Contributed by Max Liebermann* / The sounds of installation at Art Miami include airplanes flight overhead, whirring touch on drivers, drywall screws squeaking into the MDF (medium density fiberboard) walls, beeping electricians on scissor lifts, din, fans, and people talking. The larger-scale Art Basel adds beeping forklifts, bustling go-carts whipping from aisle to aisle, and hushful talk. The people making these noises, or operating the machines that brand them, are art handlers.

[Image at top: Stretching a large-scale painting that arrived rolled up in a tube.]

At many of the smaller fairs booth owners install the piece of work themselves, but hither'south someone doing information technology at Art Basel.

For Art Basel and most of its satellite fairs, galleries and dealers generally pay for the services of one of four companies � Masterpiece International, Dietl, Atelier iv, or Gander and White � which in turn sub-contract freelance fine art handlers, flying them down, putting them up in hotels, and assigning them to dissimilar booths. Art handlers with no special feel are routinely hired and men establish the majority of art handlers at any fair � probably on account of their relative brawn. Nonetheless they vary widely in size and, though the job has often been described as predominantly "lifting inordinately heavy things for other people," they certainly are not uniformly fit. Art handlers at Art Basel, men and women, are generally white.

Whoever the handlers are, they accept to be conscientious non to stray outside their professional turf. Local unionized workers have to install and paint the walls for the booths, and handle electricity, HVAC, rug, and flooring repair. Booth-wise, all the art handler is supposed to practice is touch up the paint when things are wrapping up. In practice, conjuring a local union guy can exist tough, so the handlers sometimes cease upward discreetly doing things they aren�t strictly supposed to exercise. At Fine art Miami, a non-union fair, discretion is not required or observed. Art handlers and booth owners can be seen filching paint buckets and rollers abandoned by non-union painters to finish their walls, which would be unheard of at a union fair like Fine art Basel. Regardless of the particular off-white, considering nigh of the walls are painted white and all the lights are spotlights, over-illumination (a medically recognized environmental phenomenon that leads to headaches, migraines, fatigue, anxiety, and stress) sets in, and many art handlers expect dazed and mildly disoriented by the end of the twenty-four hour period, finding it hard to focus on specific tasks. In turn, the fair itself often acquires a hazy, surreal feeling in the early evening.

Hanging a painting at Art Miami.

Art fair piece of work is by nature transient; there only aren�t enough fairs to afford installers full employment. They generally divide their time between work in museums and galleries and working for the 4 big shipping/crating companies, which exponentially surge their personnel strength during the big fairs. New York Metropolis is practically the only place where a freelance fine art handler can get reliably steady piece of work, and can count on the standard art off-white rate of $25 an hour, which means that city has the biggest supply of the required labor. That'southward why, for Art Basel, almost all the art handlers are flown downwards from New York. As a result, Art Basel becomes a kind of convention for New York art handlers, and thus an opportunity for both seething and networking. An fine art handler will see every gallerist who never called him back, every jerk who worked him for eighteen hours a twenty-four hours, three days running. But he�ll also encounter practiced friends and fellow handlers � brothers and sisters in arms who make the thirteen-hr days with demanding booth owners bearable. And while enough of fine art handlers practice not make art or especially care about it, many others are artists, writers, musicians, or craftsmen. For them, the fairs nowadays opportunities to encounter new creative colleagues and catch upwards with those they already know.

At Art Basel, each art treatment visitor has its headquarters in the back complex of storage rooms with walls l anxiety high, some rooms as big equally regulation baseball diamonds. The whole area is redolent of pizza � along with sandwiches the en masse meal of selection � and for better or worse facilitates advice. (Fine art Miami has no such headquarters, and is a much lonelier fair for the art handler.) While art handlers don�t rate 5-star hotels, and are dispersed among relatively cheap chains in and effectually Miami, there remains a bureaucracy and points of relative pride. For example, art handlers often keep their logo-emblazoned shirts on while socializing. Explaining his conclusion to shift to Masterpiece this twelvemonth, one art handler said, "I just couldn't practise another twelvemonth in Seagull," referring to Dietl'south customary hotel of choice.

A pretty standard process: hanging wall vinyl.

While installing fine art is oft very quick, time can besides slow down as placement decisions are being fabricated, work orders are filled, and administrative arguments erupt. The art handler is on telephone call, and waits as long as information technology takes to go the booth installed to the satisfaction of the booth owner. Working for a booth owner is a crapshoot. Some come to the off-white with a very clear program, including realistic expectations and specific designs. Others do non. (A few newbie galleries this year naively decided to bring half-ton light boxes that required three times every bit many people to unload them from the crate than usual.) Some are low-key, big-hearted people, while others requite the impression that there�due south nothing underneath their chests. Artful and ergonomic standards are also highly variable. Some people desire carpet, others vinyl pieces installed on the floors. Some bring wallpaper, which non every art handler volition know how to install.

Near every art handler knows how to hang a painting, when to put foam blocks downwards for work to safely rest on, when to wear nitrile gloves, how to use a drill, and approximately how much weight a drywall spiral tin comport. They all get that the bubble side of the wrap goes out when packing fine art work. Just contemporary art � especially the kind presented at international art fairs � is so predictably non-standard that well-nigh of this knowledge is simply marginally useful. And so what would a trained art handler be expected to possess to work the fair? Commencement, his own tool kit, containing standard tools, and cleverly stocked for screwball exigent situations with things like European star drill bits. Less tangibly, a good art handler must take abundant patience, generosity, and kindness, and a willingness to compromise and please the people she is working for � never saying no, cracking jokes at the right time, and smartly executing tasks like adjusting the height of a painting seven or eight. A consummate art handler must as well be an improviser. Art handlers who are also artists are more likely to excel in this expanse because they tend to be innately artistic people. Technical know-how can merely get the handler so far before she is asked to hang, for the kickoff time in her life, a six-human foot shroud made out of toilet paper. She has no choice just to figure information technology out.

Part 2 (later this calendar week): Deinstalling the evidence.

* Not the reporter's real proper noun.

Related posts:
Quick report: Miami circular-upwards
Role 1: Sharon Louden finds colour and abstraction at Pulse and Art Basel Miami(2015)
Function 2:  "Untitled — the best off-white in Miami Embankment" (2015)
Role 3: A selection from NO MAN'S Country, Untitled, and ABMB (2015)
Office 4: Artist-run @ Satellite in Miami (2015)

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