I’ve never had a credit card, sorry. They’re not as common in the UK - we tend to use debit cards instead.

Similar question, what is the cvc code on the back?

There’s nothing super-gross that I’ve installed that I can think of immediately (I’ll edit later if something spring to mind) - but there’s certainly been quite a lot of things which were sexually bizarre - I remember a video work once by a French artist who’s name I can’t remember, which initially looked like dancing/moving abstract geometric patterns, but through the duration of the video, accompanied by the song “It’s raining men”, sort of zoomed out to reveal all the shapes were made from line drawings of urinating or ejaculating penises.

• edited bit - if we include things I saw, but didn’t specifically install, there’s a lot of very weird “performance art”, which is often a bit like an avant-garde solo theatre performance sort of thing. Some performance artists can lean heavily into nudity, cutting themselves and bleeding, sexual acts, weird costumes, fetish stuff etc. As technicians, we might help prepare the space, but the performers obviously install themselves. Sometimes we operate lights or sound equipment. Anyway, with that in mind, I might be slightly misremembering the specifics, but at a performance art event, I once saw a woman wearing a rabbit’s head mask, sat on the floor with her trousers and knickers pulled down, masturbating to a black and white video projection of some sort of nazi propaganda film, whilst a bloke dressed in a military uniform crawled across a floor covered in broken glass, and possibly tomatoes (for art reasons). At the time I literally had no idea what was going on. Many years later, I still have no idea what was going on.

Very few, if any. I’m generally working in publicly funded galleries, and the vast majority of the works have long and clear paper trails, insurance and permission before they go on display - they’re normally either owned by the “permanent collection”, or borrowed with a “loan agreement” from another gallery, collector or artist.

If you want stolen artworks, you need to look at auction houses, commercial galleries and wealthy people’s houses :)

I’m not consistent with this - my personal taste leans towards geometric abstract works, so I’m a massive fan of Bridget Riley, for instance. However, when you look at this stuff all day, there’s probably artworks in every genre I’m incredibly fond of - I really like Atkinson Grimshaw’s dock paintings, for example, and sometimes there’s 400 year old religious paintings that are just incredible as objects in their own right.

Absolutely. I have a slight specialism towards Audiovisual Artworks compared to the other art techs working in the region, so I normally get called in especially for the video or sound installations. In a recent install, my first week was me dealing with all the A/V for the exhibition whilst the others were focused on building and painting walls and hanging some of the 2D artwork, then the 2nd week was me joining everyone else with putting the rest of the artwork up.

For individual works, traditional or classical works tend to be to some degree straightforward - if it’s a painting, it’s one painting, if it’s a sculpture, it’s one sculpture. It might be a massive, heavy painting with a fragile frame etc, so it may take a while, but all in all you’re not likely to be spending more than an hour on it. Huge sculptures can of course take quite a lot of time to move other things out the way, and making room for whatever machinery/lifting equipment is going to be used.

Now, if we look at contemporary works, you get things like one piece of work is “200 photographs, individually pinned up, in a neat grid of 10 x 20 photographs, perfectly aligned, with a 3cm gap between each photograph”. You get artworks by people like Cornelia Parker, which may involve a lot of individual pieces, which need individually hanging at an exact height in a specific place. I had one where for one piece of work, I had to hang approx 300 plaster cast sculptures on a wall, according to a very specific layout. These sort of things can literally take all week sometimes.

Exhibiting myself = very much no
Seeing others exhibit themselves = I’ve not given it much thought, but I am leaning towards yes.

I’m not sure what the Louvre’s security setup is, but I feel like it must be surprisingly bad (at least at that moment in time), especially considering the stuff they have stored there. I don’t want to curse things by speaking too soon, but I think generally the security in most of the places I’ve worked is pretty good actually. You certainly know when there’s a “big name” work being brought on site, and even low-value stuff is still dealing with numerous locked doors, alarms and cameras. The UK is quite big on security cameras everywhere anyway, but there’s normally extra ones installed when there’s big-name works on - as well as numerous tamper alarms, which are generally linked directly to some sort of police alert system - and quite often certain rooms or entrances to the gallery lock down with big metal shutters. I think one of the recent Louvre ones involves people climbing through a window. Windows tend to be boarded up in most galleries here - perhaps more for the sake of control of light and UV in the space than security, but I guess it does that too.

Most gallery security tends towards slowing people down - it can all be bypassed, but really it’s just slowing it down for long enough that it would be noticed and potentially intercepted and stopped. For example, using covered security fixings on a work doesn’t stop things outright, but it does mean extra kit and time is needed - by which point, the alarms have gone off and the police are on their way (and you’ve been recorded from every possible angle by cameras).

Tiny local galleries or artist-run spaces is a different matter - but generally speaking there’s nothing of high enough value to interest “proper organised theft” and the common opportunistic theft in the area would much rather nick an easily resellable mobile phone or laptop, as opposed to trying to sell a stolen painting at the local pub, takeaway or “cash converters” type shop. I do remember a few minor thefts or damages, but nothing major, certainly. If you were so minded, in a physical sense, you could probably just walk in and lift something off a wall, as in it may just be hung on a screw or nail - though I imagine you’d definitely be seen doing it.

I know one of the galleries I work at regularly had some sort of armed robbery 20 or 30 years in the past, but that was a long time before I worked there - so I’m not sure if these sort of incidents are very rare over here, or I’ve been extremely lucky. I’d think the vans and the people transporting the stuff are probably more at risk than the galleries and staff.

I’ve never broken anything of exceptionally high value, but yes, things can break sometimes, no matter how careful you are.

Quite a lot of artists’ work is made by a drive and passion for the production of the art object, rather than necessarily considering its structure and durability - this means things can be badly made, barely held together etc

There can be trends for things like ceramic sculptures to be so thin and fragile they look like they’d snap if you touched them… well… sometimes they do - and I have to touch them, and fix them down and make them safe.

I’ve been lucky with the few things I have broken or damaged, as it’s always been fixable or replaceable, and so far, early career artists’ work only.

As mentioned, a ceramic sculpture from a set, known to be incredibly fragile, and expecting a few to be broken during the installation process - a part snapped off during handling - it was superglued back on by the artist, who was present. I also chipped a sort of slot-together laser cut wooden sculpture on a very fragile edge piece - in this case, they got a replacement piece cut and covered the cost - I did offer to pay/contribute or run it through my insurance, but it was considered low enough cost to just be redone. The artists and galleries involved still choose to work with me by preference, so I think I was forgiven.

I also cracked a monitor screen once - though I was acting under instruction of the person who owned it, against my advice. In that case, I paid half towards the replacement, basically by undercharging for half a day.

I know people who’ve broken much worse in their careers, but still nothing catastrophic. Also, I’ve maybe installed 200 - 300 exhibitions, and somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 artworks. I think I’ve noticably damaged less than 5, so I think my ratio is still good.

I imagine I’ve contributed to subtly damaging a lot more than that, just from tiny knocks and bumps which add up over time - or simply the act of moving the work at all causes a tiny amount of damage - imagine each time you put a screw back in the same hole, you lose a little bit of material, for example.

I have insurance for this work, but generally things are covered by the venue’s insurance, and anything of very high value is watched obsessively every step of the way, and all possible risks removed - even if it’s going to take all day to put up one work.

If anything does get damaged, the general run of things is identifying how it happened and who was involved - more about avoiding similar happening again than blaming anyone - though they do have to work out which organisation was in charge at the time - for example, once an art mover drops the work off, paperwork is signed to say “not our problem any more”. Same in reverse once it’s loaded onto a van.

I don’t know of any major incidents when I’ve been working, but generally things are covered by insurance and people are forgiven, as long as they weren’t obviously being careless and were following best practice - you could find yourself not being asked back again though - most people doing similar work are self-employed freelancers, so they can just use someone else in future.

One thing to note is that if you were to damage a £20 million painting or something, unless the whole thing is exploded or set on fire or eaten, you’re not looking at £20 million of damage. The cost is actually the cost of the conservator or technicians who will repair the work - so breaking the frame corner or something, might only be a half-day’s work for repairs - so although the work is £20 million, you’d only have caused £200 - £500 of damage, for example.

There’s a huge amount of scale, weight and practical things like “can we hang this [heavy thing] from the [not strong enough]?”

A favourite I remember was:

“Is there any way we can screw the paintings to the window?”

“I’m assuming you mean the frame?”

“No, are there screws that will go into the glass?”

Glass:
Yeah, this is a common problem with any glazed works - and perspex is even more reflective than standard glass.

You can sometimes minimise the problem with careful lighting (ideally from high enough up to not be seen in a reflection), but generally it’s an issue everywhere.

There is a more expensive mostly non-reflective “art glass”, which is UV resistant and under most gallery lighting should let you pretty much look straight on at a work with no reflection. It tends to cost about 4x as much as normal glass. It does have a barely detectable green or purple tint, but compared to reflecting, it looks much better. It’s expensive, but it’s pretty amazing the effect it has - you can see a reflection from a sharp angle, but straight on it looks unglazed. If I can dig out some appropriate photos later, I’ll edit them in.

Replicas:
I’ve never knowingly seen that happen, but I’ve very rarely worked outside the UK, so it could be common practice elsewhere. Given the amount of security prep around some of the more famous historical works I’ve installed, I’m relatively confident they’re the real ones.

One exception is for when a popular work is loaned elsewhere - they often put a print/replica or something on its place - though this would be clearly labelled.

I think I’ve been pretty lucky with this during art installations - I think I dealt with a lot more bullshit with film & video production and live event audiovisual tech. However, some bullshit elements do happen, like anywhere. I don’t think I can necessarily pin them to a particular exhibition or venue, but there’s some things which are common bullshit issues which always seem to crop up.

1) Necessary materials not being present to do the job you’re actually there to do
This happens everywhere to some degree, but one job, for a gallery ran by its local council, involved a lot of A/V stuff being installed as part of the exhibition. We needed to run all our power extension and some audio cabling behind the false walls that we were building - so after building the studwork of the walls, we obviously wanted to put the cabling in before we clad the wall surfaces. We had put a materials order in with the venue about three months earlier, so all good. However, when it came to it, our pack of 200m of cable, and a pack of rewireable sockets and plugs etc had still not appeared. “I’m sure it’ll be here later/tomorrow”. It wasn’t. Repeat that situation for a few days. Anyway, it turns out that a completely unrelated area of the council (like schools or recycling or whatever) had not paid their bill with the company we were buying the cables etc from - so our order was on hold/blacklisted until the other area of the council had paid its bills. We just went and got the materials ourselves, to be put on our invoice at the end - but we’d basically wasted several days, wandering about doing little “in-between” tasks, because we were constantly told “It’ll be here any minute” “so-and-so in accounts is chasing up on it”.

Other similar ones are, if the venue is meant to be supplying fittings and fixings, them not having enough to put all the work up (and we could have brought them ourselves if we’d known in advance). Other common ones are not enough wrapping material, or not enough tape to wrap artworks after the work is deinstalled. Basically, the logistics/planning side can be hilariously bad at times.

Sometimes the actual artwork gets delayed for delivery. In one case, for reasons nobody could explain to me, I was booked in from Monday, but the work didn’t arrive until Tuesday. The space had already been prepared and there was literally nothing useful I could do… so I just… did some of my own admin paperwork on my laptop.

In one show, a huge group art prize exhibition with open submission, loads of work got delayed (and in many cases, damaged) in customs. Because these were being sent by approx 100 individual artists, they were pretty much being sent in “normal post”, not by art couriers. Anyway, most of the glazed works that had travelled internationally looked like someone had deliberately kicked or jumped on the boxes, and most of the glass was shattered. I imagine it’s probably some sort of new Brexit rule, to smash up boxes from other countries, to promote national something or other. Anyway, we knew approximate dimensions for all the works, so we basically hung the whole show, but left big gaps, to fill in as things arrived over the next few weeks (and after we’d re-glazed and re-framed the works).

2) Being micromanaged
Same as working anywhere else, really. If you leave us alone to get on with it, it’ll get done quicker and better.

The old joke goes roughly as follows:

Micromanager “How long is this going to take?”
Us “Pretty much about a day”
Micromanager “Okay, how long will it take if I come and help?”
Us “Two to three days”

Art technicianing (and the arts in general) likely has something like >90% neurodivergency of different flavours. Like art schools, something approaching 100% is actually pretty likely. Anyway, there’s great fondness for working quietly on your own task and focusing your entire body, mind and world upon that task, and not wanting people to interrupt that task. The unwritten rule is “if someone looks really focused on what they’re doing, don’t interrupt them”.

There’s also a lot of things like getting the right tools in place, marking up the spacing on the wall, setting the laser-level to the right height for this series of works etc, and holding tonnes of numbers in memory… then suddenly someone pops up and says “Can you come and do this work over here in the other room now”, so instead of finishing your current task, then packing down and setting up over there, you instead pack down, set up, hang, pack down, come back again, set up again, spend ten minutes remembering where you’d got up to, then finally returning to finishing the current task. There’s generally a sort of 20-30 minute “spin up” and “spin down” time on most tasks, and constantly swapping between them all is stressful and incredibly poor in terms of time efficiency.

3) Being spoken down to
Rare, but again, the same as anywhere else. Sometimes people treat you like crap, or treat you like you’re stupid, or refer to you as “the labourers” etc. Generally these people are of a “higher social class or wealth bracket”, but significantly less experienced than the people they’re speaking down to. Thankfully this doesn’t happen often at all. A general one of “people with low experience and loud mouths” can crop up a bit more frequently than I’d like, especially if you’ve not worked at a particular venue before - but normally after you’ve been there a few times, you do tend to get an appropriate level of respect and understanding.

4) People who are meant to be making decisions, being very poor at making decisions
“Can we try swapping these two over again”
“Oh, I’m not sure… maybe swap them back again”
“Actually, can you just wait, I want to talk to someone else about it”
“No, I don’t want you to hang anything yet. So-and-so will be here in an hour and I want them to look at it too”

We’re often consulted - and yes, it varies from ones where I (or others doing the same job) have complete control, through ones where we’re consulted, to ones where we do exactly what we’re told.

The most common is that the curator has a plan (sometimes drawn out in 2D/3D) of roughly (or maybe precisely) what they want, and where they want it, and we try and make that happen. We’re often consulted and free to make suggestions that they may or may not consider (including stylistic, aesthetic and narrative ones), and we try and spot potential problems with the current layout - there are often considerations of lighting, for example - a projection wants it as dark as possible, the painting wants to be well lit - maybe don’t put the projection next to the painting - you also get different types of work or ages of work which have different recommended (or maximum) lux levels of light (to avoid damage). For example, a historical paper-based work, might have a maximum of 40 - 50 Lux. A historical painting might want to be about 100 Lux, a contemporary one 200 Lux, a sculpture might be happy with 300 Lux. A low-value contemporary work, where conservation is not a priority, you just “light it until it looks good and bright”. Obviously, light can spill from one work to the next - so we may advise to adjust the order or spacing to avoid this.

Essentially, the curator or gallery manager has final say - they are often the direct client/point of contact. They can insist we do something “wrong” (i.e. fix something in an unsecure way, or light something bright enough to cause damage) and we may do it, as long as they understand they have insisted it, and we have advised against it. In a sense, we can overrule a curator on health & safety, practicality, possibility etc - though ultimately they’re in charge.

In Star Trek terms, the curator is the captain, and the art technicians are either medical, engineering or security. We can tell them “the walls won’t take it”, they can insist we try it anyway, we can quickly invent some techno-babble about “creating a support lattice behind the original wall allowing us to treble the possible weight it can take”, then we give a time estimate (and we pad out the time estimate by a few hours), they say “make it so”, we do it, and finish early, then they say “you’re a miracle worker”, which feels great.

As for what places have more or less freedom, it’s often down to the staffing and “officialness” - a converted shop unit, for a temporary show organised by local artists, they might completely hand decisions over to me, or in heavy conversation at least. A college or university might accept a touring exhibition, and have an opinion on the order the works go in, or which ones should be grouped together, but the actual decision of what works on what walls, and the spacing etc is either worked out collaboratively, or left to us. A municipal art gallery, or larger arts organisation, may have a director, a chief curator, a gallery manager, an assistant curator, a registrar, a gallery assistant etc and in those cases, if they’ve got the people, they use them. Sometimes we’re just hands to do what we’re told. In some way, the higher the value of the work (or fame level of the artist/venue) the less control we have personally. We will often say, politely, if something is a bit… “Are you sure you want it done like this?” - but if they insist, well, we’ll do it.

Most places will give us specific control of the spacing. A test layout of an exhibition is normally done by leaning the works up against the walls, stood on little foam blocks, then sliding them left and right until it looks okay. Quite often we move them to where we think they should likely go, and the curator would then say “a bit closer/a bit further apart” or “group those ones close and leave a larger gap around that one”, for example. Once agreed it looks pretty much okay, then they’ll sort of say “you rationalise the numbers”, so we will be left to do the specific maths of something like “50cm from the corner, then 30cm gap between works, except these two are a pair, so they’ll go 10cm between works”.

Because we, as freelancers, work for multiple different venues, we’re often consulted on “how are the other places doing it?”, in questions regarding hanging heights, spacing etc. Nobody wants to be seen to be “doing it wrong”, so in a way, we are sort of gatekeepers of what the average is. This is both good and bad, as I guess it keeps standards high across the board, solutions found in one place will spread to others in neighbouring areas (like technology spread in Crusader Kings), and places can trust that if they lend their works to another venue, they will be looked after properly. On the other hand, over time this probably leads towards a fairly homogenous look in many galleries.

Student works!

Though people tend to be more impressed when you say you’ve installed works by Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso etc - I also install works by students and local artists etc, and the hardest ones are always the college ones.

The thing about a well known historical work is that they want you to handle it as little as possible, so ahead of it arriving on site, you should know exactly how large it is, exactly what fittings are being used with it and so on.

Sometimes the area is prepped in advance, and with template or measurements, potentially the holes in the wall are pre-piloted - so when it comes to install, the work is opened/unwrapped (under observation) and moved once to a table for condition checking (are there any scratches, marks, cracks etc that weren’t there previously, and agreeing that “this is the state of the work” at the start of the exhibition (to track any possible damage or change in surface during the exhibition).

The work is then carefully lifted into place and fixed to the wall, along with whatever security measures deemed necessary - all in all, it’s ready prepared to be installed, it’s been installed before and you know exactly how it’s going up. It’s handled as little as possible and you know exactly what you’re doing with it.

By comparison, for a student exhibition, someone walks into the room dragging a 5 metre long piece of paper and says “can I like… fix this to the ceiling?” or “I’ve been doing paintings on slabs of concrete - can I like… sellotape it to the wall or something” and you have to invent a solution.

I mostly work at publicly funded galleries, where people go and visit a gallery or art space to see an exhibition, as a visitor attraction. They possibly pay an entry fee on the door, or it’s just free entry (and costs are covered by public funding). Generally speaking, the work is very rarely for sale.

Commercial “galleries”, which are perhaps more like “art shops” are a different thing - and there are sometimes spaces which are sort of halfway between the two.

However, there are sometimes open exhibitions, where a gallery puts on a show of several hundred artworks by local artists etc, for the purpose of selling them. The gallery might take a 30% or something cut of the sale price. Sometimes the occasional show also has works for sale - and quite a lot may sell cheaper prints of the works on display.

Generally speaking, object and sale price is very location dependent. Near where I live, you’d probably struggle to sell an original painting for more than a few hundred £, but you could potentially sell the same thing for a few thousand £ in a wealthier area of the country (i.e. London).

Like anything, price is sort of determined by demand. All you need for a high price is for the work to go to auction, and for two wealthy people to both REALLY want it. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to set up such a demand for my own artwork - hence installing other people’s work to pay my bills :) I think I’ve made less than £10,000 over 20ish years from my own artwork - some nice extra money occasionally, but a long way from being able to survive off just doing that.

Things can also depend if you’re selling to individual people, businesses, or to go into an art gallery’s permanent collection. Unless you have an existing following or level of minor fame/success, your best bet for sales is perhaps to businesses. Think of a trendy office which is happy to spend thousands of £ on designer chairs and tables - they’ll also happily spend thousands on an artwork too - they can write it off against tax, and they can potentially sell it later if it increases in value - the trick is to make them aware of you. If you’re beginning to increase in “fame”, regardless of how low a level, your work can increase in value - therefore you can get individuals who wish to buy things simply as an investment (or as part of money laundering).

Anyway, not really my area of speciality - but yeah, people definitely do buy photos and figures as you’ve described, just probably not everyday people on the street.

Also, interesting to hear about the gum dichromate/Chiba ferric gum - there’s a sort of community darkroom near me which is looking into non-toxic and plant based photographic print methods, who’d probably be really interested in that (unless that’s what they’re already doing).