are; the only ‘leave’ I have taken was an odd few days to work on my exhibition at my other internship (which I don’t believe she ever supported). I believe the trigger for this outburst may have been when I reminded her I was taking one day off to do some paid waitressing unusually in midweek (she is also completely unsympathetic to any financial woes that this internship creates). She said she regretted offering me the internship and at this stage she couldn’t write me a reference.

I am now facing my final four weeks at the internship. I feel utterly singled out, and to confirm the ‘bad feeling’ I had about my manager from the beginning, I now know she is working completely against me, not with me. I wish so much that I had walked away from the internship when I first felt this. If I walk away now I will have wasted a great deal of time and money, and will forgo any chance of getting a reference. If I stay, I fear that she will refuse to write me a reference anyway. I feel completely in a ‘catch-22′ situation – there is no-one I can complain to about this, within the museum or otherwise; any action will result in me losing my reference.

I have never received any expenses payment for this internship, and estimate my expenditure on travel during this time to be over £1000. To add insult to injury, I am frequently being asked to contribute £5-£10 to the tea kitty.

I am sure you must receive more messages like this than you can handle, but let me say it really has been a relief just to write this down and tell someone.

An anonymously submitted story to the Interns Anonymous website

Shock Treatment – An Assistant's Hair Raising Tale

2010-04-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

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.

An Internship of Fools – An Assistant's Anecdote

2010-04-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

An anonymously submitted anecdote from a subversively minded gallery assistant

I was at one time working as an assistant at a certain London gallery, which although allowing me to develop my experience in certain areas and providing me with a number of useful contacts was essentially not seeking to teach me anything above or beyond the work that would and could have been carried out be a paid, permanent employee. Essentially I was working for them as any other employee would, only for free. Through this I was inevitably picking up various contacts or developing certain areas of knowledge but essentially the internship label that was placed on the position was slightly disingenuous.

It often seemed as though my boss would simply refer tasks to me that she herself was unwilling to carry out herself as they were tiresome or menial, or that she was unwilling to pay someone for that should in all fairness have been the preserve of qualified web designers, couriers, graphic designers, and more worryingly builders and electricians. Despite being unpaid I would have to travel at my own expense, not only to work but to meetings and to make deliveries and collections. The worst parts were often having to impose what I held to be unfair terms on fellow artists or to be drawn into confrontation with them as a means for her to avoid such unpleasantries. I was also beginning to have to undertake much more work outside of my allotted time at the gallery, spending countless hours of what was supposed to be my free time (all time is 'free' time when you are not paid right?) typing away bitterly on the computer, posting stuff to blogs and the like. I was even being asked to sacrifice other opportunities for the promise of a possible (although I quickly accepted fantasy) job at the end of it all.

In light of my developing awareness of the exploitative nature of this arrangement I began to seek to turn this position to my own ends by potentially more underhand means. I began to subvert my position somewhat, partly for the furtherance of my career (contacts and experience) and partly simply for my own entertainment. It became a creative act in itself. I was lucky in so much as I had some level of apparent autonomy within my position and so when presented with the opportunity to produce an exhibition with a large amount of responsibility for the discourse that surrounded it, I chose to subvert the concept of the exhibition into one that subtly commented upon my own position within the organisation and contained multiple and ironic references to, and critiques of, the exploitative situation in which I found myself. What was ostensibly an exhibition showcasing the early career positions of emerging artists became to the observant reader a hidden critique of the whole way this 'employment' scenario was set up and the ways in which young creative practitioners/interns are treated by institutions. I am not sure if anyone reading the material that I wrote picked up on the multiple signs that I placed within my work or possibly noticed my little joke, I like to think they did and that they are still laughing a little to themselves, perhaps even now.

Overqualified, Overworked and Un(der)paid – An Internshipping Forecast

2010-03-19T07:12:00.000-07:00

An essay submitted by Karen Eliot that tackles the issues around unpaid assistant positions and internships in the visual arts

Overqualified, Overworked and Un(der)paid – An Internshipping Forecast

When you send something by ship it's called cargo

When you send something by car it's called shipment

When you send someone to fetch you a coffee it's called an internship

Having worked as an unpaid gallery assistant and a number London galleries and other cultural organisations, whose names I will not mention for my own protection rather than theirs, I was motivated to write some speculations on the growing reliance of the cultural sector upon unpaid labour, its implications and the prospects for change. The positions that I held did in some fairness enable me to increase my experience of some aspects of the sector and put me in contact with several of my peers that I might not otherwise have met. They did not however provide me with anything beyond what one might expect from a paid position within the same industry, the pseudo-educational veneer was entirely superficial, this was labour and nothing but labour and hence was nothing but the work that would, could and should have been carried out be a paid, permanent employee. I was fulfilling the employees position and yet was not being paid a wage in the manner that was once customary for such an employee. I came to acknowledge that this was mere exploitation, pure and simple, and that simply calling something an internship or assistant position did not alter this fact.

My experience was not without value, however ultimately I came to the conclusion that whilst the individual institution was simply part of a far wider cultural economy that saw a race to the bottom in terms of pay and conditions, that they could not entirely absolve themselves from responsibility, on the other hand neither could I. I too was accepting the situation and undercutting fellow workers. Whatever happened to solidarity? It seems that without a global or at least national cultural shift it is hard to imagine the laws of market forces facilitating any major shift in practice away from such a model, it is after all an employers market. The arena is flooded by a huge excess of talented and motivated creative individuals seeking employment and therefore, as is widely noted, cultural institutions and successful artists have their pick of this pool of employees and are under no pressure from such market conditions to offer anything but rock bottom in terms of pay and conditions, often in fact literally rock bottom, zero.

In the 19^th and 20^th century when manufacturing labourers and the like were (often literally) two a penny, unions and collectives were formed in order to combat just such a situation. This solution seems inconceivable however within our own postmodern, anti-centralised, individual, competitive and compartmentalised situation. It is hard to imagine the unionisation of artists assistants or gallery interns within such a competitive framework: artists themselves are, unlike actors, notoriously un-unionised and true collectives short-lived and rare. The myth of the artist as romantic individual genius undoubtedly bears some share of responsibility, in setting aside as unique artistic labour, as it does, from other types of production. But if solidarity is not found to be the solution to this clear predicament then what is?

Perhaps the predicament is not so clear as I have claimed, there are those who would no doubt argue that the current situation is fairly positive: young creatives obtain access to a range of experiences and cultural organisations can run at lower costs, which in a sector often heavily dependent on public subsidy is seen to maximise funding to output ratios and cut taxpayer outlay. However this is incorrect in so much as firstly it is wrong to institutionalise free labour within a capitalist marketplace as this is clearly exploitation and if we are providing a service or labour for someone we have the right to demand payment in order to facilitate our continued existence and participation within said capitalist system. However, if we view this situation as a pseudo-socialist model, ie. if in publicly funded industries (like much of the arts) we are expected to work for free, are we then not carrying out the work of the State and as such have the right to access State services without cost? Clearly this is not the case either. What we have is a strange mixture of the two that results in the undertaking of work without recompense, a form of exploitation that is a form of voluntary slavery by any other name. This situation is unsustainable as it deprives those previously holding paid positions within these organisations of their jobs and provides no promise of employment for those that do undertake unpaid work. To have a model built upon unpaid labour clearly undermines the entire foundations of the cultural sector; how far up the ladder does the expectation to work without pay progress? could it ultimately lead to the internal undermining and collapse of institutions unsustainably constituted?

Beyond this argument is the one that visual arts should on the one hand largely be freely accessible to all at the point of use and yet the failure to adequately resource them to meet such an expectation. This results in such pressure on budgets that the arts must therefore demand unpaid labour (and let us not forget the attendant denigration of conditions – unpaid labour is often also a way to circumnavigate employment laws that are in place to protect workers). This view must be tempered by the fact that there is clearly an unjust disparity, as within most industries, between the top and the bottom of such organisations. Perhaps if directors could be persuaded, by regulation if necessary, to share out the financial benefits of their positions more equitably with entry level workers then unpaid labour would become unnecessary. Cultural institutions that turn profits and employ multiple staff may need to be forced not to rely upon unpaid work, for ethical reasons as much as for long term stability of the sector, and if they can not afford to do so then they will have to fold. There will be countless artists led initiatives, run by unpaid volunteers that will doubtless arise to take their place. It is one thing being part of an initiative that is run by passionate individuals on a more collective basis in which no one is paid and quite another for institutions to be turning profits, often charging audiences for access and paying multiple staff on higher wages to demand free labour from their entry level employees. Internships, imported, like so many other bad ideas, from the USA, offer nothing more than extension of the neoliberal exploitation of the workforce. This is simply an unjust system that appears to requires legislation to solve. Legislation however does not appear to be forthcoming, and with parliament itself largely run on the back of unpaid interns it does not look like it will be arriving any time soon. Party politics is in the thrall of the very interests whose furtherance would least be served by the ending of a culture of unpaid, disposable labour.

And so, if the hopes of unionisation, solidarity and legislation are not to provide us with a way out of this seeming impasse, we are left with the same dilemma that faces progressives across many disparate fields. With the traditional weapons of the old left ineffectual against the new cultural hegemony of globalised capitalism where do we turn for relief from an inherently unjust and dehumanising exploitation? It is a question that has troubled multiple philosophers and theorists and one that has yet to be utterly convincingly answered. Perhaps, as some would say, we must expose this hegemony in the hope that people may see beyond it, perhaps there is no beyond it; we are complicit in our own exploitation, hailed by the dominating ideology, interpellated. Perhaps there is no prior subject that might resist such forces, perhaps we are always already constituted by the discourse that contain us. Such depressing positions could potentially be tempered with conceptions of becoming, of singularisation or differing, all of which (in complex ways that I will not go into here) appear to at least offer some elements of hope. But how in practical terms might this be achieved? The answer is no doubt somewhat regressive, going back to the idea that at least if we can perceive the forces in operation we have a hope of, if not changing them, at least supplanting their pre-eminence within our own experience. If we accept that the situation of institutionalised wageless labour exploits us we may then begin to enter into this singularisation (I chose not to employ the term individuation as aside from its philosophical meanings also connotes economic terminology relating to specialisation and an increased efficiency of the division of labour, serving as a means for individuals to find comparative advantage in the marketplace – the opposite of what I am seeking to convey). Through such an understanding of singularisation we may come to experience our internship, or our status as an unpaid assistant, as a process of becoming, of differing from ourselves. It is within this process of singularisation that we might move our thinking beyond the reproduction of consensus and a collective ethical or knowledge framework with its inherent transmission of norms of behaviour, traditions and the like and come to a new conception of the relationship between the processes of individual and collective singularisation.

A position without conventional employment conditions, set apart from the wage slave model, as well as holding the afore mentioned problems, also allows this process of singularisation more latitude. We might operate in a sphere beyond the ethical normative bonds that conventionally tie employee and employer. If employers have no consideration for ethical responsibilities then there is likewise no obligation upon 'employees' either. Indeed it is incumbent upon those that find themselves in the position of the exploited to discover those methods by which they might fight back and hence by this individual singularisation constitute the collective singularisation that will result in cultural shift. This fight back may take the form of a counter-exploitation, the drawing up of a list of clear objectives that can be attained through the said position, unafflicted by ethical norms, that must be worked towards with all guile and determination. These experiences must be maximised for their links into other spheres of experience hitherto unreachable, their connections exploited, the knowledge that they purport to convey stored and turned against itself. The various significations encountered within these positions must be where possible détourned into alternative forms of knowledge, forms that can be used against the discourse that suppresses them. The assistant can become the perhaps unwitting agent of such psychic leaks, disseminating the unconscious of the organisation beyond its boundaries, they can be the weak link in its chain, the porous boundary that opens it up to the collective, social and relational sphere of wider artistic and creative practice that it by definition excludes or contains, setting boundaries against, to capture and exploit or else exclude and suppress. The assistant or intern can act in the fashion of the computer virus that infiltrates the heart of such complex systems, they can, through their very porosity and covert refusal of allegiance, affect a larger context by making the exploitation of wageless labour no longer a viable option for organisations seeking to shield themselves from such subversive practices. The question arises, just who is exploiting who? and the answer should be at least ambiguous, if not the reverse of what we might initially expect.

Ready, Set, Hang: The Heavy Lifting Is On - New York Times Article

2010-03-17T07:10:00.000-07:00

Photo: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Article from the New York Times, by Randy Kennedy, published: March 22, 2010, the orignal online article can be found here

A bit of fun from some 'assistants' in the US...

Ready, Set, Hang: The Heavy Lifting Is On

The explosive growth of the art world during the last decade has been fuelled by rich new collectors, shiny new galleries and sprawling new museum wings. But the gears and the grease that keep this big machine humming are people who can be generally described with less glamorous adjectives: underpaid, uninsured, overworked and sweaty (not to mention often heavily tattooed, bearded, hung over and painfully burdened by loan payments for their M.F.A. degrees).

These are the art handlers, an often-invisible international underclass of blue-collar workers, most of them aspiring artists trying to pay the bills. But on Sunday afternoon at a bare-bones gallery on the Lower East Side, a group of them finally got a chance to grab a little glory. And even better, they got a raucous public forum in which to mock gallery owners, curators, collectors, critics, fellow artists and just about everyone in the art world, not excluding themselves.

The event, the first-ever Art Handling Olympics — a combination roast, “Jackass”-style stunt extravaganza and excuse to drink a lot — drew about 200 people at its height who came to the Ramiken Crucible gallery to watch a dozen four-man teams (art handlers are, by and large, male, and, by and large, large) go head-to-head, demonstrating their skills with a lot of fake art and untold amounts of Bubble Wrap.

“We kind of thought maybe this was the wrong time for this, because everyone who works in this field was worn out from working the Armory Show and everything that goes on around that, but it turned out it was the perfect time, because everybody needed to vent,” Ted Riederer, an artist, former art handler and one of the event’s organizers, said. For some of the events, Mr. Riederer took on the role of a cruel German curator, wearing a tight houndstooth suit and sunglasses, shouting abuse at the handlers like “Nein! Nein!” and “Hold it higher, higher, a little higher!” and “I pay you people to do this?”

A qualifying round in which teams were required to tape together an art box and wheel one of their members around a city block inside of it, and to stop midway to wolf down Chinese pork dumplings and throw back shots of whiskey, weeded the teams down to four.

The next events — a speed competition to hang framed works of art (with sadistic measurement requirements like 9 15/16 inches) and a contest called the “static hold,” in which handlers had to keep framed pieces of lead weighing 50 or 60 pounds held against a wall while Mr. Riederer barked orders at them and took a leisurely cellphone call in the midst of their grunting labors (“Ah, yes, hello darling, Basel, yes”) — left only two teams for the final round.

Points were subtracted for inelegant taping, dripping sweat on the art, and, once, for failing to “waste time properly” when a team that finished early didn’t leave to smoke a cigarette or get a beer. Justine Birbil, director of the Michael Werner Gallery and one of the event’s three judges, awarded extra points to the members of one team because she thought they “looked good from behind.”

Called “The Eliminator,” the final punishing round involved a kind of Nascar-pit-crew competition for the remaining two teams — one named the Kings of Cleats and one whose name was a slightly racy double-entendre. The teams had to take pieces of art out of a wooden crate and, with the clock ticking, assemble them into an installation with no instructions or curatorial guidance. (The “art installation” kit consisted of a blanket, a tambourine, streamers, two rattraps and other things that resembled street trash — in other words, the kinds of things many art handlers have actually had to try to assemble by themselves on the job.)

If the time constraints weren’t tough enough, the art handlers were often heckled during this round by onlookers; one shouted “Derivative!” as the artwork was thrown together. Asked if he and his friends had practiced for the event, Paul Outlaw, a member of the team that went home with the silver, said: “Other than doing this all day, anyway, and sometimes all night? No.”

At the end of the day the Kings of Cleats, in an upset, won the gold, a “lovely handcrafted medal,” as the organizers described it, embossed with an image of a hand holding up a majestic flaming tape dispenser. “Plus, of course, they win enduring fame,” said Shane Caffrey, an art handler for the Marianne Boesky Gallery and the event’s lead organizer.

No money?

Mr. Caffrey laughed. “In this business?”

(A version of this article appeared in print on March 23, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition of the New York Times, an online version of this article by Randy Kennedy can be found here).

A Brush With Fame? - Observer Article on Artist's Assistants

2010-03-17T07:09:00.000-07:00

brush.

An article by Rose Aidin discussing the role of the artist's assistant in contemporary art, taken from the Guardian website and originally appearing in The Observer, Sunday 12 October 2003.

To view the original article click here.

Brush with Fame

Who painted the spots for Damien Hirst? And who stitched the felt on Tracey Emin's blankets? Rose Aidin investigates the mysterious world of the artist's assistant

When Julian Opie needed an assistant he placed an advertisement in the Guardian. Within days, his immaculate studio had turned into an artistic version of the Blue Peter depot following an especially emotive appeal. Every surface was piled with CVs, Opie's voice mail and email boxes were jammed with keen inquiries, and then there were those so eager that they came by in person. Opie received more than 500 applications for a job which, if few outsiders are even aware exists, is increasingly integral to the contemporary art world.

'It was a crazy time,' admits Opie, who sat up with his wife every night for weeks trying to award marks out of 10 to each applicant. 'But my feeling is that a lot of other artists, also busy and stressed up to their eyeballs, might think that sort of professional approach was not such a bad investment.'

Indeed, Opie passed one of his applicants to his fellow Tate trustee, Turner Prize-winner Chris Ofili. He time-shares another assistant (he ended up with several) with fellow artists including Fiona Rae and Lisa Milroy. It's a fraught business: when one well-known artist needed a new assistant, word is that the member of her gallery staff charged with finding one was threatened with dismissal if unsuccessful.

So why all the fuss? Mostly it's to do with the pressures of fame and the fast pace of celebrity artist life. Like film stars they need a personal assistant to field media enquiries, run their diary and coordinate exhibitions round the world. In common with a film star's assistant, the role requires discretion, tact and extreme efficiency. The reward is proximity to fame and fortune, which can be full of career-building opportunities.

The other kind of artist's assistant - such as Tracey Emin's blanket stitcher Steven Gontarski - actually help to realise the work. Opie was hoping to combine the two roles in one person. His three by four centimetre advertisement, published on Monday 13 January, requested a PA studio manager with computer and office skills, plus technical, manual and painting fabrication abilities for £17-20,000 a year. Many applicants had none of these qualities, but were seduced by Opie's fame.

'I put my name in the advert and a lot of people expressed surprise that I'd made myself so available,' says Opie. 'Perhaps it was a little naïve, and I was overwhelmed by the number of emails that came addressed to me. But fame is a very strange quality, it's not that anyone recognises me, but the reaction did show me that my work is known among young people in this country.'

This would not surprise people who know Opie's cartoon-style portraits of the pop group Blur which adorned the cover of their recent Best of album. Or those worldwide who've seen his portraits of the Formula One team, or his work exhibited at Tates Modern and Britain, and at the opening of Baltic at Gateshead last year.

So Rebecca Partridge was overwhelmed when she was invited for her interview. 'I thought this was the most famous artist, more famous than any I've ever met, and afterwards I was like, "Wow, I've been in Julian Opie's studio."' Partridge, 26, from Yorkshire, studied painting in Bath. She worked in an art shop, painted theatre sets and was unemployed before getting the part-time job with Opie: she is now the only student from her college year currently working as an artist.

'Being an artist's assistant is an underground thing. I didn't know how it worked at all, that most artists have them. Julian's advert in the paper was like a door opening: you creep in and realise that they're people after all,' says Partridge.

'Julian is this professional married man who goes to work every day,' she adds. 'He's not like a tormented artist in his garret, and that really surprised me: he's a complete perfectionist which has really affected my work. I hope I'll combine an MA with doing this and then hopefully be employing my own assistant.'

Yet Partridge's own work, recently exhibited at Rhodes + Mann gallery in London's Hoxton, is unlike Opie's. Subsuming her style to his has made her pause: 'When I started working for Julian and I was just doing handmade paintings, even my most open-minded friends were asking big questions about the authorship of the paintings. They have to be absolutely flawless to the point where they look like prints, and that requires quite a bit of skill and energy. It's hard to remember that it's Julian's painting, not mine, and that it will be he who signs it.' Of course, it is Opie who designs and creates the template for the work.

Partridge could take comfort from the former artist's assistants who have gone on to bigger and better achievements. Opie himself worked for Michael Craig-Martin, the artist and Goldsmiths tutor. Opie's successors include Liam Gillick, nominated for last year's Turner Prize, Steven Gontarski and television filmmaker Mark James, who has made programmes about Damien Hirst.

'I think I must choose my assistants quite well,' muses Craig-Martin. 'My current assistant, Paul Hosking, was in last year's Becks Futures awards at the ICA. The trouble is that then they leave - that's what happened with Julian, he was successful too quickly to want to be anyone's assistant.' It was Craig-Martin who introduced Opie to his dealer, Nicholas Logsdail of the Lisson Gallery, who gave Opie his first solo show.

Fiona Rae only lasted a day as an artist's assistant. 'I stretched a couple of big canvases for Bruce McLean, probably not very well, and then he asked me to type a list out for him. He wanted it lower case and no punctuation, I thought he couldn't mean it, so put it all in. He found me another job and was very nice about it - even gave me a print.' Rae had more success with her own assistants, who she started using to stretch, prime and prepare canvases in 1991, the year she was nominated for the Turner Prize. She found love with one, Richard Patterson, who is now, like her, represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery.

In Damien Hirst's recent autobiography, he described Rachel Howard as his best ever spot painting assistant. This autumn Howard has her own solo shows at the Bohen Foundation in New York and at the Anne Faggionato gallery in London. Howard prefers not to comment on her days painting spots for Hirst, but her successor Lauren Child, now an acclaimed children's writer and illustrator, describes working for Hirst as 'an odd but brilliant job'.

Child and another part-time assistant painted coloured spots on to Hirst's famous canvases alone in a room in Borough, south London, in the late Nineties. 'I perhaps saw Damien Hirst three times in relation to what I was doing as a studio manager,' recalls Child. 'Pretty much all I did was paint spots. I have no idea how many spot paintings I did, we kept no record, but we were pretty quick. There's not that much to think about apart from how quickly you can do it, and the colours, which were meant to be random so we could choose them.'

Hirst is said to get a free helicopter ride courtesy of his dealer as a reward for large sales. Didn't this infuriate Child? 'No, artists have always had assistants - I admired and was inspired by his achievement. I didn't want to get involved in someone else's career and so it was perfect.'

The National Gallery's curator of Dutch seventeenth-century paintings, Axel Rüger, is intrigued by the parallels between today's artist's assistants and those of Rembrandt's day. 'Rembrandt ran very large workshops with pupils who had to pay for the privilege. And they'd work with the artists for many years. There's no way that one artist could have cranked out those hundreds of paintings, so they would work with assistants, and a master's crucial touches to painting were sometimes even contractually determined.'

Rüger argues: 'The workshop may no longer be technical, but if hundreds of people apply should Julian Opie advertise for an assistant, it suggests that the basis of the studio of the very famous artist has not changed, just the motives, and the artist's "name" remains every bit as important.'

The biggest name in twentieth-century art history, Andy Warhol, took inspiration from his assistants and turned the process into a happening in its own right with his Factory. So when Sarah Morris, who has a solo exhibition at White Cube in the spring, was studying in New York, she decided she wanted to work for Warhol's successor elect, Jeff Koons. 'Jeff made up a role for me. A lot of it was that I was just paid to be around. And he was producing a lot of stuff in Europe at the time, so it was slightly like Charlie's Angels : he'd be squawking instructions at me from a speaker phone.'

Morris uses assistants in every aspect of her painting and video work, inspired to delegate by Koons's example, and is even planning a joint exhibition with one of her assistants in Spain. She likens the studio system to that of Hollywood: 'It reminds me of Bob Evans's book and film, The Kid Stays in the Picture. There's far more infrastructure and collaboration going on inside the art world, a chain of command, than people see from the outside.'

Yet of course all is far from sweetness and light in the creative crucible of the artist's studio. And the six degrees of separation within the artist's assistants system - Opie used to work for his Goldsmiths tutor, artist Michael Craig-Martin, who employed last year's Turner Prize nominee Liam Gillick, who is married to Sarah Morris - means that, should there be a falling-out, repercussions can reverberate around the art world. Rachel Whiteread used to work for Alison Wilding: so apparently acrimonious was their parting that it's not a subject people choose to discuss.

Andrew Wilson, deputy editor of Art Monthly, says: 'As a historian it's always interesting to see how assistants develop in relationship to the artists they had once worked for. You get an affinity or a "kill the father" syndrome.' Wilson cites the example of Turner Prize nominees Jake and Dinos Chapman, who worked as assistants for Gilbert & George. The work of both pairs contains parallels in its use of shock, yet their public philosophical pronouncements are markedly at odds with each other.

'However, a classic example of a "kill the father" relationship, which over time reveals similarities and closeness, is that between Henry Moore and Anthony Caro,' argues Wilson. 'Caro worked for Moore, then his work was held up to be so much better and very different, yet has increasingly returned to the configuration of Moore over the past 15 years. Perhaps when you make the break between being a studio assistant and an artist in your own right, you have to distance yourself from the artist you once worked with.'

Mark Titchner worked for Keith Tyson, last year's Turner Prize winner, for two years and had a solo exhibition at Tate Britain's Art Now room this summer. 'My main contribution was the studio drawings. My style was fairly generic, and every day Keith would come in with a list and say what he wanted drawing. So my father, for example, found it odd that my work was in Keith's Turner Prize exhibition, but to me it was like working as a set painter. They were authorless drawings, that's the point of Keith's work, and I didn't think of them as mine at all. Using assistants is very much part of modern practice. Unless you're working only as a painter, you need other people for welding, picture editing, whatever. No one can have time to develop all those skills.'

Working in Tyson's studio situation caused Titchner to make a significant departure from Tyson's practice. 'It's led me to be more emollient to individual works. Work flying in and out of the studio without being resolved is depressing. I've become more clingy to my practice.'

Mary Horlock, curator of Titchner's Art Now show and author of a forthcoming publication on Julian Opie, says: 'You can see a creative dialogue between Keith Tyson's work and that of Mark Titchner, but you never know whether that's why they were drawn to work together in the first place - like Julian Opie and Michael Craig-Martin - or whether there's a slight tendency to adapt from each other and that comes out afterwards in the work. It's part of the hidden network that goes on.'

And of course the network can be literally hidden: like Damien Hirst's assistants painting spots all day in a room in Borough. The use of assistants may be philosophically compatible with an artist's approach but it also enables the artist to produce more work in less time. Assistants cost around £7-10 an hour, or £120 a day at the top of the market: employing several full-time is a significant investment, and art is a business like any other.

'In the last 10 years art has become part of the wheel of commodity,' argues Richard Wentworth. 'It's to do with the market: artists are expected to be extremely productive and very repetitive.' Wentworth worked in Henry Moore's studio, yet now prefers not to use assistants himself. 'I found I was inventing tomorrow for them instead of me. The British love to get caught up in the idea of who has created an art work yet have a very personal connection to mass-produced products like their cars. So when you live in a culture that is looking for individuality, when in truth there's very little, that shows up in any argument about art, including the way in which artists use assistants.'

By placing an advertisement in the Guardian - unheard of in the word-of-mouth inner sanctums of the art world - Julian Opie was making explicit and public the impact that assistants can have upon an artist's career. 'It's always frustrated me the way in which the British art world can be very amateur. I want to delve into the world on every level and produce fabulously made work like that of Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol. I couldn't do what I'm doing without full-time assistants. Nor could I do it without a computer. But even without, I'd still be an artist and I'd still make things. That's my nature - just like a fish that grows to the size of the tank, assistants allow us to grow our work yet remain the same.'

Article credit: Rose Aidin, The Observer, Oct 2003.

the Assistant

2010-03-16T07:07:00.000-07:00

the Assistant

Bearspace gallery in Deptford, London, in association with peer sessions, is pleased to present an exhibition project entitled the Assistant starting in May 2010. Each exhibition will pair up an emerging artist with a more established artist who will then enter into a dialogue in order to produce the exhibition. The established artist will send the emerging artist, or assistant, a list of rules one month prior to the exhibition opening, rules which will detail how the established artist wishes the work to be created and/or installed. The emerging artist, as assistant, is presented with the possibility of following to the letter the instructions they are given or subverting and undermining them, inserting or overwriting their own ideas and work into the final exhibition.

The Assistant aims not only to explore the practices of both artists through this process of exchange, but also to widen this examination in order to examine ideas around the arbitrary, hierarchical categories into which market convenience delineates creative practice. The exhibition seeks to explore and potentially deconstruct these classifications of 'emerging' and 'established' artist and to interrogate the role of 'the assistant' more widely by interacting with range of creative practitioners who have undertaken work in an assistant capacity.

The project seeks to question ideas around the construction an exhibition in order to examine the processes an exhibition may go through before it is finally realised, the aim is to present the secret life of the exhibition, beyond the specifically defined limits of its opening times. Exhibitions are events which often conceal moments of interest, intriguing processes, iceberg-like away from the public gaze. In order to explore such a line of enquiry this blog will accompany the exhibition, exposing the original lists of rules, information about the artists along with documentation of the process of exchange and decision making that has led to the creation of the work. It will also invite contributions from the public and a wider community of creative individuals to explore alternative experiences and interpretations of being an assistant.

Along with the exhibitions and blog, a public discussion event, a publication and a screening of video created in response to a similar set of rules will form parts of the project. Stay tuned for call outs!