While the dominant legacy of these conceptual projects has been the "poststudio" explorations of artists like Renee Greene or Andrea Fraser that take up the museum as a discursive site, or that, as with the ateliers of Olafur Eliasson or Erik van Lieshout, reconceive a studio practice in terms more akin to a think tank or design workshop, another direction, which is gaining momentum of late, is to exploit the studio as a generative space. These new and mostly process-based projects (such as Corin Hewitt’s) address with pointed obliquity the private exertions, the obscurity, and the sheer doggedness of creative work that those poststudio works have tended to skirt. Jean Silverthorne’s 1999 installation at the Whitney Altria, The Studio Stripped Bare, Again, presented a cast-rubber one-to-one rendering of her studio space. In a show currently on view at the SculptureCenter in Queens, New York, artist Melanie Gilligan’s Prison for Objects, a two-person performance that takes place between the scrap heap of a fictional artist’s workspace and a fictional art critic’s laptop, asks directly and metaphorically about the dynamic of creative reproduction.

Installation is one way of bringing the studio into the museum, but large-screen projection and photography tend to be the mediums of choice. The ecology of the studio has been a topos in several stunning video projects. Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance, John Cage) (2000), an immersive four-screen projection of surveillance video of his rural studio in New Mexico, in which the nighttime predation of his studio cat, along with fleeting views of scurrying mice, perversely reiterates that "primordial" sense of things "being experienced" — in this case, the experience being the very tension of attention. Gillian Wearing’s work with the vagrants who pass their days outside, and sometimes in, her working space, has yielded a number of monumental and desperate works, most importantly the rather horrifying large-screen triptych projection Drunk (2000), as well as a pendant photographic series. Hilary Lloyd’s Studio (2007), takes up where Wearing’s oddly wrenching critique of expressionism leaves off in exploring the stray marks left behind by the unknown abstract painter who had previously inhabited her working space. This wall-scale video diptych literally tracks the creative residue of the absent artist, using the remnants of his process as visual scaffolding while its exhaustive documentation of these expressive marks unravels the very premise of video documentary.

As spectacular as these projects are, and as voyeuristic their initial propositions, the surveillance strategies on which they rest present the promise of a lapse into chaos — hence the need for the apparatus of discipline and control. The creepy banality of their fascination with the potentially disobedient other merely heightens, of course, our awareness of our own attractions to, filiations with, and rejections of disorder. Bringing these private and obsessive work spaces into the museum, if anything, poses a dysfunctional collaboration with the audience: we are voyeurs rather than relational participants, and the studio, whether the artist’s or that of a fictional persona, is a generative but fundamentally opaque site. And yet — Courbet was right, somehow — we are implicated within it.

This makes for an interesting set of tensile gray areas, as the viewer’s position oscillates between identification with and rejection of both artist and object. This is one of the most compelling issues raised by Corin Hewitt’s project: Which fruit to eat, the luscious one made of Plasticine or the juicy organic one? Each time a lump of colored putty is returned to its color wheel, the base color moves more toward gray. Yet Hewitt demurs that his project is abjectly entropic: "Very few things to me seem abject." The operative term more rightly would be composting, the most alchemically poetic of biointensive processes. Indeed, the gray of Seed Stage’s interior was derived from a vast mixology of annual colors (Martha Stewart pinks; Ralph Lauren beiges) "composted" into a "fertile gray" while other elements are pigmented in tonal ranges rather than in extremes. "I tried to get rid of polarities," Hewitt explains. "I was interested in the ways that grays and browns can be ‘compost.’"Seed Stage then is an environment that curves back on itself, from the integration of the Whitney’s Breuer profile to the absorption of photographic subject matter. Perhaps this notion of the studio as fragile ecosystem is one that encompasses the viewer also, so that, when encountering a work that closely approximates an artist’s studio, he or she becomes activated by the creative process.