The artist's studio is a privileged space, celebrated in a lively and provocative show at the Hugh Lane, writes Aidan Dunne.
You can imagine the scene. The Hugh Lane Gallery's curators are discussing possible themes for a major exhibition in their new, much expanded space. They run through a list of possibilities, mulling over this and that. No one seems overly enthusiastic. Eventually, though, someone notices the elephant in the room. "I know," they say, "let's do an exhibition called The Studio." The elephant in the room, identified by some as being of a pale complexion, is of course the reconstructed Francis Bacon Studio from Reece Mews in London, which occupies a major chunk of the gallery.
It's augmented by an archive and study centre, by some Bacon paintings, and by other documentary material, including Perry Ogden's photographs of the studio and Bacon's living space.
In the popular imagination, the artist's studio is an object of fascination, a privileged space with its own mythology and mystique. In fact it has also evolved as the modes of art practice have evolved. The Studiotakes the concept of the artist's studio and runs with it, starting from the romantic conception exemplified in the Bacon Studio - visionary genius conjures masterpieces out of mess and chaos - and exploring such derivatives and variants as the mobile or even non-studio, the research centre, the office, the workshop, the live-in studio and the site-specific studio.
This latter was famously mooted 35 years ago by one of the exhibitors, the sculptor Daniel Buren, who had a few years previously resolved to abandon his conventional studio and work in each respective exhibition venue. The influential essay he wrote at the time, The Function of the Studio, was one of the starting points for the exhibition. Buren has made a site-specific intervention for the show and his contribution is evident before you get into the gallery at all, in the form of the coloured glass panes in the windows of Charlemont House. In fact you could say colour-coded, given the colours chosen.
Part of the effect, as often with Buren's work, is to make us look anew at the architectural context, which is agreeable if less than startling. At the same time, as he observes himself, most artists still work in the context of the studio as traditionally constituted: a space in which to make work which will then be displayed elsewhere and, indeed, anywhere. Buren's argument is that the mere fact of working in a studio, even if the artist is writing a memo in relation to a project and not physically making an artwork, subtly prescribes the nature of the eventual work.
In conversation with The Studio'scurators, Jens Hoffmann and Christina Kennedy, and with Georgina Jackson, he notes the anecdotal interest of the Bacon Studio, but argues that while it may make one feel close to the artist in a "sentimental" way, it doesn't elucidate the work which, one would have to say, seems a bit unfair. Chances are, after all, that if you see the precise context in which an artist's work is made, you will learn something about the work, given what Buren himself describes as the particularity of each artist's studio.
One feels he has to distance himself from the idea of the studio recreated and preserved in the museum because of the site-specific logic of his position. The most famous example of the zoo-like display of an artist's studio is Brancusi's, installed outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Brancusi designed and photographed his studio as an installation, though not in the form it currently takes.
Others are preserved in situ, including Jackson Pollock's, represented in the exhibition in the form of Thomas Demand's photograph, in an exterior, nocturnal and fairly uninformative view. Demand is an extraordinary artist who, working from source photographs of sites with distinctive though unstated associations, recreates three-dimensional scenes in cardboard and coloured paper and then photographs the facsimile. The result occupies a space oddly in between reality and representation, and is usually quite compelling.
In his catalogue introduction, Hoffman privileges the Romantic conception of the studio as a location that "has always been perceived as a place of artistic energy and creative excess". The "always" and the "excess" are both highly questionable, though they represent a popular view that is ferociously lampooned in Paul McCarthy's scatological video installation Painter, in which a clownish, de Kooning-esque, expressionist artist reduces a studio to a state of Bacon-like messiness. Interestingly enough, the real de Kooning's studio was fastidiously neat and, on the one occasion when he was persuaded to make a painting for the camera, he immediately destroyed the result, pointing out that the practice of painting consisted largely of standing in front of a canvas and worrying, which could only make for boring footage.
Something of that boredom is all too vividly conveyed in Fischli & Weiss's Bus to Atelier, an hour-long video which impassively records their daily commute to work, by bus. The Way Things Go, their 30-minute masterpiece, contained within the space of a rather large "studio", would have been an equally appropriate inclusion and, as it happens, you can see it if you visit Imma's current group show, All Hawaii Entrees/Lunar Reggae.
Studios were surely viewed as workshops in a more practical way throughout a great deal of time. Artists generally tend to view their own studios in that way, at least the ones not predisposed to megalomania which can, admittedly, go with the territory. The show includes excerpts from Andy Warhol's Factory Diaries, featuring clips of people who visited Warhol's studio, The Factory.
Warhol labelled it such because of his deadpan, literal sensibility - art is a business, the studio is the art factory - but in doing so he was incidentally referring back to the long-established practice of the studio workshop, directed by a master, and employing a team of individuals of various levels of expertise and ability.
Artists do become fond of their studios, which is natural if they suit them and facilitate the production of work that satisfies them. Hence the plight of Urs Fischer, who liked the studio he occupied during a London residency so much that he decided to take it home to Switzerland with him. Not, apparently, as a working space but preserved in aspic, like the Bacon Studio, except that it was his own idea, as an artist, and therefore the studio and contents made up a work of art. It's there in the Hugh Lane. What's in it doesn't look hugely promising, as art, but the whole thing is quite interesting.
Hoffmann posits it, rather bafflingly, as querying authenticity, on the basis that it is a fictional, constructed space. But surely, as it is, it bolsters the idea of authenticity, unless Hoffmann simply made up Fischer, and his studio.
The late Dieter Roth exemplifies an issue relevant to a great deal of contemporary art. Roth pioneered the creation of ephemeral artworks in perishable materials yet, as time went by, he became a kind of artistic Midas, as if everything he touched became art and hence worthy of preservation, and he was, besides, a voracious hoarder with various studios and collections in different countries. His and Bjorn Roth's Icelandic studio floor is displayed in the show, tilted against a wall, sort of like a huge abstract painting, and quite an interesting one, too.
Bruce Nauman made a series of innovative film performance pieces in his studio in the 1960s. In contrast to the intense activity of these works, the much more recent video on show here pictures a section of his empty studio by night, except that it's not quite empty. Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), documents the efforts of his cat, John Cage, to catch the mice that had taken up summer residence. It can be read as an allegory about the artist at work.
Martha Rosler has an exceptional track record as artist and teacher operating consistently outside of institutional orthodoxy, and her Rosler Studio is a documentary representation of her own studio, excerpted from her Brooklyn house and planted in the Hugh Lane, complete with transistor radio. Essentially her studio is an office and study, occupied with computer equipment, stationery, stacks of contemporary art magazines and a couple of shelves of books - an eclectic though uniformly serious selection. It's oddly comfortable and inviting.
The Studiois a lively, provocative show, one that invites response and engagement. Its constituent elements continually propose ideas with which we may agree or disagree, but which are unlikely to prompt only indifference. It boasts an impressive cross-section of prominent modern and contemporary artists, but it should also be seen in relation to other strands of the project, including organised visits to the studios of 11 Irish or Irish-based artists, including Mark Cullen and Brian Duggan, Garrett Phelan, Fergus Byrne, Mark Garry, Finola Jones, Lee Welch and Fergus Martin.
The whole thing concludes with a symposium in February, featuring Buren and others, which will consider the current status of the artist's studio.
The Studio is at the Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane until Feb 25
