Image found recently on flickr (thanks Erika!):
...after posting this image I came across this article in The Brooklyn Rail. Serendipity.
The Brooklyn Rail (Feb 2008)
ArtSeen
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Assistant
by Graham T. Beck {excerpt}Behind every great artist there is an assistant. Or more accurately, behind the artists most often called "great" there are two, or twenty, or enough for a full-time accountant. Many of my friends are artist's assistants. I worked as one. My girlfriend is an assistant; my sister is too. When I first became involved in this peculiar profession, I was struck by the variety of tasks collected under that one umbrella, but the art world is big, studio habits are varied, and methods of fabrication so specialized that the required labor is as diverse as its results. Depending on who you ask, being an artist's assistant is a lot like being a friend, or a secretary, or a 19th-century factory worker. Wages range from paltry to lawyerly; work spaces from stately to slovenly to simply unsafe. Some spend their days in business-casual and others in coveralls, but what they all share is unfettered access to the personalities and studio workings that others only glean from CVs or biographical blurbs. There are stories of ungainly tantrums, eye-popping extravagance, clichéd eccentricity or profound compassion; these accounts are traded by artist's assistants like baseball cards or bragged about like battle scars. It would be a gross understatement to say that it's engaging to talk with assistants about their workdays; it's often like hearing from a star-struck therapist freed from the binds of doctor-patient confidentiality. Much has been written on the impact of outsourcing on art and art-making, but only a few splatters of all that spilled ink define assistants as much more than mindless matter in the service of something larger. [...]
[...] But what exactly is coming? The current art world is the only one I've ever known, so I can't say for sure but I think what's happening to artist's assistants right now is evidence of a new arrangement for young artists. Facts and figures and everyone involved agree on how unwieldy the art world has grown, that its base has outpaced its upper-ranks, and that this unbridled growth (and the money that made it happen), as well as the glut of young artists, has created more tiers than ever before. It feels professionalized and systematized and filled with the calculating logic of industry. Contemporary critics tell me this is not the way it used to be--they fondly describe an idealized world where art making was its own reward--and although they sometimes sound like my parents' friends lamenting the lost spirit of the 60's, I believe the lessons at the heart of their tales. What I wonder is how the art world portrayed in their stories actually felt to young artists back then, whether it seemed no different than the current one does now? Did it feel like something you needed to work your way up in? Or did it feel like a place where making work was all it took to be an artist, and being an artist was the way to make it in the art world? For artist's assistants, for young artists, and for art lovers, this is a pressing question: Have the first few years in the art world always felt like an associate's position or is that new? It is one thing to look at art works made today and say they're too glossy, or too commercial, or too big for their britches, but it's a much larger issue to consider the impact of this type of work and its mode of production on the generation of artists raised in its midst. Right now, artist's assistant jobs keep people employed and interested and in studios making art. They also keep young artists convinced that there is always something more to learn and always another hurdle on the way to success. It is an eternal delay of readiness, the paying of dues at a phantom tollbooth. If this is new, repercussions are surely near; and if it isn't, it’s propagating now like never before. Just take a look at next year's crop.
