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.
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.
I just googled the pics. Do these sort of pieces come with diagrams showing how to place them?
Generally speaking, you'll likely get some sort of instructions, though the specifics will vary - sometimes things pretty much have hand-drawn "IKEA style" instructions, sometimes it's wall-based or floor-based paper outline templates - basically you tape the template to the wall, put screws in the locations marked, then take the template off and put the objects on the right screws.
You normally get example photos from previous times it was shown, as reference. There's often written instructions which might have very specific measurements of distances and angles, which can be difficult to follow in 3D space. Sometimes the artist is present, and they'll say "left a bit, up a bit, turn it a quarter turn clockwise" etc.
In most cases, the artist/owner/gallery wants the work to look as good as possible, so they try and make the instructions as good as possible.
Sometimes even less complicated works have basic instructions on assembly, and best practice examples of how to move, handle, rotate, install the work etc.
If instructions are particularly lacking, a previous technician may have written up better instructions - and certainly I've done this a handful of times - especially with new works that haven't been shown before. Sometimes we make notes whilst we install, and with some photographs, that becomes the "official way it's done".
In some cases it's actually left up to the curator (and sometimes the individual technician) and the instructions are just stuff like "put the sand on the floor, then put the plinths on the sand and put the sculptures on the plinths".