I met a sociologist at a party once and when I mentioned that I was an artist, he told me about a childhood friend of his, also an artist, who worked as a studio assistant to a well-known sculptor. “He actually makes this guy’s art,” said the sociologist, who studied labor movements, with exaggerated shock. “Do you know about that?”
I had to admit that, yes, I knew about that—not about the sociologist’s friend, of course, but about the fact that the art of the well-known sculptor, Jeff Koons, is mostly made by other artists; part of its appeal is that it requires the labor and expertise of a lot of people to produce. It’s no big secret. There have been documentaries, I said.
The broader point I was acknowledging, or copping to, as it felt like, was that many artists employ assistants who perform not just the preliminary and auxiliary work of art-making but often the actual, physical manufacture of the stuff as well. I also had to admit that this wasn’t a particularly big deal, or frowned on in the least among artists outside some small, purist circles—the kinds of circles where painters who don’t grind their own pigments according to methods dating back to the Renaissance are considered frauds. Studio assistants, collaborative labor, and industrial manufacture are all normalized aspects of the mode of contemporary art production I said, trying to sound more sociological, and it was only for a brief window of time—from perhaps the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—that artists were supposed to do everything by themselves. Since then, the labor of the artist has been conceptualized no differently than it has with respect to other creative professionals: you wouldn’t expect an architect to lay every brick in a building, I said, using a common analogy.
I left the party feeling weird about the conversation, though—mainly because I’d enjoyed divulging this little factoid about contemporary art, in the way that a hairdresser to the stars might enjoy reporting on the toupees and extensions of various celebrities. Clearly, something still nagged.
“I thought we’d settled that question a long time ago,” said my friend George, a painter, when I told him I was thinking about artists and their assistants—that perhaps the normalization of some labor practices around art wasn’t so normal after all. I proposed that there was still something slightly un-worklike about art-making, and un-artlike about working, and consequently, that making someone else’s art put you into a kind of divided state: performing as labor the same physical and conceptual operations that someone else performs as art.
George didn’t buy it, but maybe the difference had to do with experience. George had worked for Peter Halley, a painter who runs a studio as tight and orderly as his clean, geometric paintings, where handpicked, highly skilled assistants perform clearly demarcated tasks to the exacting specifications of the artist. My experience working for an artist had been more nebulous.
For eight weeks, over a summer during college, I’d assisted an artist in his mid-forties who’d moved from New York to live and work near my hometown in California. He had made his name in the early nineties with a series of well-regarded exhibitions, and since then had been not a superstar but certainly a fixture in contemporary art, represented in museum collections and on the biennial circuit, resurfacing every few years to show his latest work. But he’d been quiet for a while.
The terms and terminology of my employment were vague; I floated between being an intern and being an assistant, depending on the context. The summer I worked for him, he was diving into a new multimedia project: animation, software, sculpture, the works—“more like art plus,” he said, and he was in the very beginning stages of it.
For the first month, the sculptor and I watched movies, read art magazines, and cooked big lunches. A few mornings each week I’d show up at his apartment/studio ready for action. We would brew a big pot of tea, set up at a worktable in the middle of the studio with pens and notepads, and proceed to get nothing done. He told me stories about artists, dealers, and critics he had crossed paths with over the years—people I’d read about in the magazines. Adultery in graduate programs, cutthroat curatorial politics at European festivals, shady deals at blue-chip galleries.
Halfway through the summer, another art student showed up to help; he turned out to be a really good cook, and so our lunches got even more elaborate and often took up entire afternoons. Still, not a lot of progress on the project. During August there were more matinees, trips to museums, gossip. The other assistant made a model once, I remember that—a little plaster object shaped like a hamburger.
The sculptor did eventually complete the project, but not until long after I’d left. I don’t think I ever got paid, but then again, I’m still not sure I did any work.
The job description of the artist’s assistant is as varied as the landscape of contemporary art itself. You could work for a painter and clean brushes, work for a performance artist and archive documentary photographs, work for a found-object sculptor and collect interestingly shaped rocks, or work for a Conceptual artist and teleconference with curators all day. You could work alone with an artist in a moldering loft, come in a few times a week, and get paid in handfuls of cash. Or, you could work forty hours a week in a gleaming state-of-the-art studio with a hundred other assistants, sign a nondisclosure agreement, and get health benefits. Most likely, you will resemble the rest of the American workforce and sit at a desk in front of a computer, sending or receiving e-mail.
A recent scroll through an art-classifieds website revealed the following tasks, aptitudes, prerequisites, and provisos for the studio assistant:
Coordinating projects with external contractors, which include but are not limited to framers, architects, designers, carpenters, and metalworkers.
Experienced in making appointments and dealing with sensitive organizational issues with complete confidentiality and discretion. The ability to remain calm under pressure and effectively manage multiple tasks and deadlines.
Someone who can do almost anything needed in the studio to make it so I can focus on painting is what I need.
Must like cats.
How many artists have assistants? More than you might think, especially if you throw in those with art-student interns and once-a-month odd-jobbers. Some artists enlist help as soon as they’re able to afford it, going on the (usually correct) assumption that even art-making is subject to economies of scale: more people in the studio means faster production, means more exhibitions, means more money and better career traction. Taking a cue from the now-multinational museums, the studios of in-demand artists have become more like global operations centers, where multiple simultaneous projects are completed by coordinated teams of workers. At the height of the art boom in the mid-2000s, I heard stories about ambitious MFA students hiring their own assistants from the undergraduate labor pool; these subordinates produced work for upcoming gallery shows while their enterprising employers were stuck in critical issues seminars.
Making coffee, sweeping the floor, walking the dog. Bubble-wrapping the sculpture, digitizing the slides, updating the website. All the necessities of the workday—especially those without any real bearing on art-making itself—can be delegated to an assistant, who accepts such chores in the hope that he’ll eventually get assigned something more interesting, perhaps educational: assembling stretchers and mixing paints, running the 3-D rendering software, photographing the art before it leaves for the show. Artists often have specific, even borderline-obsessive ways of treating their work materials; a proper initiation into these mysteries requires a commitment from both the artist and the assistant. And while anybody can go to FedEx or pick up sushi for lunch, it takes a certain personality type to make sure that each staple on the back of a ten-foot-long stretched canvas is exactly two inches away from its neighbor and rests at a perfect forty-five degree angle with respect to the stretcher bar. The educational component of being an assistant—which was formerly called apprenticeship—can result in another stipulation often seen in calls for studio labor:
The internship is unpaid but college credit can be arranged.
Beyond the issue of actual preparatory work, there’s the social consideration of having assistants: as an artist, do you want people around when you’re having a really bad day in the studio? When you’re hungover? I knew a painter whose primary responsibility as an assistant was to keep his employer sober. Willem de Kooning, a solitary worker by nature, preferred to spend the first hours of each day on the menial chores usually delegated to an assistant, even when his paintings were selling for millions.
On the other hand, assistants may serve a primarily social function. The studio can be a lonely place. “You have to love them,” one of my professors said about working for artists. “Above all, you have to love them.”
A young artist named Christian Sampson worked for the painter Alexis Rockman for years, and his role was ostensibly organizational. “I was sort of like a sous chef,” Christian said. At the start of a workday, he laid out Rockman’s palette, preparing batches of acrylic and oil paints, solvents, and media to the artist’s specifications. Christian learned to prepare colors in dark, medium, and light tints, with varying amounts of oil, turpentine, or drying agent, in anticipation of the needs of a particular work in progress. In addition, he prepared surfaces and kept the artist stocked up on the innumerable components of a functional studio: brushes, soap, paper towels, squeegees, palette knives, paints, oil media, paint thinner.
However, this manual labor was nothing compared with the affective labor he performed for the artist: telling jokes, collecting and recounting art world gossip, providing a running distraction from the tedium of large-scale painting. In moments of exhaustion or when Sampson had run out of material, Rockman was fond of barking at his helper, “That’s it? What am I paying you for? You’re not my assistant; you’re my paid friend!”
But beyond the odd jobs, the prep work, and the companionship, at a certain point the assistant takes on a different role in the studio. Having been successfully trained in the ways of his employer, the assistant moves from a position of support and preparation to one of actual production: executing parts—or wholes—of paintings and sculptures, and in some cases making big decisions about the form and content of finished works. In short, the assistant may come to physically or conceptually make the stuff that will, once it leaves the studio, be known as the artist’s art.
And here is where things get tricky—at least as far as the sociologist of labor is concerned. Imagine a painter of enormous Photorealist nudes. He’s sitting in the back of his studio, flipping through a magazine, while his assistant is perched high up on a ladder with a paint tray and a brush. Between scans of Artforum, the artist directs the assistant to add, perhaps, just a little more of a highlight, please, to the eye of a figure in a work in progress. In this situation, who is making the art?
The answer, by almost universal consent, is clear: the artist is making art, even if he doesn’t get so much as a spot of paint on his jeans. The assistant, on the other hand, is merely working; one hopes she’s at least making a decent wage for it. But why this is the answer is the result of a long and circuitous history.
You could begin with the bottegas, where a successful artist of the Renaissance might have employed dozens of apprentices to help with all aspects of his craft. These workshops occupied a place at the center of a community. Pre-adolescents—not necessarily artistically inclined ones, just neighborhood kids who needed work—progressed from simple tasks to more challenging ones: mixing up batches of gypsum and glue for use as a painting ground, then transferring the master’s designs onto wooden panels or altar walls, then grinding pigments and making paints, and then, years later, executing parts of actual paintings.1
Each workshop was a small business and a school in miniature. In Florence, they predated both the formation of a dedicated guild for artists and an academy of the arts. Each had its own way of doing things, and this proprietary technique, inseparable from the meaning of the art it produced, was sometimes even written down, ensuring the faithful transmission of the artist’s method. Ambitious assistants aimed to graduate from service and eventually hang their own shingles in town, competing with their former employers for commissions from churches and nobles, and in turn training the next generation of artists, world without end.
The workshop system also explains the way artistic influence propagated in Renaissance Italy: through imitation. At the heart of the apprenticeship process was the act of copying. Assistants learned by reproducing the master’s drawings, paintings, or sculptures (which, more often than not, were reproductions of other artists’ drawings, paintings, or sculptures) with the aim of perfect fidelity to the boss’s style. This practice had the added benefit of generating a stockpile of reference material, closely guarded by the workshop, for use in future projects: You need a horse and rider, two cherubs, and Our Lady seen in left profile? No problem, Maestro. I’ll pull them from the file. The Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio kept bound volumes of drapery studies (drapes at rest, drapes in a gentle breeze, drapes wrapped austerely around an apostle or opulently around a wealthy patron) to deploy in his commissions, like Renaissance clip art.
But beyond the creation of these visual reference libraries, the practice of copying prepared the assistant for executing parts of actual artworks, according to the master’s specifications. Once the assistant’s work was up to snuff, he could be tasked with completing the tedious bits of a commission: some shrubbery along the road to Calvary, or the wings of the lesser angels in a Last Judgment. Certain very talented apprentices, it was said, couldn’t help but reveal their employers’ limitations by copying too well—in the way the precocious Raphael once outshone his master Perugino on an altarpiece job the latter artist was foolish enough to assign to the former.
By 1610, the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens had internationalized the workshop model, with teams of protégés in his Antwerp studio executing works for patrons from London to Madrid, while the artist himself traveled around hobnobbing with potential patrons and, in fact, performing diplomatic missions for the Spanish Hapsburg court; he was knighted, twice.
The French Academy in the eighteenth century then centralized it, linking art training, production, exhibition, and patronage in a monolithic, state-sponsored machine. The most successful artists of the period maintained extensive studios, with assistants drawn from the ranks of academy students, to meet the considerable demands of royal and republican commissions.
As the influence of the French Academy waned and state patronage dried up, so too did the collaborative mode of the workshop. The new, private patron of the arts, drawn from the upper tiers of the bourgeoisie, bought modestly sized pictures for the home. The Salon des Refusés of 1863, an exhibition organized for French artists turned away from the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ annual show, marked a watershed in the aesthetics of artistic success. Manet, Whistler, and Cézanne debuted works there, to great public scandal and belated acclaim; in hindsight, it was better to have been rejected from the official Salon of 1863 than accepted by it. With this shift in the structure of patronage, the social coordinates of the artist were dramatically relocated: from the comfortable center of high-cultural life to its adventurous margins. The modern artist—he of the antisocial tendencies and the unique vision—emerged as the paradigmatic hero in the story of art and dominated it for roughly the next hundred years.
In this story, the artist is by definition alone in his creative quest. It wasn’t that nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists stopped hiring assistants and did everything by themselves, but that the new shape of the market, and the prevailing fashion in self-representation, dictated a less ostentatious display of hired labor. It’s hard to imagine, for example, Vincent van Gogh thrashing out a turbulent plein air landscape at Arles while an assistant stood by with a parasol and a carafe of water. Paul Cézanne, who laid the groundwork for twentieth-century painting from a provincial outpost in the south of France, never once had an intern deliver him lunch at his perch opposite Mont Sainte-Victoire. Even Jackson Pollock’s revolutionary drip painting method—so readily imitated by others—is the most meaningful when we imagine the Abstract Expressionist all by himself in his Long Island barn, confronting the existential void of the blank canvas.
The myth of the Solitary Genius was precisely that—a myth. But that in no way detracted from its power over our collective imagination. This is how we, as a society, have conceived of the artist for at least the past hundred years. Picasso could hardly have been said to languish in obscurity during his lifetime: he achieved a level of fame and worldly success unparalleled in the visual arts since Rubens. By the middle of his career he had assistants for many aspects of his studio practice—from ceramics to etching to mural painting—and even engaged a private secretary, the indispensable poet-bookkeeper Jaime Sabartés, to orchestrate his demanding schedule. But a certain cognitive dissonance attends the thought of anyone other than Picasso touching brush to canvas; this is anathema to our understanding of what he did and meant.
The story of contemporary art begins when the direct line between individual and object is interrupted and art-making is opened to a wider range of definitions. This in itself is a phase-shift in art history—a return to the social and collaborative model of art-making most exemplified by the Renaissance and its legacy. But one can’t just pick up where Raphael left off: contemporary art is as different from the art of the Renaissance as present-day New York is from fourteenth-century Florence.
Beginning in the early 1960s, a generation of artists reared on the myth of the Solitary Genius and His inimitable style began to move away from the forms of painting and sculpture that marked the apotheosis of modernism and embraced a broader range of materials and processes than had ever been gathered under the heading of art. Donald Judd had immaculate steel sculptures fabricated by the same sorts of metalworkers who built oil tanks and airplane wings. Sol LeWitt gave instructions for mural-size wall drawings and sculptures that could be executed by anybody, anywhere, using whatever materials were at hand. Nancy Holt arranged massive lengths of concrete tubing in a desert in Utah.
The idea was that, in an industrial society where goods are produced through a panoply of technological processes, the limitation of art to just paint on canvas or sculpted wood and metal suggested a real lack of imagination. This more catholic approach to materials—which tended to manifest in cool, impersonal forms derived from said panoply of technological processes—also challenged the primacy of the expressionistic, heroic model of art-making, which had its high point in the art of the forties and fifties. It accomplished this, largely, by proposing a separation between the physical manufacture of art and its meaning. A Picasso painting is what it is because Picasso made it himself, by hand, in a way that no one else (supposedly) could. A Sol LeWitt wall drawing is what it is by virtue of the fact that anybody could physically make it.
Thus, to the most common charge leveled against art since the turn of the twentieth century—my two-year-old could make that!—the contemporary artist might well reply, “Yes, of course, and that’s pretty much the point.” Your two-year-old might have to learn to weld; but then again, she might not. The idea that the work of art isn’t dependent on any particular set of materials or processes leads to situations in which much of the “work” of art can be outsourced to various professionals.
The assistant could be aggregate: a firm of commercial awning manufacturers, an excavation crew, the mass of pedestrians who unwittingly made shoe-print drawings on sheets of paper left in the streets of Amsterdam by Surinamese–Dutch Conceptualist Stanley Brouwn. It could even be abstract, like the I Ching favored by John Cage in his chance-based compositions.
And as the sphere of art practices widens even further beyond the giddily experimental 1960s, the specialization of artistic techniques has become only more pronounced. Rosemarie Trockel mounted exhibitions consisting entirely of machine-knit textiles stretched like paintings. Cai Guo-Qiang exploded 1,300 pounds of gunpowder in the Gobi Desert. Damien Hirst engaged the services of fabricators and scientists to create his dazzlingly macabre mixed-media sculptures: a tiger shark or a cow preserved in formaldehyde in glass vitrines. Applying a criterion of mastery to these artists would mean insisting that Trockel be a master weaver, Cai a munitions expert, and Hirst a licensed shark embalmer.
Even when they return to more traditional forms, like painting or sculpture, artists must acknowledge the deconstruction of the category of manual skill, which has accompanied art since the mid-twentieth century, and the reality that the work of art is now an aesthetic commodity traded on the global market. In a nod to both phenomena at once, the prominent portraitist Kehinde Wiley recently set up a studio in Beijing, complete with a team of assistants—playfully “offshoring” his art production and placing it near one of the biggest emerging contemporary art markets of the past twenty years.2
Where does this leave the studio assistant? What does she stand to learn from her boss? The circuit between labor, skill acquisition, and influence that operated in the workshop system of the Renaissance has been disrupted. A young artist working for an older one will certainly learn particular techniques, but these are often so specific to an artist’s practice that they’re almost impossible for an assistant to adapt for her own work. In a field broad enough to encompass giant concrete tunnels, Photorealist paintings, and cows in boxes, an assistant who straightforwardly emulates his employer’s art is more likely to be written off as a copycat than lauded as a successor.
Assistantships do create lines of succession: in the history of art, who worked for whom is as important as who taught whom. But absent the direct transmission of a techne, do these lines do anything other than perpetuate a certain prestige? What, at the end of the day, is being handed off from generation to generation?
The video artist Karen Leo, who supported herself as an artist’s assistant for most of her twenties, divides holders of the job into two groups. First there are the administrators: the schedule-keepers, e-mail-responders, and supply-orderers, who make sure the studio runs smoothly and professionally. Then there are the stuff-makers, who are covered in plaster and wood shaving or flecked with paint.
Leo first made stuff for a former professor from the School of Visual Arts in New York; then for an older classmate, the sculptor Toland Grinnell; and then for the multimedia artist Matthew Ritchie. She assisted Ritchie for ten years; mainly, she cut out the huge, massively complicated PVC board sculptures that are Ritchie’s signature works—day after day, inch by painstaking inch, with a utility knife.
At the same time, Leo moonlighted in the studios of other artists. She edited a video for Conceptual artist Barbara Bloom and did installation work for the sculptor E.V. Day. In a brief departure from stuff-making, Leo was line producer for Carrie Mae Weems on a video project for the Museum of Modern Art. These freelance gigs allowed her to sample different artists’ ways of working: were they planners or improvisers? Delegators or controllers? Freelancing was also economically unavoidable, for someone whose job skills were at once specialized, various, and almost impossible to apply outside the art world. “It’s a very rarefied thing to get yourself into, being an artist,” she said.
When I asked her what she’d learned from assisting people, or how she’d learned it, Leo said it all came down to conversation—what you talk about in the studio, with your employer or your fellow assistants, while you’re performing the repetitive and often (frankly) mindless labor of making stuff. What you talk about is art: what it is, how it works, what makes it good or bad; you can assemble a pretty comprehensive theoretical model of contemporary art in the course of an eight-hour day with a glue gun.
Of course, who you talk to is equally important, and a mindful employer will be sure to introduce his assistant to the critics, curators, and dealers who may help her along on the path to an art career.
Another way to put it is that the educational component of artistic apprenticeship is now social, professional, and conceptual rather than technical. The assistant isn’t there to learn the finer points of a craft but to absorb the weltanschauung of the artist, from her aesthetic philosophy to how she talks to important people on the phone. Tips about paint handling or Photoshop are simply perks.
This information is transmitted through performance—the artist being herself—and only rarely arranged into a formal lesson; the assistant is likely to gain it through discreet, stealthy observation. The by-product of this observation is the rich anecdotal culture of studio assistant lore, full of egomaniacal ranting, drunken mayhem, psychological victimization, nervous breakdowns, theft, and lawsuits. (No one wants to hear about the model employers who treat their subordinates with generosity and respect.)
These stories get swapped at parties and bars by young artists in a kind of servants’ hall gossip and range from painful but endearing accounts of personal foibles to full-blown horror stories of abuse and humiliation: from the artist so sensitive to noise that he wouldn’t let his assistants chew gum to the artist who punished her helper by locking him in the studio overnight.
This is my favorite: An assistant was offered a generous Christmas bonus, one of his employer’s very own paintings, easily worth tens of thousands of dollars. But there was a catch—the assistant had to make the painting himself, start to finish, on his own time. The artist would then come in at the end, scribble his signature, and voilà, Merry Christmas.
The tradition of haughty bosses and underappreciated assistants goes back to the bottegas: as long as the West has kept track of its artists, they’ve been represented as pricks. The shameless sixteenth-century gossipmonger Giorgio Vasari says, in his Lives of the Artists, that Michelangelo was hardly a model employer. He sent for half a dozen of the best fresco painters in Florence to help him do the Sistine Chapel. When they arrived in Rome and showed him their work, he was so disappointed that he locked himself in the chapel until they got the hint and shuffled back home, unpaid.
The experience of being up close and personal with the creative act can severely test the faith of even the most devout believer in contemporary art. In 1971, performance artist Chris Burden asked a friend to assist him in the realization of a piece by shooting him in the arm. The German artist Martin Kippenberger, for whom the entire practice of being an artist was a form of high comedy, once commanded his assistant to make a series of paintings on huge canvases based on his specifications. Once the assistant was finished, Kippenberger crumpled up the paintings and crammed them into a Dumpster. The Dumpster was later shown in his retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The artist Cameron Martin worked for Nam June Paik on and off for about three years in the late 1990s; he met the legendary Fluxus artist a grand total of two times during that period. Paik had suffered a stroke in 1996, and his studio pretty much ran itself in its final years, producing the television-monitor and neon assemblages that had become his trademark. A group of studio managers administered different aspects of the artist’s work and oversaw teams of assistants in shops scattered around SoHo: there was the robotics shop, the video editing shop, and the sculpture shop. Cameron wasn’t sure exactly how many branches of the Nam Jun Paik studio there were.
He worked in the sculpture shop, hardwiring TV monitors into big welded steel armatures. A few blocks away, people he rarely met, but presumably young artists like himself, produced the jittery, seizure-inducing videotape loops that eventually played on the monitors when the sculptures were finished. Cameron remembered a day when a European collector was scheduled to visit Paik’s studio in the afternoon, all set to buy one. The trouble was that the studio hadn’t built it yet. They went into crisis mode and completed the sculpture just in time for the visit—which did indeed lead to purchase. Paik never laid eyes on the piece.
Sometimes seeing how the contemporary art sausage gets made can turn a person off from the entire meal. Audrey Robinson is a fashion designer, but considered being an artist. She had been to art school in Montreal, where she did guerrilla performances with a friend in public spaces around the city, but in the fall of 2002 she was living in Williamsburg and working in a cafe. One day she replied to a message on Friendster, then a social media site, from the artist Vanessa Beecroft, who was looking for an assistant.
The Italian-born Beecroft became famous in the early 1990s, at a time when the art world was revisiting the then-moribund genre of performance art. Early on, Beecroft had developed her signature work, which she repeated and elaborated on over the next twenty years. A group of people, usually women, usually seminude, pose more or less motionless in an exhibition space for a couple of hours. They’re instructed to stand as still as possible—sitting or lying down for short rest periods if need be—and to refrain from speaking or in any way engaging one another or their audience. The performers are dressed and styled differently for each piece; clothes, hair, and makeup are the main variables, which usually change in reference to the location of the work. Vb08, Beecroft’s first stateside performance in 1993, had a red, white, and blue theme: ten women in red pigtailed wigs, tan sweaters, and blue or white panties stood motionless at the PS1 museum in Queens. Three years later, vb16 opened at Deitch Projects in Manhattan: this performance featured a dozen women, with blonde bobbed wigs, dowdy underwear, and gold high heels.
In 1999, Beecroft changed up her formula and started displaying men. She arranged the loan of fifteen U.S. Navy SEALs in crisp uniform whites from the nearby Naval Special Warfare Center and had them stand at attention in a gallery at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. For vb45 in 2001, Beecroft’s largest performance up to that point, about forty dyed-blonde women with shaved genitals and thigh-high, black leather Helmut Lang boots inaugurated the new Vienna Kunsthalle building by standing, sitting, and finally lying down on the floor of the museum’s atrium before an audience of VIPs.
Reception to Beecroft’s work has always been mixed. She seems to take up the intersecting art historical themes of gender, performance, and labor only to tie them in a hopeless ethical knot. Was the artist highlighting the objectification of women within the culture industry, or in fact merely objectifying them? Did her work reinvigorate the anti-market ethos of 1960s Conceptualism or the politicization of the female body accomplished in 1970s feminist performance art, or did it merely recycle these ideas as promotional events? What to make of Beecroft’s public battle with exercise bulimia and the almost paternalistic form of control she wielded over her conspicuously model-thin performers? What to do with the spectacle of a dozen nude or seminude women slowly collapsing to the floor of a museum rotunda, in front of an audience of fully-dressed arts professionals and museum trustees? “There may not be any easy resolution of the feelings and opinions that Ms. Beecroft’s work arouses, and that may be the point,” demurred Roberta Smith of the New York Times in 1998.3 In 2001, Los Angeles critic Bruce Hainley wondered whether she was “the Leni Riefenstahl of performance art.”4 A friend of mine was even glibber, underlining what he saw as the only concrete development in her work: as Beecroft got more and more famous, her models looked more and more expensive.
In 2002, having recently completed performances at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice (white women, nude, flesh-colored stockings pulled over their heads, arranged in front of famous Surrealist paintings) and the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa (black women, black string bikinis, Manolo Blahniks, white fur rug), Beecroft set to work on a new project for her New York dealer, Jeffrey Deitch, to exhibit at the 2004 Armory Show. It would be something of a departure for the artist: a series of paintings.
On the day she met Beecroft, Audrey recalls, there was little in the way of an actual interview. She had hitched a ride out to Long Island, where Beecroft and her family had just bought a mid-century modernist house located inside a nature conservancy. Audrey and Beecroft sat in a sun-filled studio, drank seltzer, and made small talk. The modest portfolio of watercolors Audrey had brought with her to demonstrate her painting abilities sat unopened, and unmentioned, beside her. “We met, and we talked a little, and she just asked, ‘When can you start?’” A few days later Audrey was hired. She spent the next seven or eight months painting Vanessa Beecroft’s paintings.
Early in her career, Beecroft had exhibited a few small watercolors: breezy images of figures, faces, pieces of clothing that looked like fashion designers’ sketches by way of exuberant children’s doodles. It’s easy to see the continuity between these pictures and the tableaux-vivants that would later make her famous. In a recent interview, Beecroft recalled, “When I didn’t have any means, I did watercolors that were psychological pictures, then I used the girls because I had a problem with technique.”5 Shortly before Audrey arrived, Beecroft had started on a series of paintings in a similar vein. Flattened, cartoony faces with shocked eyes and straggly hair float on bare white grounds; some resemble the artist. They’re a far cry from the physical perfection of Beecroft’s live models, and it’s entirely unclear whether the problems with technique in the paintings are affected or genuine—and whether the answer to that question ever mattered to the artist.
Audrey was first instructed to pick up where Beecroft left off: she was given a photograph, the close-cropped face of a woman, and asked to make a painting from it. The woman turned out to be Beecroft’s younger sister, Jennifer, who had been the artist’s muse in previous works. Audrey set to work building up the structure of Jennifer’s face, developing the tones and texture of skin and hair, trying to tweak the proportions and angles and make everything a bit more anatomically plausible.
Vanessa didn’t like Audrey’s first attempts. “She thought they were too realistic, too much from the photograph,” Audrey said. The photograph vanished. Audrey began working on other paintings of women in a looser, more expressionistic manner. These met with greater approval. As the weeks went on, these were followed by paintings of other women’s faces. Sometimes Audrey would paint by herself, and sometimes she and Beecroft would paint together. Beecroft gave her assistant very few instructions about what to do, but reacted strongly to decisions that Audrey made. After a while, Audrey began to see that perhaps the criteria for these paintings were not fully consistent.
“Sometimes Vanessa would come in and say, ‘I think her hair color should be darker,’” Audrey recalled, “and so I would change it. Or she would say, ‘She should be more blonde,’ and I would change it back.” The paintings got thicker and thinner, the faces more and less realistic. Their subjects began to look like Botticellis, idyllically beautiful, before they were painted out and started again. It felt a bit like they were painting in circles.
At one point, Beecroft decided that the paintings should correspond to the four seasons. Audrey painted one woman’s lips a wintry, bluish gray; another’s hair in russet reds and deep autumnal oranges. This idea was eventually scrapped too. “I was like the hair and makeup stylist for the paintings,” she said.
Halfway through her time with Beecroft, Audrey came to realize that changing the paintings constantly was the whole point. This was where Beecroft’s instincts as an artist lay, and this defined the essence of her craft: she styled and arranged women. Beecroft had once referred to the women in her performances as “material, in an almost pure state.”6 The painted women were material as well, to be made softer or harder, blonder or darker, by Audrey. And Audrey, too, was a kind of raw material: she had signed up to be an assistant, but instead she found herself in the middle of an unexpected six-month performance piece, with an audience of one.
Her insight into Beecroft’s work was that the pleasure of painting could be experienced by proxy. “She liked the process,” Audrey said, “but she didn’t necessarily need to do it herself.”
The painting project came to an abrupt end following a studio visit from Jeffrey Deitch. After viewing the work, he decided that, in retrospect, maybe paintings were not the way Beecroft should go for the upcoming Armory art fair. Instead, he suggested, perhaps she should try to make a sculpture? Audrey recalls that he had a very detailed idea of this: Vanessa’s sister, life-size, cast in resin, on her knees on a desk—“like a guard dog,” Audrey remembers him saying—with a real security guard sitting at the desk.
But this project was ultimately destined for another assistant. Audrey had no real background as a sculptor, and she sensed it was time for her to move on; she’d had enough painting to last her a lifetime. When she told Beecroft she was leaving, Audrey recalls that the artist was sweet, concerned, a bit regretful. It was never clear what, if anything, became of the dozens of half-finished paintings she had worked on that year and left lying around the studio. In March 2004, Vanessa Beecroft’s inaugural sculpture, Sister Sculpture, debuted at the Armory Show. It portrayed the artist’s sister, life-size, cast in resin, on her knees on a desk in the booth.
Most stories about artists and their assistants wrap a protective layer of humor around a nub of anxiety; if you unwrap them, you find the question of authenticity at their tiny, fragile core. When are artists delegating nonessential aspects of their work to capable assistants, and when are they phoning it in? The Solitary Genius dies hard. Despite centuries of historical precedent, the reality of art’s industrial or even simply collaborative dimension still sits uneasily with our cherished (sometimes unconscious) beliefs about its relationship to an individual. Even Andy Warhol, whose freewheeling Factory is largely responsible for how we think about the artist’s studio today, occasionally had to retreat from his cavalier position on the role of the artist. In 1969, Warhol told an interviewer that he never actually made any of his paintings anymore—his assistant, Brigid Polk, did. The line got picked up in a German newspaper, inciting a minor flap among German Warhol collectors, who demanded to know whose paintings they actually owned. As it happened, nobody really wanted a Brigid Polk. Warhol was forced to issue a retraction: Just kidding! He made his own paintings, after all.7
In other instances, conflicts arise at the intersection of ego and terminology—especially where the historical record is concerned. When Romare Bearden, the prolific Harlem modernist, was scheduled for a posthumous retrospective in 2003 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., his former assistant André Thibault enlisted the services of a lawyer to ensure he received credit in the show. Thibault claimed that he had collaborated with Bearden in the completion of twenty-two works during the last months of the artist’s life. The institution and the artist’s foundation begged to differ: Thibault may have assisted Bearden, they claimed, but the two were never collaborators.8
The propriety of someone else’s labor in an artist’s work is often decided on a case-by-case basis. In 1997, the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of Willem de Kooning’s late paintings. The artist, who passed away while the show was up, had worked through the 1980s despite the mounting effects of Alzheimer’s disease and a lifetime of alcoholism. His spare, minimal paintings from this era, which differed greatly from the earlier masterpieces of his long and storied career, had been exhibited before but remained a source of skepticism among critics and historians. Was this the late style of a protean master in the process of reinventing himself yet again or the doodles of a once-great talent now wasted by disease?
In an essay accompanying the exhibition, curator Robert Storr argued vehemently for the masterpiece interpretation and against the doodles theory. A lot rested on Storr’s defense, in terms of not just the monetary value of the works on display but also our understanding of the artist’s legacy.
The case hinged, in part, on the role of de Kooning’s assistants. How much did they do for the artist in those dim final years when he was struggling to paint, despite chronic anxiety and memory loss? Did they not, perhaps, assist him a little too much? Storr charted the routines of the de Kooning studio with the fastidiousness of a forensic anthropologist in an effort to rebut the “ill-informed speculation that has tainted the authenticity of these paintings.”9 When the artist struggled with depression in the late 1970s, his once estranged but recently returned wife, the painter Elaine de Kooning, sacked Willem’s current assistant (whose drinking had enabled de Kooning’s own) and brought a new group of young artists to the studio. Her express purpose was to enliven the atmosphere and encourage him to work. (This in itself was a small revelation, given that in a 1983 book on the artist, art historian Harry Gaugh made much of the “silence” of de Kooning’s studio in the early eighties—suggesting that the aging artist persevered in his legendary solitude).10
De Kooning’s assistants performed the routine studio maintenance that the artist once relished doing himself. They washed the brushes and did all the usual prep work. They even devised a motorized easel that would allow him to rotate his large canvases without physical strain. For Storr, though, the most significant aspect of the assistants’ work, which required a step-by-step explication in his essay, was their use of an overhead projector. For the detractors of de Kooning’s late work, this device was a smoking gun. Each day the assistants would project images of earlier black-and-white de Kooning drawings onto blank canvases and trace some of their contours with a first coat of charcoal and oil paint—thereby allowing the artist to begin his new paintings using older visual ideas as templates.
In fact, neither the projection nor the charcoal sketching nor the underpainting is at all shocking compared with the techniques and practices habitually used in artists’ studios from the fourteenth century to the twenty-first. But in the case of an aging, once-godlike Abstract Expressionist, one of the last icons of American art’s rugged individualism, these prosaic details hit a sore spot. Perhaps sensitive himself, Storr made a point of delimiting the assistants’ role to a space literally and metaphorically outside the proper domain of the artist. He wrote that they did the projecting and underpainting in a downstairs office, outside the studio. The show at the MoMA was well received, and the art world more or less agreed with Storr that, in the case of late de Koonings, the assistants were merely preparing each work “before bringing the canvas up to the studio, where the artist would take over.”11
Some artists have made a career out of inverting the notion of artistic individuality as spectacularly as possibly, mining the diminishing store of frisson produced by its repeated demystification. The artist and musician Sean Greathead, the childhood friend of the sociologist I met at the party, works for the wildly successful multimedia artist Jeff Koons. Koons is the closest thing to a household name that contemporary art has produced since Warhol, who very much provided the template for Koons’s career.
Koons is probably most famous for his forty-three-foot-tall topiary West Highland terrier, titled Puppy, which now guards the entrance to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. Through their painstaking re-creations of commonplace American objects, Koons’s precision-fabricated sculptures and immaculate photorealistic paintings present a vision of middle-class values elevated to the chilly heights of luxury. A Mylar balloon in the shape of a heart is blown up to the size of a car and fashioned in mirrored stainless steel (Sacred Heart, 1997). A giant plastic toy in the shape of peg-legged pirate hovers in space in front of the Liberty Bell (Peg Leg Liberty Bell, 2008). In 1981, Koons encased a gleaming vacuum cleaner in a Plexiglas box and lit it with cold rows of fluorescent tubes—a piece that sums up Koons’s ambivalent relationship to his subject matter: it’s as if he isn’t sure whether he’s glorifying these humdrum icons or utterly sucking the life out of them.
Hearing Koons talk about his work is similarly vexing. A 2009 PBS documentary segment about life in his studio in Chelsea begins with the voice of the artist—placid, unhurried, a bit folksy—meandering through the themes of his art: banality, fantasy, comfort.12 Meanwhile, we glide through Koons’s enormous Chelsea studio. It looks nothing like our conventional image of an artist’s atelier: no ratty armchair, pile of oily rags, or clay-crusted workbench. Rather, it’s clean and orderly; we see computers, office chairs, welding booths, industrial shelving units laden with long rows of identical paint cans, and smooth gray concrete floors. It could be the production office of some niche manufacturing company, perhaps one that makes high-end espresso machines or garden statuary.
The main thing is that the immaculate space is bustling with people: maybe a hundred assistants are busily making Jeff Koonses, like elves in Santa’s workshop. We see them polishing cast aluminum sculptures and spray-painting them in a plastic-lined room, mixing oil paints on a glass palette to match the vivid hues of a digitally printed collage, transferring these digital images onto enormous, colorful canvases inch by careful inch. Some wear dust masks, respirators, goggles, even white Tyvek suits, but a few glimpses of pierced noses and tattooed arms beneath shirtsleeves remind us that these young people are artists, after all, not lab technicians. The camera continues its pan into a cluttered workroom, where a sculpture fashioned after an inflatable lobster sits prominently on a large wheeled cart, and behind the lobster, for a duration of about three seconds, there’s Sean working at a computer.
Sean is a soft-spoken punk rocker, modest about his music and art. In college he studied painting and a bit of digital media; those skills, plus the informal career network of Atlanta artists transplanted to New York, were enough to land him some commercial illustration work. He freelanced at Forbes and designed online slideshows for its website. They’d say, we need a picture of a clock, and Sean would make one in Adobe Illustrator. In the early 2000s, he met an art director at Topps, the iconic trading card and sticker company based in New York, and was commissioned to make paintings for two of its canonical card series: Garbage Pail Kids and Wacky Packages.
Sean had a run of hits with his designs for Orangutina orange juice, Spittles candies, and DeadBull energy drink. Hill Billy, his most lasting contribution to the Garbage Pail Kids series, is a barefoot cherub in coveralls, who grins idiotically at the viewer with enormous, malformed teeth. Flies circle his oversize head; he holds a cardboard sign reading SMILE and sprawls in front of a rickety wooden fence set in a grassy pasture. The card is now somewhat rare—I saw one online for ninety dollars—and Sean has been asked to sign a few for collectors. “I had very minor celebrity for a minute,” he said. This was all fine and good, but when Sean heard about an opening at Jeff Koons’s studio in 2004—an opportunity to do real art for a real artist—he took it.
Koons’s studio is one of the biggest employers of studio assistants in New York. If artists’ studios were brokerage firms, Koons’s would be Goldman Sachs. Most of his staffers come from top-notch art schools—ironically, many are graduates of the kinds of conservative institutions in which an artist attempting Koons-esque conceptual hijinks would be thrown out on his ear. A lot of employees at the Koons painting department, for instance, were trained at the New York Academy of Art, a school that specializes in traditional realist oil painting with an emphasis on classical technique and materials. The artist doesn’t need people with particularly sophisticated takes on theory or the neo-avant-garde; he needs people with really good painting chops.
The studio manager who reviewed Sean’s portfolio liked his stuff—somehow Koons and the Garbage Pail Kids are not that far off in spirit—and Sean got the coveted job, along with health insurance and a new employee handbook.
In smaller studio situations, the benefit of working for an artist is that you’re in close contact with him or her, and thus, that you have unfettered access to the nitty-gritty details of the trade. In addition, you hope, this workplace intimacy lends the artist to take an interest in your artistic and professional development. Plenty of artists’ assistants have parlayed a fairly low-paying (sometimes next-to-no-paying) job into the beginning of their own bona fide art careers. Some artists choose to become assistants instead of attending high-priced MFA programs; the assistantship functions para-academically, along the lines of an unaccredited work-study program.
This isn’t necessarily the case in the big studios. When Sean came to work for Koons, he didn’t meet the man himself until a few weeks into the job, and he primarily dealt with with his co-workers and various studio managers. Impersonality, however, was made up for by reliability: Sean was fairly sure he’d still have a job in two months, which is more than many artists’ assistants can say.
This reliability is a function of the artist’s market. Koons’s work has been a fixture at auction for decades, and the artist operates at a level of the art world that buffers him against sudden catastrophic meltdowns. Enough people and institutions have now invested in his work that utter ruination, though certainly not impossible, is at least unlikely. Consequently, his studio apparatus is insulated against sudden swerves. When Sean started, in 2004, Koons employed about fifty people. The staff ballooned during the peak of the art boom—when Koons’s sculpture Hanging Heart broke the auction record for a work by a living artist, at $23.6 million—and has since leveled off at about 120 people, post–crash of 2008.
Sean ended up in the sculpture painting department (as distinct from the sculpture department, or the much larger painting department); as the name suggests, he and his colleagues were responsible for applying paint to sculpture. But Sean’s particular job was confined to the computer. In the Koons studio methodology, most things began with a digital source. In the case of paintings, this meant a Photoshop collage that could be blown up onto a canvas through a process of projection, tracing, and color matching. For sculptures, the staff worked from a composite image produced using a 3-D rendering program. A sculpture of an inflatable cartoon lobster, for example, could be scaled up on the computer in order to generate a series of molds for use in the casting process—which was outsourced to off-site fabricators. When the raw aluminum lobster returned from the foundry, the boys in sculpture painting were responsible for devising a plan to spray-paint it so that it perfectly match the plastic original.
This was where Sean came in, sort of. His job was to transform the original digital lobster file, for example, into a series of vectored shapes, which became templates used to guide a plotter, which produced vinyl stencils, which were applied to the sculpture and carefully masked off with tape. This ensured that whoever actually pulled the trigger on the spray-paint gun got every scale, spot, claw, and eyeball in exactly the right place.
Despite the relative consistency in this phase of his oeuvre, a 2001 Koons is subtly different from a 2011 one: the paintings become more complex and fragmentary over the decade, and the sculptures evolve from single objects and monochromed shapes to colorful, multipart arrangements. I asked Sean if he’d noticed the difference, as he sat there at the computer every day for seven years working on color separations and vector graphics. “It’s kind of funny sometimes—when you’re focused so much on one tiny part, you lose track of what it actually is you’re working on.” In other words: not so much. He did say that he once spent weeks at the computer vectorizing a picture of a vagina before he realized what he was working on; he was zoomed in so far that it was just a bunch of abstract shapes.
“People think I have a large factory that just knocks out work,” Koons has said, by way of minimizing the role of industrialization in his studio. “I do have a lot of people that work with me, but we make very few paintings a year because it takes a long time to make each one.”13 The nod to Warhol is implicit. After all, it was Warhol’s Factory, more than any other development in contemporary art, that most radically reconfigured the artist’s studio in the popular imagination. Warhol was unashamed about playing up the glib, mechanized aspects of his art. “Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art,” he claimed, and flaunted the idea that the Factory churned out Warhols like cheap cars off an assembly line.
The reality was quite different. The Factory, which the artist started while still living with his mother on the Upper East Side, was more like a piece of experimental living theater than an art studio. It was a space where Warhol’s coterie (he called them “superstars” rather than workers) enacted a countercultural utopia of sexual freedom behind the blank, productivist symbolism of the place’s name. Warhol, a working-class son of Pittsburgh at the tail end of the steel industry, generally employed only one or two assistants at a time—usually at below-minimum wage. Others were contracted on a per-project basis, such as the young men hired from the St. Marks Baths to urinate on prepared canvases for his late 1970s Oxidation paintings.14 The assistants might help to churn out batches of silk-screen prints, but Warhol himself was much closer to the production line than he professed to be. Even his famously impersonal films—the eight-hour-long Empire, the interminable Sleep—belie a rigorously personal approach to art-making on par with the most existential of Abstract Expressionist head trips. The poet John Giorno, whom we see sleeping in Sleep, recalls that Warhol himself, wired on amphetamines, wound the crank on the 16 mm Bolex camera every twenty-eight seconds for the entire five hours and twenty minutes of the take.15
In many ways, Koons has taken Warhol at face value: though a far cry from General Motors or even Martha Stewart Inc., Koons’s studio is more like a factory than the Factory ever was. Warhol’s studio was incorporated as a legal business entity—Andy Warhol Enterprises—only in 1974, ten years after the Factory first opened; in contrast, Jeff Koons LLC has aggressively pursued copyright infringement and intellectual property disputes concerning the artist’s work and requires its employees to sign nondisclosure agreements about the work they perform for the company. Sean was allowed to tell me in general terms what he did for Koons, but not which particular projects he had a hand in: the example of the lobster sculpture is pure conjecture.
The transgressive agenda underpinning Warhol’s pseudo-industrialism has been entirely displaced within the earnest post-Fordism of the Koons model. On the whole, Koons’s work is high quality art produced under decent, if dull, conditions; by all accounts, he’s a model employer. Sean, who plays in two bands at the moment and still finds a little time to paint, seems genuinely happy with his assistant job. Vectorizing computer graphics five days a week, from 8 to 5, is a little repetitive, he admits. But then again, he’s able to pay rent on an apartment in Crown Heights that he lives in by himself. He also has health benefits, a genuine rarity in the primarily freelance world of assisting. There’s a certain amount of competitiveness and gossip among the staff, but also friendship, camaraderie, even love: Sean counted a dozen couples who had met on the job since he started working there seven years ago. He can see gallery shows in Chelsea on his lunch break, and the studio has a lively soccer league: almost a game every day. When he first started, he’d heard rumors that some of the staff at Matthew Barney’s studio (another of the city’s mega-studios) wanted to challenge the Koons team to a football game—a nice idea, but the wrong sport. “If it was soccer, I’m sure we could kick their asses.”
In October 2011, Metro Pictures Gallery in Chelsea mounted an exhibition by the French artist Claire Fontaine. Titled Working Together, the show presented a sort of greatest hits collection of contemporary art forms—text paintings, found-object sculptures, prints, videos, neon—exploring the politics of collaboration. In one room, a series of monochrome paintings with silk-screened texts reproduced portions of an interview between the fashion designer Marc Jacobs and the artist Richard Prince, who had recently collaborated on a series of handbag designs for Louis Vuitton, where Jacobs was the creative director. In the interview, Jacobs and Prince chat about their mutual appreciation, their love of collectable objects, and being friends with Jay-Z. In another room, a video projected onto an enormous wall shows the British poet Douglas Park reading an essay by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The video is both tedious and riveting. The essay he reads, called “The Assistants,” is about Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka.
The exhibition’s conspicuous parade of names, from Agamben to Jay-Z, leads the viewer in a roundabout way back to Fontaine herself—or, rather, itself, as the work in the show was actually made by a group of artists rather than a single individual. Claire Fontaine, named after a French stationery brand, is a “collective artist,” according to the exhibition’s press release. It is reported to consist of two individuals, one Scottish and one French, who give interviews and write essays but remain officially nameless. In one of these interviews, they described Claire Fontaine as an organization “composed only of assistants” and whose “management is an empty center.”16
The collective’s idea that the artist is a figurehead, a blank page of sorts, cast a different light on the way we treat proper names in art and industry. Who is Marc Jacobs, and who makes his bags? Whose labor goes into them, and, if we buy one, whom are we remunerating?
These questions are relatively easy to answer when applied to a fashion designer. As a society, we’re comfortable with the idea that Marc Jacobs doesn’t sew every stitch on each product bearing his name (or Louis Vuitton’s), and that even that a lot of Marc Jacobs clothes and accessories are probably not designed by the man himself but rather by various people in his employ; after all, the name “Marc Jacobs” belongs equally to a person, a corporation, hundreds of retail stores, and millions and millions of individual shirts, jackets, dresses, and bags.
When asked of artists, the answers to these questions aren’t as clear-cut. Artists, even high-volume producers like Koons and Damien Hirst, have corporate structures so small as to appear essentially monadic when placed against those of fashion designers or record moguls. As a consequence, it’s harder to square the appearance of individual authority with the reality of collaborative labor that underpins most contemporary artists’ work—even when the artist is essentially shoving our noses in that fact. We’re less comfortable with the thought that the words “Jeff Koons” may designate an artistic brand, first, and a guy from Pennsylvania who makes art, second. We’re still in the habit of relegating the assistant to the back room, out of sight and mind.
But this may change. In a time when many prominent artists seem awfully managerial with respect to their own work, projects like Claire Fontaine suggest a shift in symbolic allegiances. Meanwhile, a welter of art-activist projects have sprung up in the past decade to examine actual conditions of labor within the billion-dollar pyramid of the art industry.
Working Artists and the Greater Economy, W.A.G.E. for short, advocates for the establishment of a formalized artist fee schedule at nonprofit institutions. The group’s goal is a reality check on the notion that artists included in prominent exhibitions are “paid” in the form of exposure; if your work is in a big museum show, their argument runs, the museum should at least foot the bill for installing it.
Others, like Arts + Labor and the Precarious Workers Brigade, address the other multiple forms of labor required to circulate art and ideas through the culture industry. What they find, not surprisingly, is that many people who fill jobs in the art world (art handler, gallery receptionist, preparator) are themselves artists, critics, art historians, and so on—and that many consider their work to be a temporary stopover on their road to professional autonomy.
A few months before the opening of the Claire Fontaine show, a young artist in New York named Chris Kasper published “An Open Letter to Labor Servicing the Culture Industry” in an online magazine called Dis.17 Kasper narrated his travails in various art-related jobs, and the anxiety of working freelance for dismally low wages with zero job security—a familiar story in the era of distressing workplace neologisms like “flextime” and “perma-temp.” He calls for a time-honored solution to these problems: unionization. His list of low-paying art-world occupations is nearly exhaustive, except that it leaves out the category of the artist’s assistant.
What would a union of artists’ assistants mean? Perhaps an end to uncompensated dog walking and compulsory ego stroking, as well as the abuses, trivial and severe, that ornery artists inflict on their hapless staff. But it could also mean an end to the unofficial career training, art education, and extravagant lunches that constitute the positive aspects of this entirely unregulated work situation.
It’s a theoretical question for the moment. The art industry isn’t liable to see a return of the guild system, and, unlike its close relative the film industry, it hasn’t yet developed its own modern forms of organization. What’s commonplace in Hollywood is anathema in Chelsea, and a revolution in art industry labor isn’t likely to begin with the artists’ assistant.
But again, imagine a painter of enormous Photorealist nudes. He’s sitting in the back of his studio, flipping through a magazine, while his assistant is perched high up on a ladder with a paint tray and a brush. Between scans of Artforum, the artist directs the assistant to add, perhaps, just a little more of a highlight, please, to the eye of a figure in a work in progress. What if the assistant decided to throw down the brush and walk out? After all, she’s actually doing the work.