The explosive growth of the art world during the last decade has been fueled by rich new collectors, shiny new galleries and sprawling new museum wings. But the gears and the grease that keep this big machine humming are people who can be generally described with less glamorous adjectives: underpaid, uninsured, overworked and sweaty (not to mention often heavily tattooed, bearded, hung over and painfully burdened by loan payments for their M.F.A. degrees).
These are the art handlers, an often-invisible international underclass of blue-collar workers, most of them aspiring artists trying to pay the bills. But on Sunday afternoon at a bare-bones gallery on the Lower East Side, a group of them finally got a chance to grab a little glory. And even better, they got a raucous public forum in which to mock gallery owners, curators, collectors, critics, fellow artists and just about everyone in the art world, not excluding themselves.
The event, the first-ever Art Handling Olympics — a combination roast, “Jackass”-style stunt extravaganza and excuse to drink a lot — drew about 200 people at its height who came to the Ramiken Crucible gallery to watch a dozen four-man teams (art handlers are, by and large, male, and, by and large, large) go head-to-head, demonstrating their skills with a lot of fake art and untold amounts of Bubble Wrap.
“We kind of thought maybe this was the wrong time for this, because everyone who works in this field was worn out from working the Armory Show and everything that goes on around that, but it turned out it was the perfect time, because everybody needed to vent,” Ted Riederer, an artist, former art handler and one of the event’s organizers, said. For some of the events, Mr. Riederer took on the role of a cruel German curator, wearing a tight houndstooth suit and sunglasses, shouting abuse at the handlers like “Nein! Nein!” and “Hold it higher, higher, a little higher!” and “I pay you people to do this?”
A qualifying round in which teams were required to tape together an art box and wheel one of their members around a city block inside of it, and to stop midway to wolf down Chinese pork dumplings and throw back shots of whiskey, weeded the teams down to four.
The next events — a speed competition to hang framed works of art (with sadistic measurement requirements like 9 15/16 inches) and a contest called the “static hold,” in which handlers had to keep framed pieces of lead weighing 50 or 60 pounds held against a wall while Mr. Riederer barked orders at them and took a leisurely cellphone call in the midst of their grunting labors (“Ah, yes, hello darling, Basel, yes”) — left only two teams for the final round.
Points were subtracted for inelegant taping, dripping sweat on the art, and, once, for failing to “waste time properly” when a team that finished early didn’t leave to smoke a cigarette or get a beer. Justine Birbil, director of the Michael Werner Gallery and one of the event’s three judges, awarded extra points to the members of one team because she thought they “looked good from behind.”
Called “The Eliminator,” the final punishing round involved a kind of Nascar-pit-crew competition for the remaining two teams — one named the Kings of Cleats and one whose name was a slightly racy double-entendre. The teams had to take pieces of art out of a wooden crate and, with the clock ticking, assemble them into an installation with no instructions or curatorial guidance. (The “art installation” kit consisted of a blanket, a tambourine, streamers, two rattraps and other things that resembled street trash — in other words, the kinds of things many art handlers have actually had to try to assemble by themselves on the job.)
If the time constraints weren’t tough enough, the art handlers were often heckled during this round by onlookers; one shouted “Derivative!” as the artwork was thrown together. Asked if he and his friends had practiced for the event, Paul Outlaw, a member of the team that went home with the silver, said: “Other than doing this all day, anyway, and sometimes all night? No.”
At the end of the day the Kings of Cleats, in an upset, won the gold, a “lovely handcrafted medal,” as the organizers described it, embossed with an image of a hand holding up a majestic flaming tape dispenser. “Plus, of course, they win enduring fame,” said Shane Caffrey, an art handler for the Marianne Boesky Gallery and the event’s lead organizer.
No money?
Mr. Caffrey laughed. “In this business?”