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Artists have always had assistants—Greek sculpture was carved in workshops, and Rembrandt painted with aides whose anonymity continues to cause curatorial headaches. But the figure of the “fabricator” is a relative newcomer in the history of art production. The fabricator was born only a half a century ago, when a push toward the use of modern materials and bigger, more complex projects meant that the art waiting to be created was unrealizable without a trained hand.

Fabricators cut, solder and engineer ideas into formation; they build and construct technologically complex visions on behalf of their author. Fabricators are not just helpers. While they follow orders, fabricators know something that their bosses don’t: how to make the art work.

Beginning in the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg synthesized found object and painting, technology and sculpture to generate art that whose form no longer offered easy understanding. Donald Judd stripped his creations to their most substantive essence so that his compositions equaled their content. In doing so, each obscured the lines between art and material, object and creation. Artistic innovation required a technical equivalent. For Lawrence Voytek¹ and Peter Ballantine², fabricators for Rauschenberg and Judd respectively, each day meant finding practical and mechanical solutions to ideas in gestation.

Voytek mastered material so that Rauschenberg didn’t have to. Welding, bending or just experimenting with anything industrial—from aluminum (he used over two tons in his 27 years working for Rauschenberg) to Renobond, 3 mm thick skin coating for skyscrapers—Voytek shaped the substance of Rauschenberg’s hybrid inventions. Ballantine, a carpenter, cut and glued Judd’s freestanding, discrete, plywood structures into their Minimalist simplicity. Unsupervised in his workshop, he built Judd objects as he might have built a table, so that the art would echo the kind of well-made appropriateness suitable to a finished product. He estimates that in his shop, entirely set up for Judd fabrication, he constructed 250 plywood cubes over the course of his career. In conversations with both their fabricators, one can hear the excitement of building art “like it had never been done before” resound twenty years later.

 Fabrication meant different things to Rauschenberg and Judd. For one, it was a means for increased experimentation, for the other, a way of distancing the artist’s hand from his creation. Rauschenberg’s delegation was practical—he simply could not produce the work himself—whereas for Judd, the delegating a task meant transferring control. As a result, the two artists developed distinct relationships with their colleagues. Rauschenberg kept his fabricators close by. Judd had no contact besides the initial object order and its final pick-up. But today, both Ballantine and Voytek retain a fierce trust in the artists they worked for. It is always “my artist” and always “the work.” 

The Harvard Advocate: How did you get started as a fabricator?

Lawrence Voytek: In college at RISD, I worked a lot in the industrial design department. When I graduated, my wife-to-be and I moved to Florida, where I took classes at Edison Community College. [Robert Rauschenberg’s] fabricator before me had recently left, so I sent my portfolio to him [Rauschenberg]. Bob had me come out to interview. It was pretty intense. Bob was always a hero of mine. I had seen a lot of films on him. When I was going to school, some were into Jasper [Johns], some into Roy [Lichtenstein], but I was always into Bob.

I went and I knocked. He said, “I’m Bob Rauschenberg.” I said, “I’m Lawrence Voytek.” That day, [other assistants] showed me where the welder work and they asked me if I could weld an aluminum frame. No one ever told me that I had the job but they told to come back tomorrow cause they had more frames for me to work on. 

Peter Ballantine: I came to New York in 1968 to be in the Whitney Independent Studies Program, which was just starting. Judd was one of the teachers there. I ran out of the money I brought with me and in those days, the fashion was for artists who needed to make money was to be a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician.

I started working for Judd on his building on Spring Street as a carpenter. I learned carpentry on the job—out of books. I always said yes whenever he asked me to do something. In 1971, he brought me a paper with a sketch and asked me if I could make it.

HA: Can you describe the studio? What kind of work did you do?