Introduction

Wo u t e r D a v i d t s
& Kim Paice

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 The Fall of the Studio

The artist’s studio is in dire standing, or, at least, so

many critics and artists would have one believe. In
recent decades, this customary space used for artis-
tic creation and production has been discussed widely,
yet mostly in a casually negative form. Any praise is
by definition considered to be ideologically suspect.1
Indeed, ever since artists embarked upon the radical
program of questioning and eventually overturning
the traditional and conventional modes of produc-
tion, circulation, and reception of artworks in the late
1960s, the studio has suffered a series of tragic blows.
It became a prime target for critique, was declared to
have fallen, and finally lost both its conventional prom-
inence and mythical stature — its putative station as
“imagination’s chamber.”2 To many artists, the space
not only accommodated, but, above all, represented a
type of artistic practice, material production, and cre-
ative identity that they wished to supersede or avoid
altogether. “Deliverance from the confines of the stu-
dio,” wrote Robert Smithson in 1968, “frees the artist
to a degree from the snares of craft and the bond-
age of creativity.”3 Just as the studio was experienced
as a romantic straitjacket, an outdated and restrictive
context for the development of new modes and strate-
gies of making, distributing, presenting or experienc-
ing art, the long-established mediums of painting and
sculpture, which had traditionally been considered
studio arts, were deemed passé, and likewise their
tools and techniques seen to be irrelevant. New modes
of production were developed and tested with seeming

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 Introduction

urgency. Some artists simply stopped making works

themselves and began outsourcing the production of
1 Isabelle Graw, ‘Atelier. Raum ohne Zeit; Vorwort’, Texte Zur Kunst, 13,
49, (2003), p. 5. This negative perception is certainly symptomatic of the
persistent lacunae in critical scholarship on the artist’s studio. In stark
contrast to the spectacular increase of the field of critical museum studies,
which has resulted in a wide range of publications, engaging disciplines
as varied as art history, anthropology, sociology, and political science, the
artist’s studio has not yet received the full consideration that it deserves.
The beginnings of the proposed consideration can be found in Caroline
A. Jones’s groundbreaking compendium about studio practices of key
American artists, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American
Artist, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. More
recently, too, there has been a spate of exhibitions that have presented the
artist’s studio as a vital topic in contemporary art (at the Henry Moore
Institute in 2002, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2006, the
Kunst Akademie in Berlin in 2006, the Hugh Lane Museum in Dublin
in 2006, and the Centre Pompidou in 2007). These shows have evaluated
fundamental changes made in artmaking since the 1960s and also
examined the means by which artists have questioned and reinvented the
studio. For the respective catalogues, see Jon Wood (ed.), Close Encounters:
The Sculptor’s Studio in the Age of the Camera (exh. cat.), Leeds: Henry
Moore Institute, 2002; Stedelijk Museum Bulletin, 2 (2006); Jens Hoffmann
and Christina Kennedy (eds.), The Studio (exh. cat.), Dublin: Dublin City
Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2006; and Didier Schulmann (ed.), Ateliers: L’artiste
et ses lieux de création dans les collections de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky (exh.
cat.), Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2007.
In popular culture however, the studio still enjoys a high status. In January
2007, British life-style magazine Wallpaper*, for example, ran a remarkable
quiz-like article in the ‘Art’ section, entitled ‘Private Viewing’. It showed
photographs of a certain Gautier Deblonde, who travelled around the world
to “capture the inner sanctum of artists.” Readers were invited to “spot
the clues” and “name the absent genius.” The answers were printed in the
last pages of the magazine. They revealed that photographs of the studios
of such famous artists as Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Chuck Close, Rachel
Whiteread, Luc Tuymans and Richard Serra had been included – some
of which were easier to guess at than others. For more substantial and
historical publications that have taken up the topic of the artist’s studio as
a photographical subject, we would like to single out Alexander Liberman,
The Artist in his Studio, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1960; Lieven Nollet,
Ateliers d’artistes (exh. cat), Antwerpen: MUHKA, 2001; and Dominique de
Font-Réaulx, The Artist’s Studio, Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2005; Liza Kirwin
and Joan Lord, Artists in their Studios: Images from the Smithsonian’s
Archives of American Art, New York: Harper Collins, 2008.
For the historical use of the studio as a backdrop for fashion photography,
we would like to refer readers to the study by visual artist Joke Robaard
within the context of the Research Group of Visual Arts of the Academie
voor Kunst en Vormgeving/St Joost, Avans Hogeschool, and published as
Joke Robaard: Folders # 53, 54, 55, 56, edited by Joke Robaard, Camiel van
Winkel, Jaap van Triest, ’s-Hertogenbosch/Breda: Lectoraat Beeldende
Kunst, Avans Hogeschool, AKC|St.Joost, 2008.
2 Michael Peppiatt and Alice Bellony-Rewald, Imagination’s Chamber: Artists
and Their Studios, Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1982.
3 Robert Smithson, ‘A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects’ (1968), in:
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack D. Flam, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996, pp. 100-113 (107).

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 The Fall of the Studio

works of all kinds and scales to engineering firms and

industrial manufacturers. As Richard Serra recounted
in 1985, when he started to produce large-scale steel
sculptures in the late 1960s, he was forced outside of
a private studio: “The studio has been replaced by ur-
banism and industry. Steel mills, shipyards, and fabri-
cation plants have become my on-the-road extended
studios.”4 Other artists tried to circumvent the con-
ventional division between the site of production and
reception that persists in the system of studio and gal-
lery, and opted for site-specific work, either inside the
gallery itself or on remote locations — hoping thereby
to subvert the tried presentational techniques of art
institutions and ultimately to short-circuit the com-
modification of art. In 1971, Daniel Buren decided
to reverse the dominant way of doing things and no
longer to force the artwork into a course of eternal
nomadism.5 He ended his seminal essay ‘Fonction de
l’atelier’ with the radical statement that his decision to
work in situ compelled him to leave the studio and to
“abolish” it.6 Desires to make monumental earthworks
and ecological art led some artists to reclaim derelict
sites for their work — as was the case for Agnes Denes,
who declared a landfill in southern Manhattan to be
her “studio.”7 The endeavour of taking exception with
any notion of a preset spatial ontology of the studio
was also clearly at issue in the conceptualist renuncia-
tion or suspension of the materiality of the art object.
When an artwork comes into being and exists as a mere
idea, its ‘creator’ is no longer in need of a separate, let

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 Introduction

alone an especially assigned and equipped workplace

at her or his disposal. As Lawrence Weiner’s notorious
“declaration of intent” bluntly indicated, neither the
construction of the piece by the artist, its fabrication,
nor its actual building was a guarantor of ‘art’. The
ultimate existence of a work depended on the presence
of a someone at the receiving end: “Each being equal
and consistent with the intent of the artist, the deci-
sion as to condition rests with the receiver upon the
occasion of receivership.”8
In recent decades, the desertion of the studio
has become still more apparent and involved. In such
films as Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty (1997) and Sec-
tion Cinema (Homage to Marcel Broodthaers) (2002),
Tacita Dean calmly positions the studio as one among
other lost and phantasmatic objects, as her camera

4 R ichard Serra, ‘Extended Notes from Sight Point Road’ (1985), in Richard
Serra: Writings, Interviews, Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1994, pp. 167-173 (168).
5 Daniel Buren, and Jens Hoffmann, ‘The Function of the Studio Revisited:
Daniel Buren in Conversation’, in Jens Hoffmann and Christina Kennedy
(eds.), The Studio, Dublin: Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, 2006, p. 104.
6 Daniel Buren, ‘Fonction de l’Atelier’ (1971), in Daniel Buren: Les Écrits (1965-
1990). Tome I: 1965-1976, edited by Daniel Buren and Jean-Marc Poinsot,
Bordeaux: CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 1991, pp. 195-204.
7 Agnes Denes, ‘Living Murals In the Land: Crossing Boundaries of Time
and Space’, Public Art Review, 17:1, 33 (Fall/Winter 2005), pp. 24-27
(25). Reflecting on her Wheatfield: A Confrontation (1982), she explained:
“Wheatfield sprang up twenty feet from the Hudson, one block from Wall
Street, flanked by the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. At
sunset the four-block site was my studio. Exhausted from the day’s work, I’d
look out at the rushing waters of the Hudson and the yellow stalks of wheat
waving in the wind, savor the heavy smell of the field and the buzzing of
dragon flies, surrounded by ladybugs, field mice, praying mantis. I was
on an island of peace, just a block away from the heartbeat of the city and
evening rush hour on West Street.”
8 Lawrence Weiner, as quoted in Alexander Alberro, ‘Reconsidering
Conceptual Art, 1966-1977’, in Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.),
Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999,
pp. xvi-xxxvii (xxii). This statement was first published in the catalogue for
the exhibition January 5-31, 1969, New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969, n.p.

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 The Fall of the Studio

languorously haunts Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty

(1969) or Marcel Broodthaers’s studio in Dusseldorf.
Furthermore, it is now rare for art to be produced in
a single spot and by a sole individual. Rather it comes
into being on myriad ‘sites,’ via both physical and vir-
tual bases, and through the collaboration of different
people with varied skills and backgrounds. For that
matter, few artists can be said to reside in one place.
Most operate in multiple locations around the globe
and participate in a network of multiple artistic, in-
stitutional, and socio-political ‘actors’.9 As Philippe
Parreno, a celebrated exponent of the nomadic exis-
tence, relational activity, and collaborative practice
that has flourished since the 1990s, remarked in 2003:
“I don’t need one studio, but I do need a lot of stu-
dios.” His ideal studio, he continued, “would be one
place made of many different places, (…) made of dif-
ferent qualities and useful in different time frames.”10
The dispersal of the artistic workplace across
globalized networks has led to the widespread ac-
knowledgment of the ‘post-studio’ era. We often
speak of or read about inhabiting a moment in his-
tory that is past or beyond the studio. Indeed, the space
has been deemed on many occasions to be over, and
done with. In the contemporary scholarship about art,
the nomenclature of the ‘post-studio’ has become ut-
terly commonplace. In both theoretical and critical
prose the terminology is used frequently. And yet
it is still challenging to determine precisely when
and with whom this manner of speaking about the

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 Introduction

studio began. Although Smithson and Buren are often

considered as the pioneering figures of ‘post-studio’
practices, neither one of them ever used the term,
despite producing voluminous writings on this mat-
ter.11 John Baldessari, who employed the term to de-
scribe a course he taught at the California Institute of
the Arts, Valencia, in the early 1970s, does not recall
where he took the term from — “perhaps from Carl
Andre,” he guessed, in an interview in 1992.12 Andre
indeed coined himself in an interview of 1970 as “the
first of the post-studio artists,” although he immedi-
ately hedged that the claim was “probably not true.”13
The history of the origination of the idea of the
‘post-studio’ is apparently as uncertain as that of ‘insti-
tutional critique’.14 Although both terms have played a

9 F  or a broad discussion of the roles and significance of art’s industrial

fabrication, we refer readers to the October 2007 issue of Artforum on the
theme of ‘The Art of Production’.
10 K ate van den Boogert, Studio Visit: ‘A lien’ Philippe Parreno, in TATE,
January / February 2003, pp. 48-53.
11 Caroline A. Jones has observed that Smithson “aspired to become the first
post-studio artist,” only later to acknowledge that, “[n]either ‘post-studio’
nor ‘post-modern’ were yet common in Smithson’s lexicon, of course.” See
Jones, Machine in the Studio, p. 270. In the sequel to Brian O’Doherty’s
famous book of essays, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery
Space (San Francisco: Lapis Press, 1976), it is quite revealing that the author
does not use the term ‘post-studio’. Rather, his succinct text reinvigorates
our understanding of the importance and crucial role of the studio. See
Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship Between Where Art
is Made and Where Art is Displayed, Buell Center/FORuM Project, New
York, Columbia University, 2007.
12 Interview with John Baldessari, conducted by Christopher Knight at the
artist’s studio in Santa Monica, California, April 4, 1992; Smithsonian
Archives of Modern Art; http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/
transcripts/baldes92.htm.
13 Carl Andre and Phyllis Tuchman, ‘An interview with Carl Andre’, Artforum,
8, 6 (June 1970), pp. 55-61 (55).
14 A ndrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of
Critique’, Artforum, 44, 1 (September, 2005), pp. 278-283. In this brilliant
essay, Fraser establishes that not a single one of the leading artists-
protagonists of ‘institutional critique’ – including Smithson or Buren – had
ever used the term.

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 The Fall of the Studio

crucial role in critics’ and artists’ parlance of the past

four decades, there is no one person who can claim to
be the sole author or exponent of either one. But in
the case of the ‘post-studio,’ we should also consider
the extent to which the term does justice to the cur-
rent status and nature of the space(s) and place(s) of
art production. Following four decades of the critical
exploration of the institutional art regime and its
paradigmatic spaces by artists, the studio curiously
seems to be the only space of the so-called ‘art nexus’
that remains systematically endowed with the prefix
‘post’. How often do we read or hear about a post-mu-
seum, post-gallery, or post-house-of-the-collector?
Has the studio become the ultimate casualty of the
neo-avant-garde’s wishes to dismember the institu-
tional apparatus?
Despite profound changes in the understand-
ings and processes of artistic production in the
1960s, not everyone considered the studio to be ob-
solete. As early as 1968, Lucy R. Lippard and John
Chandler, in their famous essay ‘The Dematerializa-
tion of Art’, recognized that the seeming evapora-
tion of the art object in conceptualism could not be
equated with a vanishing studio. On the contrary,
with an explanation that is strikingly structuralist,
Lippard and Chandler informed Arts Magazine read-
ers of the notion that the studio was merely undergo-
ing a functional, and not a fundamental, change: it
was “again becoming a study.”15 Lippard and Chandler
eluded taking up a funereal voice, and struck more

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 Introduction

nuanced tones — albeit without examining the impli-

cations of their statements. Their assertions, however,
prompt us to consider the historical dimension of the
modern artist’s studio, namely the relation between
the workplace of artists and scholars, represented by
the long-established historical model of the study. In
that sense, the term ‘studio’ signifies more than an
enclosed space for genius, creativity, or melancholia;
and this resonates with the postwar abandonment of
related notions of the author, and is aligned with the
discourse of the ‘post-studio’. The historical use of
the term ‘studio’ sealed the gradual transformation
of the early-modern artist’s workshop from a place of
manual practice to one of intellectual labor. It embod-
ied the gradual blurring of the distinction between
artistic and academic activities and thus could be said
to emblematize a virtual condition of personal ar-
tistic reflection or ‘studious activity’ that permeates
contemporary artistic ways of making.16 In this re-
spect, Lippard and Chandler then seem to hint that if

15 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, Art

International, 12, 2 (February 1968), pp. 31-36, as reprinted in Alberro and
Stimson (eds.), Conceptual Art, pp. 46-50 (46).
16 For this understanding, we would like to refer readers to the brilliant
collection of essays by Christopher S. Wood, Walter S. Melion, H. Perry
Chapman and Marc Gotlieb, in Michael Wayne Cole and Mary Pardo (eds.),
Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism, Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2005. In the introduction, Cole and Pardo explain
that the current use of the English word ‘studio’ for the early-modern artist’s
atelier is historically incorrect. In English the word ‘studio’ does not appear
in this meaning until well into the 19th century; in Italy, until far into the
17th century, people called the artist’s atelier a bottega, or simply a stanza
(room). The Italian word studio (or studiolo) refers to the room, or even only
to the furniture of a scholar. Since the 15th century, artists have increasingly
often also had a studio, where they collected books and all sorts of
curiosities and to which they could withdraw for private artistic reflection,
away from the busy public workshop or bottega.

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 The Fall of the Studio

conceptual art grants us a new understanding of the

role and significance of the studio, on the one hand,
and of the nature and identity of the space, on the
other, it does so neither by discarding the customary
model of the studio, nor by inventing a new one alto-
gether: it revisits the stakes of an existing, yet over-
looked model of the studio.
An analogous argument and approach informs
the present compendium of essays on the artist’s stu-
dio. Instead of upholding the accepted wisdom or nar-
rative that the studio has fallen, this book ambitiously
questions many assumptions that underlie the popular
and international discussions of the ‘post-studio’. It
traces the shifting nature and identity of the artist’s
studio in postwar art and art criticism, both in Europe
and in the United States, and aims to achieve this by
way of detailed analyses of seminal artists’ practices.
The contributors are concerned with artists who are,
to be precise, at work. So, the essays gathered here are
devoted to individual practitioners and their under-
standing and use of the place of work — not necessari-
ly in order to frame their practices in the studio, rather
to analyse their practices of the studio — across media
and geographies. Thus, The Fall of the Studio deliber-
ately focuses on the artist’s studio as key trope, insti-
tutional construct, and critical theme in postwar art.
While some of the artists discussed here are canonical
figures of the second half of the 20th century, others
maintain highly active careers at the beginning of the
21st. All of them, however, partake in the staging, re-

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 Introduction

staging, performing, critiquing, and displaying of the

space and place of the artist’s studio, in one way or
another. While the list of the artists who figure in this
study is by no means exhaustive or even representative
of possible rapports that artists have had with the stu-
dio since the 1950s, the collected essays, nevertheless,
present a succinct palette of significant positions and
approaches; and this variety allows us to broach key
medium-related, gender, cultural, as well as socio-po-
litical issues that lend specificity to our understanding
of the institution of the studio.17 Its wealth lies in the
acknowledgment of the discontinuities more so than
the continuities in practices of the studio.
One proposition that permeates the following
essays is that the rapport of postwar art and artists
with the studio is in no way transparent, as seems
to be implied by the overly broad term ‘post-studio’.
While some of the essays here demonstrate that art-
ists most closely associated with the romance of the
studio have a far more complicated relationship with
the space and its aesthetic regime than is commonly
accepted, other essays insist that protagonists of the
‘post-studio’ era do not maintain so radical a distance
from the studio, as is often claimed — either by the
artists themselves or by their critical advocates.
17 Admittedly, the present collection of essays remains hopelessly partial
and does little to examine and frame the subject of the studio within such
methodological perspectives as post-colonialism, multiculturalism, and
contemporary identity politics. Yet this would have required a different
approach than that of gathering the papers we received in our call for the
College Art Association’s Annual Conference, but one we will certainly take
into account when, in all likelihood, we expand upon this compendium in
the future.

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 The Fall of the Studio

In the first essay, Morgan Thomas discloses the

complex ‘figure’ of the studio that can be discerned in
the work of the celebrated painter Mark Rothko, who
remains closely and yet problematically associated
with Abstract Expressionism. Even though Rothko’s
work “has been framed as emblematic for the limita-
tions of the studio as it functions in modernist art,”
Thomas argues, “[it] opens up the possibility of an
alternative thinking of the studio.” Contrary to the
reading of the “closed nature” of the paintings as a
direct token of the painter’s isolated, romantic, and
heroic use of his studio, Thomas wants us to consider
them “in terms of an aesthetic of oscillating forces.”
Rothko’s paintings, and in particular the later ones
that were commissioned for specific sites, are defined,
she explains, by a “complicated and often volatile two-
way traffic between the studios and the real or imag-
ined destination,” a series of quasi-cinematic moves
that, Thomas provocatively says, produce a “vertigi-
nous effect,” not unlike the one evoked by the dialec-
tic of site and non-site in the work of Smithson.
Next, MaryJo Marks lays out the blunt and
sophisticated understanding of the studio of Bruce
Nauman, an artist who most famously wondered in the
late 1960s what it meant to be an artist and possess a
studio to do all kinds of things in — when consciously
“not start[ing] out with some canvas.” As Marks dem-
onstrates, Nauman embarks upon a self-reflexive ex-
amination of “the form of strategic deprivation,” or
the “deliberate loss of conventions, materials, or rou-

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 Introduction

tines that had formerly determined (…) what an artist

does and practices doing in the studio,” better known
as “deskilling.” To these ends, Nauman makes the
most of the “conjunction of empty time” and “empty
space” in his various studios. He turns away from con-
ventional studio activities to the staging of multiple
everyday activities — which he then documents either
in photographs or on film — in his studio works of
the late 1960s and finally records his vacant studio at
night in Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)
(2001), thereby revealing, as Marks convincingly as-
serts, that “mutually dependent, the art and the studio
exist by virtue of the artist’s mere presence, a minimal
guarantor of their identity as they are of his.”
The actual presence of the artist is further ex-
plored by Kirsten Swenson, who discusses Eva Hesse’s
self-portrayal in her studio, both with her work and
with items that she collected and used in her studio.
Examining the famous, and as-yet under-analyzed
photographs of Hesse, literally posing with certain
sculptures in her studio and taken by fashion pho-
tographer Hermann Landshoff in 1968, Swenson
demonstrates how the artist herself intelligently and
sensibly responded to “the phenomenological prem-
ises and tacit gender politics of minimalism,” and also
used her studio “for negotiating the diverse post-studio
strategies” that prevailed in the New York art world of
the late 1960s. Looking closely at one of the most-
reproduced photographs of the series, in which Hesse
lies on a chaise longue and is covered in a tangle of

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 The Fall of the Studio

rope, Swenson unravels the convoluted references that

the artist advances through the conscious arrangement
of work by artist friends such as Smithson and Sol
LeWitt and reviews of Hesse’s own latest exhibitions.
The Landshoff photographs, Swenson points out,
serve “as historically conscious depictions of the artist
in her studio” that reveal the extent to which Hesse,
who “notably maintained a more conventional studio-
based practice” than many of her contemporaries,
nevertheless “incorporated diverse extra-studio prac-
tices into the conceptual bedrock of her art.”
In her essay on Robert Morris, Kim Paice starts
by wondering why, although this well-known Ameri-
can artist is thought to be one of the artists responsible
for the fall of the studio, he himself never wrote about
studio practice as such. Throughout the 1960s, the
artist maintained several studios in which he decon-
structively expropriated the studio’s margins, noise,
and activity into photographic and performance works
that, Paice contends, are in some ways “about displac-
ing or ruining the artist’s studio.” Folded into the fa-
mous Box with the Sound of its Own Making (1961) and
Card File (1963), as well as the ambitious Continuous
Project Altered Daily (1969), she also recognizes the
artist’s desires “to increase public awareness” of the
conceptualization of works while limiting “the sym-
bolical presence of language, images and gestures” in
them. Morris’s early Neo-Dada objects, later minimal
sculpture, and process-oriented installations all in-
volved attempts to “expose the everyday as well as the

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 Introduction

category of publicity,” the creation of exchange value,

and limits in artmaking. Decades later, these issues led
him, curiously, to endow his collected writings with
the supplemental title of his 1969 project. The fact of
being at work and of maintaining a “workly” quality
of work, whether in or outside the studio, Morris dis-
cerned, is valuable.
Daniel Buren, who is widely considered a key
protagonist of the ‘post-studio’ generation, took a
more definite decision in 1971. Writing his, by now,
canonical essay on the function of the studio, the art-
ist believed that his decision to work in situ had forced
him not only to leave the studio, but also to declare it
“extinct.” Through a close reading of the 1971 essay,
however, Wouter Davidts shows that Buren’s particu-
lar farewell to the studio, while based upon a highly
intricate and efficient analysis of the role and signifi-
cance of the space, in a triad with the gallery and the
museum, that is, is anything but ultimate. Buren’s
desire for a “true relationship” between the artwork
and its place of creation — epitomized by the histori-
cal studio of Constantin Brancusi in Paris — inhibits
him, Davidts argues, from accepting or exploiting
“the loss that takes place within every exhibition.” It
is remarkable, Davidts observes, that the very condi-
tion of publicity that befalls every artwork, and which
Buren has repeatedly analyzed in detail, seems to
trouble him to such an extent that he feels obliged to
abolish precisely the space of the studio. Even more
so, since his solution is not to ‘leave’ the studio, but to

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 The Fall of the Studio

‘incorporate’ it — through “a complete identification

between the studio, the world, and himself.”
The artist’s bodily encounter with the studio
forms the core of Julia Gelshorn’s essay on the ne-
gotiation of the studio as a gendered space in the art
of several male artists in the late 1990s. The work of
such diverse and controversial figures as Matthew
Barney, Martin Kippenberger, Jason Rhoades, and
Paul McCarthy, she argues, amounts to more than
merely juvenile or pathetic veneration of the space
of the studio, but in fact involves highly coded and
self-conscious engagements with the latter’s histori-
cal “masculine mystique” — in the aftermath of both
feminist and post-feminist critiques of the studio’s po-
tential implications in the masculinity in art. Through
a close reading of some of these artists’ celebrated
sculptures, performances, and large-scale installa-
tions, Gelshorn demonstrates how these works deliver
a smart and ambiguous update of “the studio as a frame
for the ritual display and formation of the artist’s iden-
tity.” Ultimately, she concludes with the admission
that “attempts to undermine, subvert or renounce the
myth of the studio, tend only to reveal that the annihi-
lation of the studio is itself a counter-myth.”
The question of mythification pervades Philip
Ursprung’s essay on the studio of Olafur Eliasson.
Using his own experience of visiting Eliasson’s stu-
dio, and having participated in debates and symposia
that the artist organized there, and ultimately con-
tributing to a book on the studio proper, Ursprung

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 Introduction

sets out to uncover the undeniable appeal of Eliasson’s

whirling work space and task force of collaborators
in his Berlin studio, formerly called Olafur Eliasson
Werkstatt & Buro (Olafur Eliasson Workshop & Office).
He meticulously unravels Eliasson’s posture as art-
ist-cum-entrepreneur-cum-scientist by tracing the
various assignations of the studio, to then expose the
trailblazing enterprise that its system has made pos-
sible. The artist, explains Ursprung, “at once demys-
tifies and remystifies the studio as a site of artistic
production,” since he “manages to appeal to both the
romantic idea of the workplace and the administra-
tive notion of the office.” In this way, we learn that
Eliasson has succeeded in launching the studio as a
virtual brand, an attractive label of experimentation
that all the products that it engenders are endowed
with, all while creating a marvel that narcissistically
mirrors and reproduces itself over and again.
In the final essay, Jon Wood embarks on a similar
quest to grasp the role of an artist’s studio, quizzically
asking, “Where is the studio?” Deeply intrigued by
Jan De Cock’s site-specific wooden fiberboard sculp-
tures, called Denkmal, Wood thoughtfully and evoca-
tively traces the importance of the “rich, anxious and
deeply contested tradition and legacy of the studio,
and of the studio of the sculptor in particular,” that is,
first in 19th and 20th century literature, and then in
the young artist’s self-aware sculptural practice. A Jan
De Cock Denkmal, Wood points out, presents itself to
the visitors as a studio, “albeit an abandoned one,” that

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 The Fall of the Studio

demonstrates a “subtle awareness of its [own] museo-

logical status and problematic posterity.” These sculp-
tural environments, he explains, bear the material
residue of the manual work it took to produce them,
and when they are displayed as “sculptural and archi-
tectural interventions” and accompanied by “staged
installation photographs” of people frequenting them,
the artist’s sensitivity to “the theatre of the studio and
art museum” allows us to grasp the studio both as a
stage set with “off-screen sculptures” and as “material
existence as archive and documentation.”
In concluding, we would be remiss not to men-
tion the debates about the artist’s studio that are be-
ing waged today, in real institutions, for example, in
ongoing discussions about ‘research in the arts,’ and
in the practical spheres in which recent changes in the
conception, goals, and functions of higher art educa-
tion are occurring. Within these discussions, which
are very lively in Europe and in the United States,
about the different modes and modalities, and the
goals and purposes of artistic production and creativ-
ity, the artist’s studio remains both a crucial referent
and reference point for future forms of practice and
knowledge. Within the current exploration and evalu-
ation of the scientific and/or academic value, poten-
tial, and significance of artistic work, the studio as the
(private and/or personal) site of that work, remains to
serve as a crucial subject.
Additionally, a discussion of the contemporary
status and nature of the studio can add to the ongo-

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 Introduction

ing debate in art schools around the world about the

necessity and significance of providing art students
with a proper workspace. In an era when students
work ever more systematically on personal comput-
ers and laptops, questions arise as to what extent the
architectural and institutional investment in separate
and viable workspaces for all students remains valid,
let alone crucial to preparing our students for pro-
fessional practices. Our expectation is that this pub-
lication, which critically questions and evaluates the
historical and contemporary modes and modalities of
the artist’s usage of studio space, finds concrete rel-
evance in these contexts. We sincerely hope that this
anthology puts to rest the many sweeping claims and
prevailing misconceptions about the obsolescence of
private workplaces in the era of global informaticiza-
tion and mobility.
While many essays do indeed emphasize the ca-
lamitous status and heritage of the studio, they reveal,
if anything, that the studio, up to this day, continues
to emerge as a fabulous, hydra-headed monster that
— like the museum — survives every radical at-
tack. The present collection of essays is marked by
the credence that one can not easily dispense with
the condition of the studio. One is forced to deal
with it through a critical engagement with its mul-
tiple historical legacies and with the different modes
and modalities in which it has been used, displayed,
represented or ‘practiced’ by artists. This endeavour
paradoxically forces us to pay the studio a visit, over

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 The Fall of the Studio

and over again, or at least to consider those myriad

spaces where artists are at work; an endeavour for
which this book wishes to act as a thought-provoking
exercise and an inspiring invitation.

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 Introduction

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