The Really Big Show

For three days we played curatorial assistants to Pablo as he set up the 3rd Annual International Assemblage show to be ready for the opening on Sept 29th. There are over 300 art works by the sixty artists participating and over twenty five arriving in person to attend. It’s terribly exciting and as they say in the circus “a really big show”!
Dion’s main job is transporting things to the mouldy dungeon and working on the computer, I mostly assist with the unloading and moving of art work. I try hard not to break things. Mostly it goes well. There are some dramas about the placement of art and the sizes of certain pieces, a set of three that Pablo thought were about 2ft long, turn out to be over nine feet long each! (A metric misunderstanding as it turns out)
Huge parcels arrive daily in crates, badly wrapped packages arrive by courier, some artists transport their work themselves and drop it off. It’s wonderful to open all the surprise packages. Pablo says it is like a horrible Christmas, as you never know what you are going to get. His three interns keep very busy cataloguing both the show and packaging it arrived in, which Dion also gets to take down to the dungeon.
Four large parcels arrive from Canada in crates – and lo and behold the packager has used the Robertson screw driver to seal them. The Robertson screw driver is apparently unknown in European and American hardware circuits. Not thinking to bring this tool with us from Canada, we disappoint. In the end it takes all day to open the four crates using alternate technology.
In the midst of all this artists arrive from all over the world and need direct directions to restaurants, to look at their art, to talk, to flirt, to network and in one case shop! I was seconded as the only other north American female of shopping age to take the LA Times art critic shopping through out Berlin. I happily obliged
Slowly over the three days between shopping and computer work the show was hung.
It looked fantastic and filled the entire gallery and the three studios. The only major glitch was about twenty minutes before the opening Deiter somehow managed to erase the entire data base of catalogue materials, which of course contained all the labels! To say there was drama is to underscore the tension and words exchanged. We missed most of it as it was all in German. A last minute plan was devised to label everything with a number and print out a price sheet. After much running to the copier store, hand edited corrections and last minute identification of art work, there was something to give to the “collectors” at the opening. And what an opening it was.