Tag: Vitamin Creative Space blog

After graduating from NSCAD, I began planning a road trip across the United States to reach the West Coast. I thought that it might be an idea to try and contact artists whose work I thought was interesting, and if nothing more, just visit them. It was a very naïve notion, I confess. When I tried finding their contact information, enquiring through galleries or university faculty lists, I would only receive answers from assistants. At the time, I was surprised; I just had no idea how this thing works. It occurred to me at the time – but I failed to act on it then – that instead I could just meet these assistants.

Only much later did I understand who assistants are, being not only useful individuals to the realization of artworks, but a parallel world that corresponds as well as struggles with the world of the artists (the world that we learned about in school). Having worked for several years in assistant jobs, and alongside other assistants, I am very much interested in how others understand the position. At the Venice Biennale, I again met many interesting young artists working for the installations of other artists, bringing up the idea to ask some friends for accounts of this job. Below are just a few. I hope to continue this discussion, and welcome others to send me their opinions.

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working as an assistant has simply been the search for money.  it has never benefited my own work nor have i ever felt it compromised my position by working for others.  the benefit of working as an assistant is the lack of conviction usually alloted to the assistant and in my case, a lack of a long term commitment.  it helps month to month.   it has been a rarity while working for another artist where i identify or even support the work that is being inevitably produced.  my hands are offered, not my opinion, and that is all i am really willing to offer.  there was a time where i thought that construction from assisting jobs was starting to enter into a direct commentary on my life as on artist and i started to think about christopher de’arcangelo’s practice as an artist and a construction worker…

i recently assisted S___  on a project of his… which involved a trip that i didnt want to be paid for.  and in this particular case, i did feel a greater connection to the artwork, and maybe resultantly had no interest in being paid for it.  maybe the payment itself creates the disassociation, the wall the assistant hits while the artist keeps on going..
i know these answers aren’t profound, and if you are going to publish it, please don’t use my name!

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Of course I remember our conversations in Yokohama about the ‘Side-Dish’ show, or making an assistants show, I still think it could be funny, although for sure one needs more of an angle than showing the ‘second-class’. Hmmm, about your questions, I guess they have to remain anonymous since people could maybe lose their jobs if they speak their minds.

As for me, well yeah, I don’t do too much assistant work as you mentioned, more making their websites and catalogues and what not, so at least you have the relationship of a kind of ‘expert’ and not like in Yokohama, where there was clearly more hierarchy involved.

My own artwork doesn’t really benefit from my design work (for design I author everything via a studio name to keep my proper name out of it, and also not to confuse Google searches and what not.) For sure you can meet some people, and they find out you also make work, but it’s been my feeling that they prefer you keep it professional and not bring too much your own art stuff into the mix. So basically in order to keep a good client relationship to get money, I generally keep my own things and interests out of the discussion.

It would be interesting to ask people who really do work closely with artists / art institutions these types of things. I think the idea is that you can get some experience and exposure, but often, you become too ‘useful’ for the person or the org. and they end up not being able to perceive your practice in any other light beyond being useful somehow. I’m just in Switzerland now (again design job for a museum project), but one of the technicians here for example makes all of J___A___’s work, I mean since years and years, and he works as this museum technician, so that’s what I mean in terms of getting pigeon-holed into a certain role.

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Without a niche (a niche niche)
The broad-daylight operator with many skills and a firm, able grasp of English (and other languages), with people skills and studied gestural appropriateness, wit and levity, an eye for aesthetic forms and a founded and running knowledge of art history, a fair knowledge of political affairs (and some catching up to do in history), a philosophical basis that holds itself upright, acquaintance with cookery, culturally experienced and travelled, sympathetic with the losers, critical at opportune moments, vague at the sensitive ones, rebellious a little too often but a hard worker and team player nonetheless: such a set of attributes will have you arrive at a job in your chosen profession, with an amount of creative flexibility and mobility. The only drawback is that because it is such a general set of characteristics, the person it describes will never be invited to join any exhibitions or panel discussions. Having no particular acumen or idiosyncrasy, no “subject”, this operator can be said to be in a sustainable position because these skills are valuable when transferred to any position or project, and (if truth be told) can lead in a direction of individuation – because of the creative nature of the character, because of its proximity with the author, its potential overtaking of the author – but sustainability can easily be imagined as stasis.

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OK, so my plan to write you last night failed because a friend of mine was in desperate need of comforting and I had to provide food and good words for her inexplicable grief. Good enough excuse? I’m gonna steal time from __ in order to answer your question instead.

I’ll try and order my thoughts about this subject as best I can, as I think that authorship is a great topic to be examining, but I might be more jumbled than is useful to you. Maybe I’ll just try answering your questions directly:

Q: Could you describe an occasion when you have been involved in the manual process of making someone else’s artwork?

A: I’ve worked for a few artists on various pieces, bits and bobs really, but my most prolonged experience was with a stone carver who worked in small town Canada. This type of practice is probably less controversial than, say, a painterly one, because the manual tasks involved to get a stone to the ready are more similar to stretching and priming a canvas as opposed to actually being responsible for the draughtmanship and paint application (and then, as it was in the Renaissance, having the master do the face, hands, and signature at the final stage).

Working directly for an artist, however, is the same as any human relationship – there is a gradual understanding of that person’s interest, ability, and creative personality, which tend to dictate (depending on the interaction of those factors with your own) how much input is sought, proffered, considered and accepted from assistant to artist. In my case, I found the woman I worked for open to my ideas, and as she grew to trust me and my abilities (the latter being one of the critical influences in how much is left to the assistant) I was handed over more responsibilities. What was most important to note from the experience, however, was how, no matter what amount of hours I put into any given piece, and how much I felt some sense of ownership towards it, everything that came out in the end was emphatically not my work. Now, this may be because I trained as an artist as well, and Moore/Noguchi formalism isn’t my thing. The instructions from the artist meant that, whatever my contributions were, the construct linking all the pieces together was bound to be hers, and as such there was nothing but gratefulness on my part for teaching me certain skills and keeping my belly full.

Does this have anything to do with seeing people (assistants? workers? servants?) as instruments? A bulldozer operator working on the Sternenfall exhibition at the Grand Palais was told by Anselm Kiefer, in his imperious yet mischievous style, that “you are my pencil”. And proceeded to direct the destruction of one of his container towers the way a ballet choreographer would direct his corps.

Q: To what extent and in what ways was the artist involved?

A: Since her practice was on the mystical/personal side of formalism, the artist I worked for worked very closely with me on the direction of each piece. This hasn’t always been my experience with other artists, so I would say that to a great extent, this depends on the slant of their practice. It might be considered inauthentic, cheap, cheating or worse by some that contemporary practice involves what is, essentially, signing your shopping, but to some it is these questions of purity (and playing with same) that interest them most. Didn’t Benjamin accurately diagnose the loss of aura by the art object? Now imagine a generation of artists, post-Duchamp, post-Warhol, the majority of them reared in hothouse art school environments saturated with “theory” (the Frankfurters leading the charge), and their practice begins to make a lot more sense in terms of its use of prefabricated or otherwise outsourced production.

Working with artists indirectly, via a gallery, is different than working in their studio, mostly because there are more layers of red tape to wade through, but also because costs need to be approved on either side of the transaction. As a tech, you’re also removed from direct contact with the artist, which can sometimes be useful as insulation against day-to-day aggravation, but is also a hindrance because you don’t have the luxury time in which to plumb the depths of the artist’s head, therefore having to either guess or stall when the decision making is left to you. It’s a halfway house that can be very frustrating, especially when you’re working with somebody who is on a different continent.

I was charged with organizing the assembly of the concrete half of a piece by D__S____, and trying to create a relationship with him while at the same time managing to manoeuvre around the exhibition budget constraints was quite tricky, and I ascribe most of the difficulty to there being a five hour time difference between us. Clear communication becomes essential, and slow email responses, unclear directions or instructions, and lack of prep time all contribute to problems and delay. In the end we reached a concord, but the process was pretty gruelling.

Q: Any thoughts on the finished work? A sense of achievement or was this just a product of your day-job? Was your contribution acknowledged? Do you think it should have been? Do you think your involvement had any bearing on the authorship (or ownership) of the work?

A: I spoke about it in the answer to the first question: when the artist was directly involved, I felt pride in completing a task to the best of my ability, but no real sense of ownership or entitlement. You’re really just earning your place on the acknowledgement list in the catalogue. Is this true of artists who let you/get you to do most of the work on your own? For the most part I would say yes, because again, even if you’re entrusted to make aesthetic decisions normally associated with the ideal of the Artist As Romantic Genius, it’s not being presented as your own work, and the starting points in the development of the piece can be rather distant from where you yourself would begin.

Take, for instance, ____’s “Firmament”. I know the people who helped design it, test it, prototype it, and I helped assemble the final object (twice). Now, because I don’t work for his studio, my feeling when it was done, both times, was more of a “good job” feeling rather than a “look what I did” feeling – but I think that my studio friends tended towards the latter. After the first install we were all taken to a dinner by AG, which was appreciated, and certainly not the norm. I certainly feel that assistants should be acknowledged for their contributions, but they don’t really need to have their names on the museum information plaque. Apparently some would-be buyers of Hirst at his Sotheby’s auction were demanding to know the identity of painting assistants that worked on his FACT paintings, justifying their requests with “well, what if they become famous someday?”. That becomes interesting trivia perhaps, and maybe biographical fodder 50 years down the line, but I can’t see any tech or assistant I’ve ever known to insist on outward credit like that, no matter how responsible they might be for the final output. It’s like when you repaint a white wall white: the worst thing that can happen is that somebody notices that you’ve done it.

This is perhaps the symbiotic nature of artist/assistant: the artist needs the assistant to create the work, but the assistant needs the shield, the contacts, and the prestige provided by their association with a more established creative agent. This also brings to mind the idea of the artist as thief, and the most successful artists being the ones that can cover up their thefts the best. Artists constantly nick their ideas from history, both the capital-H kind and their own personal version, and it would be absurd to think that their assistants, especially the ones that they have long relationships with, don’t contribute to that latter history.

I can see I’m starting to ramble, so I’ll leave off with two art historical examples that come to mind, and that I’ve never really seen examined in depth and could be relevant (?):

– Jack Goldstein used a cadre of assistants to make painting in the 80s, and was viciously attacked for it, namely because it was unfashionable at the time. Was Hirst the first to make it cool again?

– Moholy-Nagy talked with a paint factory foreman to make his “telephone pictures” in the 20s.

So, I don’t totally feel satisfied with my loquacious answers, but it’s something, no? Please let me know if you want me to clarify any points, and the only acknowledgement I demand is a copy of the final dissertation.

That and you owe me, ahem, nine pints…

All the best,

N__

[written in response to a questionnaire by K___]

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George Brecht comes to mind as an artist whose career significantly and famously overlapped his “normal” job working at pharmaceutical companies, as one can hardly imagine two areas that seem less connected. Admittedly this fact is built into a persona, but it is still these days either a fairly rare PR strategy (excepting the tortured furniture designer Cattelan, Nan Goldin the sex trade worker, Serra the mythic steelsmith, Koons the cunning stockbroker) or not very common to talk about one’s money job. Many of the artists we’ve heard of may not have other jobs; a fair amount of them teach, it’s safe to say (or selling the art may be a different job altogether, though it is mostly entrusted to galleries). As a student in Canada, my teachers were all teachers; Nova Scotia doesn’t furnish a bustling art market, so for many living there this was (and is) not an option. When I went to school in Germany this was different; some of the students could even make a pretty decent income from their artwork, or at least position themselves toward this possibility. Not to mention the professors. I don’t dredge all of this up because I want to compare different systems, or the art that comes from them, but because I begin to wonder where a job ends and the art begins, or vice versa. At what point does it become alienation, and in what circumstances does one remove “oneself” from the task at hand, to play a character? (When, in my teacher’s absent gaze, did I see them working on some other idea, their own?)
Artists have it easy, it can be said. Their job is to play (my co-worker, who mostly handles numbers, regularly points this out to me). Certainly the situation is different, the contradictions more grotesque where I live now. When it rains it pours (if by rain I mean that cars, property and nannies fall from the sky), and when it’s dry, one works for someone else… Artists are a hard to characterize lot, the cliché in North America being that they are frequently drawn from the upper-middle classes to be able to pay for the schools, to be able to identify art among their ‘career options’; this image reaches to the threshold of definitions of ‘success’ in characterizing what an artist is, at which point we notice its limitations (a study conducted in Canada shows that artists’ incomes are typically lower than the average: http://theagyuisoutthere.org/wagingculture/). The odd-jobber, the dropout, the hand-to-mouth bohemian are all romantic stereotypes in their own rights, mocking the reality of living off of what you love to do. These two conventional views of artists speak to a term Pierre Bourdieu had described: the ‘heteronomy’ of the field of art – artists’ relative weakness inside a field of relative privilege. To rebuke that the work that art is involved in is not real labour does not merely point out its relative privilege, but cuts art off from the general workforce in an unrealistic and unfruitful way; there is more potential in maintaining this connection.
As someone who has a job but who thinks of themselves as an artist, I am always wondering what is at work while I am working. I am not in a desperate situation financially, and a job like I have (which involves art anyway) is not really for the desperate; in any case, even though I can’t speak for everyone, I believe most people make choices about what they do (while I am by no means advocating a neo-liberal self-made destiny delusion). I have a good job; this isn’t the self-pity of someone who yearns to be free from labour or demands immediately to be discovered. This choice implies a kind of collusion between parts, understandable as a position of mutual benefit, especially in the art field: studio assistants who have access to certain types of visibility or perhaps technical training; part-time writers who can advance their agendas through other channels; gallery staff who cull sources of information or are involved in specific social spheres; these are all easily identified as different routes to attack ‘the same problem’, if our ‘problem’ is success. One can sometimes sense a shuddering of the membrane between generations or hegemonies in these situations, despite the seeming benefits of a job that pays in both financial and symbolic currency. With no slight intended to workers in general, this friction is a special type. The artist, whether seeing time slip away, or through sheer ingratitude, will usually want to change course. This has various reasons –including the widely differing values individuals carry with them, the central importance appointed the individual in art, and the swift and potentially arbitrary transfers of power – however, for now I also don’t want to dwell on this pragmatic level.
I am most curious about what is going on ethically with regard to this supposed split, as to consider labour as experimentation or role play points beyond bald struggles for power and potentially links art and its accompanying work to other forms of labour. This may be called a retreat or a whimsy by some; again, I don’t mean to mock real labour as a form of slapstick; perhaps we don’t yet live in a world where play or self-exploration are tolerated in the general workforce. Speaking from an art perspective, thus it seems all the more worthwhile to reconsider what working means, and to include these considerations in the art that is made. For in art we find an exquisite representation of a baseless economics, and to struggle for power according to someone else’s definition of success (the ruling value system’s, for instance), is to implicitly agree with this representation. Perhaps – and this is probably too rosy-eyed – art that actively engages not only with its status as a commodity (which is better than ignoring it, but is in fact by now quite routine), but that engages with the work required to keep it going, with the choice that lies prior to production and to the production of oneself as an artist, perhaps this can relay with a broader understanding of labour (whose goal is of course control of one’s own means of production); perhaps we can imagine seeing in magnified or frozen state that moment of choice that separates art and work.
There is still this question of the split and how to deal with it, which brings up a host of other questions: Why doesn’t one go all out, become the artist one claims to be, put all the eggs in one basket, the most rewarding? Is it a show of solidarity to know what working is, despite one’s impulses to slough it, an attempt to remain ‘realistic’? Or a reasonably conservative strain of survival instinct? Or a guilty shadow of protestant work ethic? The road signs toward independence and self-determination tell us that we have to use our ‘free time’ to develop ourselves above the labour we produce every day; in fact, this ‘free time’ can be seen as the endangered species of modern work reforms, and in a growing number of industries (especially the creative ones: a word that denotes increasingly and manifold other industries) is replaced by a flexible work schedule one never clocks out of. Perhaps, considering this tendency, it is worth crossing the free time/work time line with an inverse motion, kidnapping work for art.
To think of a job as an experiment necessitates a suspension from the very personal panic derived from our desires not being fulfilled. It may necessitate the adoption of multiple personalities, and it may cause confusion and doubt about one’s purpose, as it sets up a double-life in which one half pulls most of the weight of our ambitions. I think as a form of research it can always be recuperated or transferred into an art piece later; I am not talking about asceticism or denial of the worldly. It is more about pausing for a moment on the crossroads where the artist in us escapes down an alley and the worker marches on. If I were to call on artists to pursue this masquerade, I would also call on bosses everywhere to do the same.
Maybe Santiago Sierra could try a job at Starbucks?

(originally posted on the Vitamin Creative Space blog, 09/05/2009)

The play of forces by which we are made, each with and from our compromised perspectives, to understand and evaluate one another, leads us down a sort of evolutionary path, a perceptual survival-of-the-fittest, the attention span whose basis is “interest level”.

The curators, waiting for the flood of material into their eyes, assume incorporation is like the process by which olives get strained out into consituent sizes through holes of various dimensions, by which retention (judgment) is nearly a physical process. The artists making presentations talk and fill ears as if with grain, or liquid with its sedimentary inherence, and the know-holes of the curators like drains inward with complex-invisible filter systems, filters on filters, reflection pools, sustain the onslaught with measured and measuring patience—because all await the backflow of the fed sponge. Level of interest is of course subjective. But on the other hand subjective is level of interest, and incorporation is a sequence of confirmations of one’s own body and its conditions as opposed to a mechanism of reception and judgment, of properties. The judgment of the curator is the expression of what the identity of the role specifies, underscoring what is expected of them as the chooser, facilitator, permitter, conditioned as it is by affinities, favours, preferences, distribution.

That’s the initial self-reflection that only the dullest, most opaque-minded and overconfident free-agent will not have realized.

But soon such rebellious thoughts encounter the cunning evolution of self-awareness, and interests become the very substance of judgment, strategy the façade rather than the deviant underground current. Expectation and insinuation become a flirtatious game, and one simply has to know or figure out how to bend the rules; one can ask or refrain from asking, one can assume or make-believe to assume; for instance what one’s role is, what is expected, on one’s enthusiasm or real powers of potentiality. (Hard to measure! Evidence is gathered from all adjacent areas, like how when looking at a particular star directly, its energy melts into the black depth beyond, but when the center of perception is elsewhere it presents itself.) And then the possibility opens to take positions.

While being driven in a taxi-cab our group had a discussion about the previous day’s artist presentations. I had remarked that I had asked one of the artists after retiring to the bar why he thought these presentations were happening in this way; he confided that there may be some insinuation, perhaps of reciprocation. (The context is important: a political situation caused by a “provinical” setting for a large international art prize that has little direct effect on local artists, fostering alienation; as for us, those hosted and being introduced to the local, the insinuation is to host in return.) It seemed that when uttered, this insinuation was vile and offensive even, not deeply but a feeling rather more related to the resentment one feels after waking from a dream in which one was totally free. Defiant, another person in the car said that they hadn’t seen anything worth circulating anyhow, and this was partly because the artists are lazy and state-supported in this “regional” location, and are stuck in a cycle of applications, residencies and justifications. The inability of the artists presenting to provide any information or insight with regard to their marketability was referred to as a flaw, in light of the self-fulfilling government system. This time the insinuation was that if one didn’t pursue a healthy relationship with the market then one wasn’t pursuing independence. And naturally without independent thought there is no need to circulate. In a way, this makes sense, and if you accept this logic then our presence there made sense. There was a recurrent mention made by artists, curators and the non-profits we met of developing the market in this country. The market deterritorializes, apparently opening up rifts in space in ways the state has no flexibility for. There is still the question of why the market’s tendencies engender independence, and how such independence is perceived. Curators and their assistants turn to galleries as the first place to find comprehensive materials on artists, as well as production and technical details, making the job of selection a lot easier; in conventional terms this relation can be quite close. It hardly need be pointed out that this can set up a self-fulfilling system in its own right, especially if the equation that conformity to the commercial market will lead to greater independence is followed, necessitating all kinds of measures and attitude shifts. Whether or not this comprises an interesting discussion is another question. Some will then leap to identify an insight in the midst of compromise, as the most independent artist must defer to certain tastes and conventions, and their critic or anyone else will have to embrace their own fallen-from-grace position, and to fit their criticisms among the advertisement and sustainable salesmanship of reality—the skill by which they achieve this puzzling mixture of independence and deferral will be identified as what anyone is being judged for; all the rest is information, we will hear some say.

(originally posted on the Vitamin Creative Space blog, 29/05/2010)