I am a UK-based self-employed Art Technician, who travels around my local region to different galleries and museums to install art exhibitions.

Sometimes I handle famous and expensive artworks or priceless artifacts, but most of the time it’s probably artworks you’ve not heard of. This includes 2D work like paintings, 3D work like sculptures, video projections, screens, sound systems, computers, and room-filling installations. Sometimes we work directly with living artists to help produce their work.

Happy to talk about technical stuff i.e. how artworks are transported, packed, fixed to the wall, what sort of fittings are used, how an exhibition is spaced out, hung, arranged etc; or to talk about working in galleries, or any questions from artists about how to prepare works for exhibition etc

I’m also a practicing artist, and historically both a filmmaker and gallery curator - so happy to answer things relating to that sort of thing too.

Because it’s a pretty niche job I may have to keep some details vague for privacy etc.

I’m doing a public talk fairly soon on “what I do”, and I need to know what sort of things people are potentially interested in, so I can focus more on those in the talk - so any relevant questions would be really helpful to me, thank you.

  • hobata@lemmy.ml
    141·
    16 days ago

    What was your most bizarre or disturbing “art object” you thought WTF of it? By that I mean really sick shit like caned dog poop or guillotine collection.

    • Art_Technician@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      20·
      16 days ago

      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.