The painter Alexander Ross helped Julian Lethbridge move his New York studio to a SoHo loft and ended up managing the whole building, where Hirst, artist Michael Hurson and 303 Gallery director Lisa Spellman also lived. “From Julian I learned how the art world functions,” Ross says. But meeting the others didn’t really advance his career. “It opened doors to my mind,” he explains, “not anywhere else.”

Many artists bring on additional people just for specific projects. To prepare “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist,” his exhibition last winter at Lombard-Freid Projects, in New York, Michael Rakowitz needed plenty of help from his team of six. The show consisted of about 60 small-scale reconstructions—made with Iraqi food wrappers and Arabic newspapers—of artifacts stolen from the National Museum in Baghdad after the 2003 American invasion. Rakowitz intends to remake all 7,000 of the looted pieces.

In this case, the assistants—students, mostly—may make long-term commitments. But how long is too long to stay? Bleckner rotates his helpers out every few years. “After a certain point, you fear they may hold working for you against you if their career has not happened the way they thought it should,” he explains. Dunham concurs: “If you’re ambitious, you have to get out.”

The sculptor Joel Shapiro, who generally works on a large scale, has long relied on assistants, including some who weren’t sculptors themselves. Back in the early 1980s, for instance, painter Christopher Wool cut wood for him (“It was the best job I ever had,” Wool says). These days Shapiro works closely with Ichiro Kato, a master woodworker, and Patrick Strzelec, an artist who is expert at casting. “But while they’re realizing your work, they sometimes have to suppress their instincts,” he says. “They have a role in the shaping of a piece—but they also have their own art to make. Those who are pivotal to your work stay with you, but it’s not necessarily a happy position for that person.”

James Meyer’s 22 years with Jasper Johns have brought him security. He’s been careful, however, to maintain his own painting practice, even though it means he has to get up at 5 a.m. to work for a few hours before starting his day with Johns. “That way you don’t feel like you’re not moving ahead,” he says.

Meyer also points to the dangers of being associated so long with so celebrated an artist. Five years ago, he started working in encaustic, Johns’s signature material. “So my work is perceived as reflective of Jasper’s,” he says. “But it’s figurative—very different.” Meanwhile, his family has had to adapt to his travel to Johns’s three studios (in Connecticut, St. Martin, and South Carolina) and various exhibitions. “It’s just part of the job,” he remarks.

On the other hand, John Currin insists that “it wouldn’t help me to have an assistant. I’d end up micromanaging to a degree that there would be no point. That’s like hiring someone else to drive a two-seater sports car. Why bother?” Still, he says, he has taken on an artist-bookkeeper who also straightens up. “My studio looked like Francis Bacon’s,” he admits. “Now it’s a much more pleasant place to be.”

"The Studio System" originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2007 Table of Contents.