Last week, while meeting with a few fellow artists on a small committee for EFA, our studio program in New York, we began discussing the creation of several WhatsApp groups to manage practical matters—scheduling events, sharing announcements, and more. The conversation then drifted toward the idea of creating a smaller auxiliary chat devoted less to administration than to mutual aid: a place to ask where to find a particular material, seek advice on framing or fabrication, or troubleshoot the countless minor crises that emerge in studio life. One of my colleagues, the artist Kate Hopkins, proposed the perfect title for the group: “Phone an Artist.”
I almost immediately recalled a moment in 2003, when I found myself in a bind while preparing a solo exhibition. A central element of the show needed to be a salt sculpture, and despite repeated attempts, I could not figure out how to make the material bind properly without crumbling apart. At the time, I was working at the Guggenheim, which had just opened The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney. The exhibition itself was an extravagant labyrinth of baroque objects and installations fabricated from highly unusual materials—petroleum jelly, silicone, freeze-dried potatoes, tapioca, astroturf. Barney was then at the height of his influence in the art world, generating enormous fascination among critics and the public alike. Yet for all the intensely personal and physically exposed nature of his work, he himself remained a famously elusive figure, rarely making public appearances or granting much direct access.
During the planning of the exhibition, those of us in education and public programs met with Matthew Ryle, Barney’s longtime studio manager and close collaborator. Ryle, by contrast, was remarkably relaxed and approachable. As we discussed possible public programs for the exhibition, I realized I was sitting across from someone who likely possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of strange sculptural processes and improbable material solutions.
At some point during one of those casual conversations, I asked Ryle if I might trouble him with a stubborn sculptural problem. How, exactly, does one make a salt sculpture hold together? He replied without hesitation: “Oh, that’s easy. Just call me at the studio next week and I’ll give you a few tips.”
The following week, I phoned Barney’s studio and asked for “Matt.” When he came on the line, I cheerfully said, “Hey Matt, how are you? This is Pablo from the Guggenheim.” I explained once again my salt-sculpture dilemma and added that I suspected he was probably the only person I knew who could help me figure it out.
The voice on the other end immediately launched into an extraordinarily detailed explanation. He described different binding agents and mixing techniques, suggested combinations of materials, warned me about humidity and structural stress, and even gave me addresses in New York where I could find specialized supplies. It was an astonishing display of practical knowledge, delivered generously and without the slightest impatience. As I scribbled notes frantically, I remember thinking that this was precisely the kind of hidden expertise one imagines circulating through artists’ studios.
And yet, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, something began to feel slightly off. The voice did not sound quite like Matthew Ryle’s. It slowly dawned on me that I was not speaking to Barney’s studio manager at all. I was speaking to the other Matt in the studio: Matthew Barney himself.
I was instantly mortified by the realization. I must have sounded absurdly naïve and presumptuous: cold-calling one of the most famous artists in the world to ask a handful of stupid technical studio questions—as if one were to phone Picasso for advice on stretching a canvas. I did not dare confess that I had actually intended to speak to the “other Matt.” Instead, I stoically continued the conversation, thanked “Matt” profusely for his generosity, and hung up as gracefully as I could. I was relieved that he could not see me blushing on the other end of the line.
Later, I remembered Matthew Ryle saying that Barney genuinely loved talking about technical problems and material processes. He was apparently the sort of artist who, after a long studio day, would happily go out for beers with assistants and spend hours discussing fabrication methods the way a mechanic delights in discussing engines. That kind of conversation, I imagine, felt concrete, collaborative, and unpretentious. By contrast, the highly cerebral discourse that often surrounded his work and its “meaning”—the dense theoretical language of museum panels, catalog essays, and academic symposia—may have felt far less comfortable to him, perhaps even faintly alienating. He must have felt, as many artists do in those instances, like a rare animal in observation.
One could say that there exists, among artists, an informal underground network of technical knowledge: a constantly circulating body of insider information passed from studio to studio, often orally, through favors, chance conversations, late-night phone calls, or frantic text messages. But unlike the world of beginner tutorials or FAQ lists, the questions that emerge at a certain level of artistic practice are rarely simple or standardized. They tend instead to be bizarrely specific, nuanced, and unprecedented—because the work itself is attempting to push into territory where there are no ready-made instructions.
How do you create a sound installation using a technology that has not even been invented yet, as Janet Cardiff and George Burres Miller had to figure out for their 2001 adaptation of the Thomas Tallis 40 part motet? How do you bring living plants into a museum without accidentally introducing pests into the galleries, a logistical challenge once faced by Marcel Broodthaers? How do you install a beehive with live bees inside an exhibition space while ensuring that the insects remain calm and nonaggressive, as in projects by Pierre Huyghe? How, relatedly, do you fabricate a book entirely out of beeswax, which was a problem I once confronted myself? Or how does one engineer a giant music box, a paint-squirting carousel, a giant American flag shredded by a massive turbine?
Doing a cursory inquiry with artist friends, many immediately offered examples of similarly improbable forms of artistic mutual aid. The playwright and artist Aaron Landsman described consulting collaborators about how to create projections visible from a moving bus performance, only to arrive—through failed experiments—at the unexpectedly elegant solution of projecting onto a farmer’s barn along the route. Artist Paola Cabal recalled needing advice on motors for a kinetic sculpture and receiving a complete technical walkthrough from fellow artist Jeff Carter. Artist Bean Gilsdorf remembered regularly crossing the street to consult a puppeteer neighbor with encyclopedic material knowledge, asking questions such as how to fabricate hundreds of lightweight sculptural fingers capable of producing the correct tapping sound against glass. Meanwhile, artist Nicol Michi Gan observed that some of the most important calls are not technical at all, but conceptual: reaching out to trusted artist friends for help making “a nebulous but good idea legible.” Others, including Lexa Walsh and Susie Underwood, described exchanges involving improvised hanging systems, papier-mâché techniques, audio balancing, and unusual sculptural materials. Again and again, what emerged from these conversations was the same recurring phenomenon: artists functioning as one another’s unofficial laboratories, troubleshooters, translators, fabricators, therapists, and speculative engineers—sharing forms of highly specialized knowledge that would otherwise be almost impossible to locate elsewhere.
The questions are endless because they are merely extensions of the infinite ways in which artists attempt to exceed existing forms and materials. Much of artistic innovation, in practice, consists not only of conceptual invention but of technical improvisation. And so artists often become each other’s unofficial research departments: pointing one another toward obscure suppliers, forgotten industrial processes, scientific tricks, specialized fabricators, or other artists who once encountered a similarly improbable problem. Often, nobody possesses the full answer. What circulates instead are fragments, clues, precedents, rumors of solutions—just enough to make the next experiment possible. Often the best go-to people in this regard are conservators: scientists who know best how to address material issues and predict the behavior of those materials.
I am no Matthew Ryle, nor am I a conservation scientist, and therefore I am often incapable of answering sophisticated (and often non-sophisticated) technical questions. Yet I should confess something else—something I have never publicly admitted before: over the years, I have inadvertently become a kind of confidential call center for art-world crises.
Every so often, I receive a discreet phone call from a curator, museum director, producer, or arts administrator seeking advice about a difficult situation unfolding behind the scenes. Perhaps because I have spent what feels like geological time inside institutional contexts, I am sometimes sought as a kind of emergency interpreter of the peculiar social mechanics of the art world: labor tensions, budgetary disasters, institutional politics, curatorial conflicts, artist relations, or situations slowly drifting toward legal rupture. The kinds of problems that arrive are rarely glamorous. More often, they involve bruised egos, failed communication, collapsing timelines, ethical ambiguities, or the delicate diplomacy required when relationships between artists and institutions begin to fracture.
While I cannot provide specifics, I can offer at least one example for the sake of entertainment.
Some years ago, a museum colleague called me seeking advice about an oddly delicate crisis. A mutual friend of ours had attended a dinner hosted at the home of an extremely wealthy museum trustee. At the end of the evening, her coat had vanished from the coat closet. Since it was the middle of winter, she simply took a cab home and assumed the coat would turn up the next day. It did not. The museum discreetly contacted the board member to inquire whether the coat had perhaps been misplaced or accidentally taken. No luck. Days passed. Our friend, understandably irritated, began insisting that the museum reimburse her for the missing coat, which happened to be very expensive, her best piece of clothing.
This placed everyone in an exquisitely awkward institutional bind. My colleague felt she could not aggressively pressure the trustee, who had after all been the gracious host and occupied a stratospheric level of donor importance. At the same time, the museum administration—already enduring budget cuts and austerity measures—was deeply reluctant to reimburse such a costly item. So my colleague called me to ask what I thought should be done.
“Pay for the freaking coat!” I replied immediately. To me, the answer seemed obvious. The financial loss was minor compared to the escalating emotional and institutional damage the situation threatened to produce. Eventually, the museum agreed and reimbursed her.
But the coda to the story was even better. Some time later, during another museum function, our friend spotted her missing coat hanging on the coat rack. The wealthy trustee had apparently taken it by mistake that night and had been wearing it ever since.
Due to the peculiar nature of these inquiries, I eventually realized that I had inadvertently become what, in technological language, might be called an “edge-case tool”: largely unnecessary under ordinary circumstances, yet suddenly indispensable under rare and highly specific conditions. As the ruthless criminal Anton Chigurh remarks in No Country for Old Men, trying multiple approaches is “foolish”; what matters instead is choosing “the right tool.” In the art world, perhaps, certain people unexpectedly become precisely that: highly specialized instruments consulted only when a problem becomes strange enough that no conventional solution seems to apply.
And perhaps, in one way or another, all of us eventually become that for someone else. To paraphrase Andy Warhol, each of us may have not get fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen minutes of usefulness. If we know whom to call, and if we are generous enough to share what we know, it becomes possible to assemble solutions collectively—to construct projects that are ultimately larger than the sum of their phone calls.