Indeed, Hewitt conceived of Seed Stage in quasi-theatrical terms. The rectangular enclosure contained about 10 feet of workshop space, at the end of which was a kitchen counter that also marked the beginning of the "stage," the elevated platform under, behind, and in front of which various activities take place. Underneath the stage was a root cellar and water system while above, a set of rolling shelves with canned and dried goods. As with nearly every dimension of the Whitney installation, these built elements were generated through a form of retooling, taking the Breuer profile of the Whitney’s building, mutating it at the scalar and planar levels, and rendering it horizontally (as flooring-stage) and vertically (as shelving).

The performed dimension of Seed Stage most immediately seems to reward notions of solitary artistic mystery and the inaccessibility of the creative impulse. But while Hewitt is interested in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (among many others), rather than arguing for a return to the romantic model of the isolated artist, his work throws that notion into the tub along with significant doses of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. If anything, he distills an alternative, possibly even a dialectical way of thinking about the artist’s material working space. "I want it to be a sense of agency both in the perception of what’s happening but also in the action that’s being taken," he says. Seed Stage is, then, a place of productive and perceptual mobility, addressed to "the very open relational possibilities between things, but also to the limits of reproduction and the anxieties of reproduction."

This evocation of limits and anxieties, as well as the recasting of the artist in terms of agency rather than pure creativity, is emblematic of a major sea change in the conception of what takes place in an artist’s studio. Where Gustave Courbet’s 1855 painting The Artist’s Studio showed, as the painter put it, "the whole world coming to me to be painted," a little over a hundred years later Courbet’s equation between the world and its representation was revisited and thoroughly transformed in several signal pieces of what would come to be known as institutional critique. Perhaps most influential among these is Marcel Broodthaers’s 1968 staging, in his Brussels apartment, of his Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles, Section XIXe Siècle, an extended tongue-in-cheek display of art-packing crates, postcards, museum signage, all inaugurated by a press conference; Broodthaers duplicated the same apartment from memory in plywood inscribed with words in place of objects in 1975, in La salle blanche, restaging this "museum fiction" at a one-to-one scale. (La salle blanche ultimately became the template for, among many other contemporary projects, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s various restaged live-work spaces.) The Belgian was not alone in this recon-ception of the studio. In 1962 the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri produced his Topographie anécdotée du hasard, a meticulous documentation of all the elements to be found on a table in room 13 of the Hotel Carcassonne in Paris, where he was then staying. Like Broodthaers, he revisited and revised this project, in 1964 on a visit to New York, when he opened his room at the Chelsea Hotel to gallerygoers, who would find therein the clutter of everyday living alongside various of his signature "snare pictures" and assemblages. The conceptualist Edward Krasinski, whose signature mark of standard blue adhesive tape placed at a height of 130 centimeters elided Constructivism and Surrealism, worked on converting his Warsaw studio into a complex and living artwork from 1988 until his death in 2004, circumnavigating the entirety of its space (save one small room) with the blue tape. This act combined the order of high end and even metaphysical geometric abstraction with the clutter of the everyday, from leftovers to sentimental tchotchkes to other works-in-progress. Like Spoerri’s seaming of the lived, including leftover meals, and the displayed, or Broodthaers’s various "domestications" of the museum, Krasinski’s procedure also linked his studio to his exhibitions by literally taping them together, via the blue tape strip of "length unknown," as he put it, in a continuous line since the 1960s, when he first adopted the mark. His studio, on the 11th floor of an Iron Curtain-era apartment block, has been preserved as the Avant-Garde Institute.