December 2009

From the previous post:

Most attempts by net artists to break the fourth wall and reveal their studio environment are as banal as those environments: webcam feeds, grinning avatars, etc.

And then there's this strategy, from a Salon-hosted blog, the "it's not really me, it's some guy's eye" graphic:

Have always disliked this kind of arty cropping. It's especially obnoxious in ads for politicians. Eliot Spitzer and Geraldine Ferraro both hired some art director genius to do this for them--or am I thinking of an old Pepsi ad with Ferraro? But that's another rant.

In response to this, from the previous post:

"The studio--artist sitting in a Starbucks, a cubicle, or his mom's basement surrounded by empty Cheetoh bags--will not be seen or become part of the mythology of the work."

JS emailed:

I am actually very interested in the mythology of an artist sitting in dumb places while making profound work online. This contextual information actually interests me more for someone with a virtual practice than it would for someone who makes work offline, especially given the cryptic styles preferred by many net artists for their online portfolios. But maybe this just belies my bias towards Keeping It Real.

Some non-virtual artists actually do have fascinating studios; it's not fair to them that I'm complaining about MOMA recreating Pollock's Long Island barn inside a 53rd Street office tower. Visiting those locales and listening to the artists talk about their work can and does add to their mystique, or, if you don't believe in mystique, "a depth of understanding of their work that can be conveyed anecdotally."

My bias is towards invisible artists: one of the great things about the techno music underground of the late '80s/early '90s was the "faceless dj/producer" who created a vibe by means of vinyl record sleeves, posters, and aliases, as opposed to the "cock rock" strutting stage personality under the spotlight. Most attempts by net artists to break the fourth wall and reveal their studio environment are as banal as those environments: webcam feeds, grinning avatars, etc.

I am also an ancient blogger who still remembers the early days of the medium, when critics assumed all blogs were personal diaries full of inconsequential details about feeding pets, quitting smoking, etc. I went overboard to "professionalize" and probably still do--no pictures of me at my laptop cropping a photo of a cardboard box in Photoshop, just the box. (If that can be called professional.)

Not thoughts on the exhibit of that name but the concept of "picturing the studio."

The degree to which museums fetishize the studios of "made" artists (e.g., MOMA's recreation of Pollock's meager barn) is inversely proportional to the decline of studio practice generally.

Decline not in the sense of less artists but in the attrition of a "privileged space." "Privileged" either in the romantic sense of a quasi-spiritual environment or the capitalist sense of a place where business is done, that requires payment of rent, hiring of employees, etc.

Two places where the studio could be said to have moved in the absence of the above conditions:

1. The workplace or "day job situs" (text, photoshop collages, and animations made during "downtime" and posted from work computers--not by me of course);

2. The internet - use of a blog as a publishing platform - "virtual exhibitions."

Many artists have studios that will never be visited, because they are horrible garrets or the logistics of getting artworld "players" over are just too daunting. Some of these same artists will post hundreds of reproductions of their "real space" artwork online, and even hundreds of pictures of the changing interior of their otherwise private workplace. Ironically, hundreds or even thousands more people will see their work and the environment from which it springs than if these same artists went the physical, gallery route of getting work shown. Ironically, again, though, this may be false data. Speaking from personal, anecdotal experience: I have had many people say, on making an actual studio visit, that the work was much different (meaning better) than what they assumed it was from the internet.

Other artists will cut the "virtual studio" out of the loop altogether and make art specifically for the Internet (fast-loading, punchy, linkable, transparent OR, on the other hand, opaque, net-unfriendly, and reliant on text to explain). The exhibition space then becomes the viewer's browser plus whatever cues (page design, media bells and whistles) the artist chooses to spin the work. The studio--artist sitting in a Starbucks, a cubicle, or his mom's basement surrounded by empty Cheetoh bags--will not be seen or become part of the mythology of the work.

More on the exhibition I'm in that opened Friday; here is the press release [pdf version]:

December 12, 2009-February 13, 2010

Curated by Michelle Grabner (SAIC) and Annika Marie (Columbia College), Picturing the Studio is presented in conjunction with the College Art Association's 98th Annual Conference in Chicago, February 10-13, 2010. With works by more than 30 artists spanning the past two decades, the exhibition is testament to the compelling nature that the studio itself holds as subject as well as place of production.

Picturing the Studio features site-specific works by New York artist Ann Craven, SAIC alumna and Los Angeles based artist Amanda Ross-Ho, and SAIC faculty Judith Geichman and Frank Piatek. Major, iconic works by Rodney Graham, Bas Jan Ader, Matt Keegan, James Welling, David Robbins and Karl Haendel are intersleeved among excellent examples of work by Chicago-based artists who take on the studio as subject.

"The privileged space of the studio remains an important domain for the artist," notes Grabner, SAIC professor and chair of the Department of Painting and Drawing. The very range of works convened—photographic documentation and drawings of celebrated studios, the transposition of the contemporary artist's studio into the space of the gallery, theatrical tableaux evidencing its impact on the physical state of the artist's body, delicate line contours of workshop paraphernalia, and so forth—illustrate the heterogeneity of artistic strategies, modalities, and scales of embodying the studio. While Picturing the Studio offers no clean closure to these questions, what it does seek to show are instances of artists working in, on, and through the studio as a special site of attention.

Featured Artists

Bas Jan Ader, Conrad Bakker, John Baldessari, Stephanie Brooks, Ivan Brunetti, Ann Craven, Julian Dashper, Dana DeGiulio, Susanne Doremus, Joe Fig, Dan Fischer, Julia Fish, Nicholas Frank, Alicia Frankovich, Judith Geichman, Rodney Graham, Karl Haendel, Shane Huffman, Barbara Kasten, Matt Keegan, Daniel Lavitt, Adelheid Mers, Tom Moody, Bruce Nauman, Paul Nudd, Frank Piatek, Leland Rice, David Robbins, Kay Rosen, Amanda Ross-Ho, Carrie Schneider, Roman Signer, Amy Sillman, Frances Stark, Nicholas Steindorf, and James Welling.

A related book on the subject of the artist's studio, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, a co-publication of SAIC and the University of Chicago Press, will be released in April 2010. For ordering information visit www.press.uchicago.edu

This exhibition is made possible in part with funds from the College Art Association and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. It is also part of Studio Chicago, a yearlong collaborative project that focuses the artist's studio. www.studiochicago.org

I may have erred in previously saying the show also addressed post-studio issues. The pieces I have in the exhibit deal in part with extending studio practice into workplace "downtime."