Studio Visit

Bruce Nauman Gustave Courbet Rirkrit Tiravanija Jeanne Silverthorne Marcel Broodthaers Daniel Buren Olafur Eliasson Caspar David Friedrich

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"Of all the frames, envelopes, and limits — usually not perceived and certainly never questioned — which enclose and constitute the work of art (picture frame, niche, pedestal, palace, church, gallery, museum, art history, economics, power, etc.) there is one rarely even mentioned today that remains of primary importance: the artist’s studio." This remark, penned in 1971 by the French Conceptualist Daniel Buren, throws new light on that complex refuge, the studio. For if the atelier has been both the site and the subject of representation, the space of world making, then an undercurrent in recent art provides a new address both to what Svetlana Alpers has called the "forward, probing lean" of traditional studio practices — that is, their future-oriented creative tilt — and to the static framing of their results by the museum.

A project at the Whitney Museum in New York this past fall posed an extraordinary meditation on the studio’s fecundity, while preserving some of its antic, mutable poetics. Corin Hewitt’s Seed Stage, in the museum’s lobby-level gallery, presented viewers with an unusual reconfiguration of the relation between the studio artist and the space of display. The central volume of the gallery was taken up with a large white structure, a functionalist shack roughly twice as long as it was wide; the pristine exterior walls of this studio left only a narrow corridor around the gallery’s perimeter for visitors to circulate in. The corners of the studio had been cut away to leave shoulder-width gaps through which the interior could be seen. Inside what might be thought of as the architectural "core" of the project the artist carried on his daily activities, eating, reading, cooking, moving objects about, storing them or retrieving them, arranging and photographing them in a kind of continuous puttering. He also tended boxes of worm-filled compost, grew vegetables from the seeds of those he’d eaten, or returned leavings (fruit skins as well as photographs) to the boxes of mulch. These activities in turn yielded photographs of maquettes made with foodstuffs and modeling putty and anything else at hand. The latter images, at least those that survive, serve as the documentary residue of the piece itself. Scattered around the periphery of the gallery, the photographs functioned as "seeds," inasmuch as while they emerged as the "fruit" of the labors taking place inside the studio they were often as not returned to that space to be rephotographed, or bottled, or mulched and, by implication, to serve as the visual ground for new elements.

The studio itself was capped by a frieze of color swatches while the walls and floor of the space were tinted gray. A large three-dimensional color wheel made of modeling putty provided the material from which copies of food were made; both palette and storage dump, this object testified to the mutabililty of materials — nothing went unused, everything provided fodder. "I keep remaking things and eating things," Hewitt explained during an interview. "Before I cook a squash I make a sculpture of it out of Plasticine and then I eat the squash and I’m left with the sculpture, which I then boil down and reuse by putting it back on my color wheel, so that my color wheel keeps getting fed."

On weekends, the artist was visually accessible to viewers through the slits cut at each corner of his studio, each of which provided a limited if wide-angled view onto the set. The slit "was a solution to finding an image-based relationship to a physical space," Hewitt explains. This understanding of the studio-laboratory through photography renders the chamber itself as a camera, that is, a small room with a limited view. "I’m trying to create a language of photography where it can be redigested very quickly," says Hewitt, "so photographs that now go up come back in and you never know as a viewer how long they’ve been there, how long they will be there, what order they were taken in, only that they have a relation to the site."