I am an art worker, which also means I am a masochist.

Now everything is hidden in plain sight.

When I walked into his office his first words as we shook hands were, ‘So who punched you in the head?’

These are environments that consist predominantly of only the highest and lowest art strata—super rich collectors and the manual laborers who move their riches around.

Savash Erenler takes photos of install and deinstall scenes to explore the privileged situation in which art handlers often find themselves.

It wasn’t cutthroat. Things changed, but the world has changed. It’s not just the art-moving business.

We were thirty minutes in when we called it off, because it was simply too dangerous for us.

We would hear rumors—our checks would bounce occasionally—that Jeff’s going bankrupt, then all of a sudden we would hear Mercedes Benz is going to infuse five million dollars into production again, this sort of thing.

The first morning before meeting, Seth scheduled an appointment for me to have my leg and arm waxed hairless at a local spa.

Not surprisingly, once it became clear we had this new method, work around large paintings seemed to increase significantly.

So the conditions Watteau painted on his shop sign become relevant once more: a rich social class keeps subordinate servants.

Yet even the security locks weren’t immune to being picked.

That language should be exact is a value which is forcibly agreed to under the whip.

According to one bemused connoisseur at the Louvre ‘there are ten people in white gloves to unhang a painting that only two people will touch.’

There is no breeze to agitate a flower here.

A few years ago, I hung a David Hammons show that nobody saw but me.

Any art handler knows that most paintings are only good for putting holes in walls. These scrawled instructions for hanging and other chores show how skepticism and a ragged line come to aid the task of seeing.

It’s like finding a body part.

Not a singular I or identifiable We but something between, the polyvocality of a chorus.

And you have to have respect for what you do in order to earn what you’re asking for, because they have to respect what you do in order for them to give you the things that you’re asking for.

In these works the art handler’s demystifying project is held up as if to ridicule; and yet the flames that burn pencil and knife and measuring tape show not only that these objects are not what they pretend to be, but that the suggested provocation is not held within the frame. The functional trap of human tools goes up like an undeciphered smoke signal.

In the middle of winter, three teenage girls were having a beach party on the sidewalk.

Maybe pranced isn’t the word, but maybe there isn’t a word for the way he ran, haltingly, on his toes, in a tiny cloud of attendants, like he was terribly late to an important place whose doors were closed and he couldn’t be happier.

Photographer Irina Arellano-Weiss shoots the fair installs and deinstalls while working as an art handler.

I don’t think academia looks particularly inclusive, idealistic, fair, any of that.

There is nothing on the island, save locally produced materials, that has not been packed and transported thousands of miles across the vast Pacific Ocean to one of the most isolated land masses in the world.

The prescription offered by ‘Just Cause’ is clear—we need to start thinking of art handling as a skilled profession and a career path like any other trade, rather than as a temporary position one holds until they make it or drop out.

Here, the ink within the tool most directly associated with reading as a labor—even if that ink appears an interface designer’s metaphor—emerges as pure accumulation.

But here the bodies are like two revealed backends of a carnival donkey.

If you’re having trouble making a decision, then do something outrageous and get fired.

An artwork is a focal point within a network of social relations; it is becoming increasingly difficult for the art industry to ignore the fact that this network includes the diverse segment of people who safe-guard its physical wellbeing and build the environments that expand its social potential and dollar value.

A video made by Russian pianists/movers in Tel Aviv goofing around; one of them crosses the street and plays a romantic tune on an upright piano, while carrying another one on his back. 

I was an art handler for a few different galleries in the late seventies and early eighties. I remember sneering with artist co-workers at the cheesy effects of the then-unknown Gerhard Richter’s gestural paintings we were lazily installing at Marian Goodman.

The art handler’s toolbox is an appropriated, or “recruited” one, not containing enough designated designs that may perform required functions even more efficiently.

When I was younger, I always wanted to do art handling. Luckily, I was born into it.

I don’t understand exactly who my audience is, but I know that there are a lot of younger people checking it out.

In the readymade, the artist’s handling of the object is off-limits, and despite this initial radicalism, preserves a conservative convention of representation. In art handling, value is expressed in the relationships between touching and looking.

But short days or days off rarely come when they’re most needed, like during a hangover, and they usually happen when cash is tight.

We know where your address is; we know all your stuff; we know how to open up the doors.

So many rules are made up on the spot, like a bunch of people get together and they’re like, “I don’t know, yeah, I’ve never sold a balloon before.”