Grin and Bear it - An Assistant's Story

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.

By Accident or Design

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...

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

(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.

An Assistant's Tale of Woe

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

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

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

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.