2003
'Accumulator'
Andrew Stones
8.30pm start. 45 minutes duration
Thursday 4, Friday 5, Saturday 6 December
National Sculpture Factory, Albert Road, Cork
Presented as part of Art Trail 2003
Commissioned by the National Sculpture Factory, Accumulator was a live
video event by artist Andrew Stones, which directly responds to the
interior of the National Sculpture Factory to generate, process and
present a large-scale multi-media installation. The live event took place at the National
Sculpture Factory, Albert Road, Cork at 8.30pm on Thursday 4th, Friday
5th and Saturday 6th of December
Accumulator is a site-specific work utilising a digital video projection
in which live images coexist with a time-compressed record of six months
of the Factory's daily work. Just prior to the shortest day in December
2002, Andrew Stones installed a CCTV camera inside the Factory to capture
an image of the Factory floor once every four minutes until the Summer
Solstice six months later.
In Accumulator, time and the longer-term processes of the Factory are
compressed into a 30-minute projected time-lapse film. The rhythm of days
and nights, as the seasons progress into summer, unfolds in a Factory
interior transformed through the use of lighting and physical interventions.
A dense multi-channel soundtrack, formed by processing audio recordings
made in the Factory, fills the space.
Andrew Stones has worked extensively with gallery and site-specific installations.
Recent projects include the multi-channel audio installation 'Tell Us Everything'
(2002) at the Royal Institution, London; the videotape 'Victorian Car Chase',
screened at the 2003 London Film Festival; and a series of video installations
(currently in development) based on visits to CERN (European Centre for
Particle Physics Research in Switzerland). More information on Andrew
Stones' work, and on his collaborations with Irish artist Frances Hegarty
is available at
www.brighter.org
 |
 |
close window
‘The Changing Role and Significance of the Artist's
Studio;
The Studio is dead, long live the studio’.
A symposium looking at the artist’s studio.
National
Sculpture Factory
‘'The Changing Role and Significance of the Artist's Studio;
The Studio is dead, long live the studio’.
29 November 200
Granary Theatre, Mardyke, Cork.
In November 2003, the National Sculpture Factory hosted a seminar looking at the artist’s studio as a conceptual, rather than a practical space. An obvious impetus for this examination comes from the role of the National Sculpture Factory as a studio provider, however, there are far more compelling reasons for broadening out the debate on artists’ spaces of production. We perceived a contemporary artistic resonance in exploring the studio’s role and place in history; in deducing what position it occupies both as subject and object of work in artists’ practice today. The following are transcripts of presentations on the day.
Tara Byrne
Director
Welcome: Tara Byrne
Director – National Sculpture Factory, Cork.
The National Sculpture Factory, (NSF), is a resource and support organisation for artists, providing working space and other facilities not available in usual studio situations.
It is for this reason that we have decided to examine what the role and function of the studio is; what it represents for artists, and how that impacts on our role.
Specifically we want to look at the studio as a concept and as a physical reality, what it means to work both in and outside of a studio. Does the studio, or absence of one, define the artist’s practice and is increased availability of home and hired-in technology accounting for less studio-based practice?
It is natural that this topic would interest us. The NSF’s role as a space provider is interesting, in that we aim to provide supports other than physical ones; opportunities to develop, grow and creatively interact; to promote dialogue and to gain access to new ideas, artists, practices and training. Our core aim, however, is to offer working spaces to artists.
How do our spaces, (being temporary), obviate the more permanent studio concept? Have sculptural needs changed as definitions of sculpture changes. Who uses our space and why?
Is space theoretical or conceptual as well as physical? Can our critical supports in the form of projects, lectures, and a training programme be described as offering conceptual space? Is studio practice the same as studio work?
What are the other types of support and value do the studio, and what it represents, have for the artist?
The studio has become important historically - there is a notion of what a studio is and should be - even what it should look like, with the Francis Bacon studio located in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin, raising interesting questions
The main growth in development of studio complexes that occurred through the ‘80’s and ‘90’s mean that it is now an appropriate time to assess their capacity to meet current needs, particularly as they relate to new technologies. Also we need to consider the collegiate and cooperative support which they can provide in light of current modes and definitions of artists’ practice and its context.
There are also major implications brought about by the new mobility and portability of an artist’s ‘tools’ for the traditionally fixed, geographically located studio space, and for the increasingly common site-based forms of practice undertaken by many artists on a regular basis.
Introductory Remarks
Declan McGonagle: Chair
Director, City Arts Centre, Dublin
The French artist Daniel Buren, in an interview in 1970, described the studio as the first frame of the work but later on in the interview he went on to say all his work derives from its abolition. What Daniel has said there is that the work represents the two poles around which today’s discussion will take place ‘The Studio is dead, long live the studio’.
The traditional model of the studio was as a site of production with no, or minimal, interaction with the public - a closed unit. But, interestingly, the most traditional studio , if it was functioning at all, if the artist was functioning at all, would be visited regularly by curators who might be researching an exhibition - by critics, researchers or writers and sometimes by buyers and collectors. I remember doing an exhibition with William Scott in the early 80’s and he said he also sold work directly to collectors from his studio. Even the traditional model, the closed model wasn’t that closed, it was also a ‘transactionist’ space and it connected directly to the distribution modes that operate beyond the studio.
So I don’t think we can be prescriptive in any way, and I’m pretty sure the speakers today are going to be anything but prescriptive in their address of the idea of the studio. I think it’s really about thinking of the studio as a function and not simply a place or a series of functions existing wherever the studio needs to exist. We are going to have speakers today looking at those sorts of issues from the perspectives of administration, from curatorial perspectives, from critical perspectives and from the perspective of the artist.
Mick Wilson
Coordinator
of MA studies, Dun Laoghaire Institute of Technology
&
Design,
Dublin.
Of Full and Empty Spaces: Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…
It is perhaps important to note here that this piece was prepared initially for spoken delivery and designed to kick-start an exchange among a group of artists and arts workers. This will hopefully help explain why its mode of address is so rhetorical, and why the text is littered with terms such as "we", "here", "now", and other devices such as repeated formulas and lists, that read awkwardly in a published text. I have elected to retain these idioms in order to underline that the text is designed as a mild ritual provocation rather than to pretend that it is a theoretically resolved reflection on the complex matter of the artist's studio.
In order to initiate a discussion of the studio space in contemporary visual arts practices, it is necessary first to note that it is a contested site: it is contested in that it is a site where some seek to locate the values and meanings of art practices and art products. These values and meanings are discursively constructed through positing some claim as to the precise or essential ‘nature’ of the studio and its processes. A central aspect of this contest over studio space is the exhibitionary performance of studio processes and exhibition of the studio construct itself. There is a complex genealogy to these exhibitions and performances of the ‘truths’ of the studio, which includes a certain ethos of ‘work’ as a guarantor of authenticity and reliable and verifiable value. This presentation will examine some aspects of the construction of the studio through a series of images which in multiple and often-contradictory ways posit an idea of the studio.
In 1991, Gavin Turk, submitted his emptied Royal College of Art studio space with a familiar blue heritage plaque, which declared in the usual rhetoric of such devices that "Gavin Turk Worked Here" citing the relevant dates. This perhaps surprisingly complex work, won no admiration initially from the Royal College of Art managers, although it has since become a mythic work in the story of the yBAs. Here a ‘signature’ was attached to the studio: effectively the emptied studio was thus filled with the aura of the artist's presence and inscribed by his occupation of the space. Here the studio was presented as workplace, exhibition space, private space, public space, context of production and thing produced by the artist's labour. And already, we can begin to recognise that the studio although a seemingly neutral empty place, left open for making and doing, may be as fraught with ambivalence and contested meanings and values as that other (more familiarly) troubled site of contemporary art: the gallery. Brian O'Doherty in his ruminations on the "white cube" of the 1970s established the contours of the ideological operation of the "empty white space" of the gallery and its complex impositions on, and construction of, the experience of "looking at art". Gavin Turk's work here introduces the possibility of recognising the studio as a similar form: the partner space of the gallery. Even a superficial acquaintance with the canons of art history will suffice to establish that the studio-gallery interchange is not new, but rather another of the same-old-stories of modern art.
Consider the image of Nadar's studio as photographed in the 1860s. This photographer's studio was the site of the Impressionist's first exhibition in April 1874. One could trace further back to the 1790s and David's exhibition of the grand history painting in the studio. And one suspects that we could travel back further yet to find studios becoming exhibition spaces. But then, this is not supposed to be an art history lecture, so what about today?
In 2003, Little Warsaw, the artist collective representing Hungary in the Venice Biennale, presented a broadsheet publication (somewhat akin to Sarah Pierce's Metropolitan Complex), which contains this image. This is the studio as a discursive space: a place to discuss, debate and challenge. The studio is thus a highly socialised space. As well as a space that is contested in terms of its value, meaning and role, it can also be an arena in which the contests of opinion are acted out. Interestingly, this particular studio is a temporarily re-functioned department store. Thus a type of space invented for the commodity of the 19th century here becomes a space where the commodity-status of the artwork is apparently now to be once more critiqued, questioned and undermined. This refusal of objects-for-the-marketplace is by now an old and (perhaps?) strangely self-defeating strategy. It is informed by a familiar ‘marketplace anxiety’ that has arguably shaped European aesthetic discourses since the Enlightenment. It is possibly rooted in the consecration at that time, in the notion of ‘disinterest’, of an aristocratic unease at the arrogation of taste and culture to the processes of the market place. In the place of the theatre of the commodity we are given a rather mooted spectacle of ‘discourse’, a proposed aesthetics of transaction and relation. Of course to dispose of the object is not to engage the question of the commodity, it is simply to misrecognise the commodity form.
Of course there are many veterans of this (perhaps?) quixotic battle: indeed it is interesting to note the recent proliferation of personalised histories of conceptual art where the war veterans argue their respective posterities before they vanish forever into that posterior place. Consider the image, Art and Language: Paints a picture installed in the style of the Jackson Pollock Bar (1999). Here the studio has been made over as a public performance and critical re-positioning of a myth of private labour. This performance of the studio with all its layered knowing ironies, reversals and irreverence acts in part as a citation of (and rejoinder to) an earlier performance of the studio: the well-known Namuth films of Pollock's painting-choreography. This would suggest that the representation of, the performance of, and the exhibition of the studio space be understood as a protracted discourse: a set of speech-acts, where each intervention is both constative and performative.
However, the studio is not just a prop in the staging of a conversation within the self-consciously ‘high’ art game of Oedipal muttering, backbiting and polemical chat. Consider Art Spiegelman's Maus project. Here Spiegelman presents the dilemma of the studio as a place of private labour – a place where he labours to document the intimate and historical family trauma of the Holocaust survivor. This private space, which is always already caught up in public, is revealed in its dichotomous tension through the explicit dilemma of the image. It is well established that private space can only be understood as such through the operation of a private/public distinction that is unstable, mobile and anxiety-ridden. Spiegelmann shows the private space of the studio as a site for constructing public meanings which circulate in such a way as not only to bridge the two domains but also to demonstrate their mutual contamination, their already compromised complicity. He figures this through his self-portrait as mask-wearer, as fraud, and as media spectacle. So here the studio is given to us as a site of distressed conact and interaction between the public and the private: the distress is given tangible form in the performance anxiety of the artist. Here the studio is narrated as both a romantic myth of lone struggle for meaning and value, and as a place where public meanings are constructed and negotiated.
But when we talk of the artist's studio, we are perhaps imagining something more akin to the image of Giacometti, sunk inside his studio, illuminated by a bare-bulb, installed in a place of origin and originality: perhaps, this is what we really have in mind when we speak of the studio. This is the studio as a type of dreamscape. Here the artist's studio is become (like Nadar's studio) a photographers studio (and also like Nadar's studio an exhibition space) a stage-set for playing out the notion of ‘genius’.
But there are those who stand against genius and all its rhetorical baggage, its mystification and its aristocratic ambition. In the next image of the artist in the studio, it is the painter Soulages in his overalls with his work in hand. And so some artists may earnestly claim that they are merely ‘workers’, labouring men pursuing honest work. The hard-drinking, hard-working, honest-Johns, who go to market to sell their wares in the dignity of their overalls and their flat-cap unpretentiousness: this is perhaps a hard-act to follow or fault. These artists seem to claim that the studio is a place of work: a workshop …a proto-factory space of plain old-fashioned decent work.
But sometimes the advocates of old-fashioned work are wilful in their repression of the fact that the picture of the-artist-in-the-studio is also a genre subject, a highly conventionalised representation and codification of values. The recognition of the rhetorical imagery at work here might disrupt the often-rehearsed rhetoric of work. Think of Courbet's "Real-Allegory", think of Gerome's statement of the art, think of Matisse and his celebrations of the artist and his access to his model, think of Manet painting Eva Gonzales painting in turn a still life, think of Van Gogh's old boots. The-artist-in-the-studio makes multiple claims on the meaning of production: it hopes to determine the meaning of art making by constructing the meaning of the locus of art making, the studio itself. It is the naming and claiming of the space of production that will define finally what it is that is being produced. Importantly, this way of understanding the studio as the place of origin and originality claims a role for the artist as being empowered to set the terms for the subsequent life of the work. If the artist can fix the meaning of the studio as the place where the meaning of work is fixed, then perhaps the artist's agency can be restored and stand against the threats of misappropriation of the work and its values in the economy of consumption out there in the philistine world beyond.
Those who wish to evaluate the ‘meaning’ of the studio might be caught in a similar presumption: that where you do something determines what it is that is being done: that the where somehow implies the what? Such presumption is not ungrounded, but it is problematic.
And although we might think these examples that I am trotting out here are all out of step with the current moment, all rather old-fashioned, art-historical and dull; consider Fiona Rae's portrait in a 2001 issue of Art Review. Here the artist is presented as a thinking body, dispersed among the kipple of the studio (the bits-and-pieces that accumulate in the studio without any apparent calculation). The photograph seems to want us to ask, "What is she thinking?" And although we can't necessarily answer the question, simply asking it, helps pose the studio as a place of subjectivity; a place for a privileged, creative, original subjectivity; a place-to-be-thinking; a place not just to work, to show, and to talk, but also to think. We might then want to consider that the studio is also a place to be as a way of securing and guaranteeing an identity: "I'm an artist, I am in a studio."
Another question is suggested also: given the predominance of men in my chosen images so far, we may also be prompted to ask "is the studio a specially gendered space?"
By way of answers we can throw up more examples where the studio is explicitly gendered - in Fantin-Latour's 1870 sketch for his famous painting of Manet's studio - here the studio is a social place, a clubhouse, a space of a shared project, a space of mutual support and recognition. The studio is here shown as an alternative ‘polity’ if not quite an alternative politics. I would suggest that this would become Andy Warhol's Factory in a century: an alternative space where fantasies of the ‘homo-social’ may play out. A space where images of beautiful women may circulate - remember Jackie, and Marilyn, and the matronly Chairman Mao.) This might also become the Hollywood studio system, a premonition-like portrait of the dream factory managers and insiders (among whom Warhol craved to be accepted and to move.) And yet we've still only begun to list some of the ways that the studio is constructed, there are so many other ways of picturing this. Consider the photograph of Monet's studio in the 1920s. This will remind us that even the out-doors-y plein-airist had use for the studio as among other things a place to do business. Manet's Luncheon in the Studio of the late 1860s may help us recognise that the studio is a place to dress up and act out: a place to rehearse attitudes, postures, and identities: a place for posing. (Remember the future here, remember Warhol, remember Little Warsaw, remember Art and Language, remember Soulages, remember Fiona Rae…)
The studio isn't just for hanging around in either; it’s a place for doing things. It’s a place for judging things, as Bazille tells us here in an image of his image which occupies the cover of a book which promises the truth of Impressionism ‘First Hand’. It takes as its icon of truthful immediacy a painting of the studio: the studio, it is reiterated here, is a first hand, reliable guarantor of truth (and value).
But see that chair, that empty chair, prominent in the foreground, waiting for the viewer to take up residence, to take her place within the picture looking at yet another picture within the picture. What are we to make of this mise-en-scene, this mise-en-abyme, this missing-in-action? In another related image we seem to see the same chair again, empty in the empty studio. Gavin Turk's work in this case is pre-figured by Bazille: as again a studio declares that the artist laboured here. We might also see the studio as a space of longing: the young Turk's longing for a future posterity, Bazille's longing for a viewer: the artist's consecrated isolation as a longing for the company of others, longing for an audience, longing for social connectedness: think of Van Gogh's chair and candle, think of all that longing staring out towards the invisible viewer for centuries from these Rembrandts, these Goyas…
More recently, Lichtenstein has suggested that the studio can be a place of longing unto sickness. There is no shortage of people to tell us that the studio is a place where the unfortunate malady of modernism has historically moved towards death, starved in its garret, removed from the people, removed and isolated away from the world. The studio has served as an icon of the marginalized impotent isolation of art from the everyday living culture of modernity. It serves as a case-study in failure for those who want to teach us to abandon the difficult, obscure, unloved, and self-referential elitism of art in favour of the transactional, relational, and evangelical engagement with ‘the audience’, the ‘public’ or ‘the social’. But then Velasquez in the 17th century helped to clarify elitism in different terms. Velasquez suggested, in his self-important and grandiose way, that the artist in the studio might also be an artist at the heart of the world, at the centre of the royal court, engaged in worldly affairs, engaged in power, and engaged in an endless play of looking, looking back, looking out, looking through…We should not forget that there is no simple opposition here: in or out of the studio. There is a multiple field of ways of contesting the studio space, and multiple ways of operating and construing the consequences of any one of these contested constructs.
It may also help to note that Velasquez demonstrates in other images that the studio can be a collective workshop, a differently gendered space and a place of competition. But some people will challenge and note that we are still within a narrow horizon of the ‘modern’, and our conceptions of the studio are trapped in too narrow a space. They would be right to point out that the studio is arguably an older idea. It is evidenced in an illustration of the Evangelist St. John, from the Florence Gospels from 10/11th century Germany. The studio is shown here as a place where inspiration may happen, a place of waiting to make contact with the sublime, a romantic place, a lonely place, a relay to the infinite, a mediaeval place, a monastic and ascetic place of discipline.
Finally, there is one last image to be considered. Remembering that the studio is rooted in the Latin "sta(u)dium", the place of enthusiasm, of studiousness, of study, of intellect, it will help to consider an image of a 10th century German manuscript illustration, - St. Gregory watched by the deacon Petrus from outside the curtain. Here we have arguably a crucial insight into the nature of the studio. It is part of a spatial politics. It operates an economy of space that attempts to build into the fabric of the everyday world the obviousness of a proposed division of labour. As the criticism already cited has it, instead of a space where we have our work cut out for us (as the saying goes), it might just be a place where we have our work cut-off for us?
But whatever way we may wish to view it, I would urge that the studio be understood as a politics of space: and one does not resolve a politics by simply leaving the room (nor for that matter by turning the room into an exhibit) we must do something more.
Michael Dempsey - The View from the West
Curator of art and community programmes, Galway Arts Centre.
When considering this presentation, I quickly did a survey of the artists in my immediate remit and a lot of the ideas Mick Wilson raises are echoed in it. What we have here is a view from the West. Traditionally, I was thinking about why artists came to the West. We have Paul Henry or John Milton Keane coming for the sheer beauty, something that’s unspoilt, untouched. But more recently, we have the artist Briain Bourke who came to the West for economic reasons; it was purely a way of surviving, looking for a space that he could afford. More recently amongst my own contemporaries, people didn’t like what was happening in Dublin. They felt the urban culture was over-saturated and moved into counties such as Sligo, Leitrim and Galway to connect with what was happening there.
This may constitute being pushed out by the Celtic tiger, looking for cheaper space to practice art in an environment where there isn’t much call for it. So what happens to these artists when they move into rural Ireland? I notice three stages they go through; firstly they absorb nature. It’s all around them. They cannot get away from the mystic rain that we were talking about. It rains a lot, it’s muck, and they end up being inspired by what’s happening there.
Secondly, after securing a studio, or managing to get one built (because that is primarily why people left Dublin, they were looking for a physical studio) and, after looking at the landscape, they come into the studio and start facing their internal natures. After a while, arguably due to the lack of society, people stop looking out and start to look inwards. Then there’s the third phase, where they actually start to go out and construct bits of nature to tackle the sense of separateness from nature, so they bring in nature and construct still lives within the studio space.
I’m just going to consider a case study of an artist, Nick Miller. Nick is known primarily for his portraits, charcoal drawings in which he is looking for some kind of presence in the sitter. He saw the studio as a shell of physical and psychological protection, a space where critical judgement could be suspended - where two people could meet, almost like two boxers in a ring and some kind of creative art could actually happen. He moved up to Sligo about ten years ago and gradually the visitors stopped coming, so he started looking towards nature. He wanted to look to the safe confines of the studio space. So rather than going out and painting, he wanted to stay in that safety shell. He came up with a solution, the mobile studio, by renovating and ESB van. He was able to drive around to different locations and still have the safety of the studio surroundings. Sometimes he would just drive back into trees so the branches would make the studio space.
Looking for what isn’t merely a picture of a landscape, he was trying to get closer to the landscape, to absorb it - to get that presence against it, and this was his way to do that. One of the artists we invited to the Galway Arts Centre was a German artist, Nils Udo. Part of what we did there was to drive around to different locations, but he sees the landscape as a studio in itself. He was initially a painter in the 70’s who gave up painting and left the studio to go out and make environmental art, similar to what Andy Goldsworthy was doing. He said that what he retained from the studio was the solitude of the studio, but the solitude of the landscape too, in actually being a hill walker. So the solitude was what was important to him, he actually made that connection. So how much of the significant function of the studio was tied to his practical purposes? A lot is in the nature of the work.
Dorothy Cross has described her studio as an accumulation of objects. Even though she works with conceptual installations, she needed the physical studio space in order to store the objects she collected over the years. She sees it as a physical ‘sketch book’, so that ideas proceed from the objects. Studio space as an environment allows the suspension of critical judgement. Artists who mess with materials have a very practical dimension. What’s happening in Galway is very similar to what’s happening in Dublin, in that the graduates from GMIT, because of the economic boom and real estate prices going up, have no spaces to work in, yet they are producing work. How do they manage to do that? They work with an organisation like us and produce work in the community, but they need to be able to tap into organisations and the resources the organisation can provide. And that’s exactly what we are trying to do, we are starting to provide different resource rooms, so we can provide new facilities and new tools such as digital cameras. Not only do we provide equipment, as the only such organisation in Galway city, but we are able to talk to different players. We can talk to the council on behalf of artists to arrive at different projects.
We recently produced a project with Alan Phelan, in which we gave him a space, where he set up an ‘information exchange zone’ as he called it. Alan was working with residents of Newtownsmith. In this space he invited them in to discuss the possibilities of the project happening, and that’s ongoing at the moment. Another artist, Aisling O’Beirn, was working with colloquial names, looking at names that are not on official maps and she made a number of street signs. The interesting thing about that is that she didn’t need a studio. The project was set up via an email conversation that I had with her. Then we negotiated with the Council to get permission to put the street signs up. A similar process occurred with Paul Meade, who initially started in Arthouse, where he did a residency, developing virtual identities. The whole production and realisation of the project happened via email - Paul never arrived down for it; it was just put up in a Garda Station. So the possibility of working outside in Galway city is still very real, but what I see is that all of these artists still have physical studios and they still recognise the need to have the studio, even if they are going to work outside the studio.
What I did then was to start to look at the other two collectives that are in the area of Galway and County Clare. There was a studio collective called the ‘Courthouse Studios’ in Ennistymon, (in fact it doesn’t exist anymore because the Council withdrew the funding for it). The reasons the artists gave for needing studio space, were to provide safe and suitable studio space for them to work collectively and promote their work, thereby increasing their opportunities, while sharing the workload of organising exhibitions and projects, and increasing the visibility of individual artists who work on the geographical margins of the art world. Regardless of what’s happening, there are so many artists living in County Galway and County Clare, yet they all seem to be working as individuals, (but you don’t get to hear that). The other collective that we have and which has been up and running for the last seventeen years is ‘Art Space’ and they are quite a strong organisation. They have certain core members that have been there for seventeen years, but they are also very open to providing space for young graduates, so they have a temporary studio system that turns over and over and helps people on a temporary basis.
Ideas of a studio as a repository, the studio as a conceptual space, the studio as virtual space, the studio as an archive, the studio as a world of art are all relevant, certainly the studio is all those things and more. Talking to many artists when I was preparing this talk, (admittedly a lot of them are materials-based), gave me the impression “what are you talking about, the studio is my life’s blood, if I didn’t have a studio I would be smoking pot or something”. It has safety benefits for people; it has different functions, dealings and meanings for different types of work. It depends on the nature of the work whether you need a studio or not, I think its absolutely vital whether you make physical or conceptual work, or work in the community. What I see is that it is a place of solitude; a place to be alone, or to paraphrase Virginia Wolfe, a room of your own.
Charlotte Robinson
Chief Executive of SPACE Studios, London
The SPACE Model
I would like to begin by posing a number of questions relevant to SPACE studios -
What is the SPACE model?
Is it the same as it has been for the past thirty plus years?
What changes have there been?
What changes should there be?
How does the conventional idea of a studio relate to artists practice today?
Does it matter?
Where might we go next?
These are some of the questions I am asking myself although I am convinced that any answers I might provide should be taken only as comments on our perspective, rather than answers per se. What I feel that I can add to the polemic is a quick survey of where SPACE is today and why we are doing what we are doing. It will be a very London-centric answer, because that is what I know. I also think what we are currently doing also raises more questions than it answers, and is
determined by a set of beliefs that the current guiding lights at SPACE hold and is thus quite an individual series of solutions.
SPACE was started in 1968 by a group of artists and other interested professionals to provide large workspaces, which had become a requirement for much post-war art. Its intention was to provide both workspace and the means by which art and artists could be promoted. It has developed in a distinctly ad hoc manner, as there has never been the luxury of sufficient funding to stop and think why, expediency has tended to rule.
The charity was founded with three distinct strands:
The provision of workspace to assist necessitous artists
The provision of education and services for such artists
To increase the interest and appreciation of art by the public at large
SPACE was never an artists’ co-op, although for a period it became a quite introverted self-help group, which favoured those on the inside over those on the outside or newly joined. Until 1990, the Air Gallery represented a vital if contentious child. It provided a significant profile, but it was, like a child, expensive and noisy, and not always appreciated by the main body of artists who felt it drained resources and attention away from them.
The dire financial situation of the early nineties forced the Air gallery’s closure and with it much of SPACE’s public face.
SPACE has now opened another gallery space at The Triangle, twelve years on. During this period much has changed, and with it so has SPACE.
Some of those things relate in particular to London - such as property prices and availability of property, some to legislation, European or national, which makes the management of property
much more expensive and legally onerous - and some to society itself. Society is less innocent, and artist’s expectations are also changing. Rent and general living expenses are much higher, and even using their normal ingenuity artists are more pressured by the need for disposable income and have less time. Less time to debate, less time for attending meetings, less time to be generally philanthropic, or so we find in London.
However, SPACE is closely connected to the world of practising artists and sees itself as a body which must change and adapt in order to provide what artists need. Only last week I received a tribute to the life of an artist called ‘Risk Everything’, he had trained as an artist, graduated, married, rented a studio and worked there for most of his life…. And died. Same studio for most of his life. We have some other artists like him but I am not convinced new generations will want or need the same facilities. I have no doubt we shall continue to provide the traditional studio or forms of it but it is important that both we and artists recognise that it is not all we can do. Nor is it essential or even desirable for all artists to have their own studio, because the traditional white box may not be what they need.
When I arrived at SPACE, rents were fairly low, staff wages were low and the staff rarely provided a service up to the expectations of the artists. Morale was also fairly low because muddling-through had brought some financial penalties with it, in the form of artists taking predatory financial revenge on the informal, good-hearted nature of SPACE’s practices.
Now SPACE has quite well paid staff, many of who are artists who are expected to work in a professional manner. Consultation still happens and the range of services provided is vastly different. Thus it is a much more top down experience but the ‘pay off’ is that artists can if they wish, have a relationship, which is little more than that of landlord and tenant, albeit a sympathetic landlord who will provide support and assistance on a range of issues, but particularly in relation to debt and how to handle it. Rents have increased but are still some of the lowest in the capital. Although we are increasingly working within a philosophical context which I and the rest of the senior staff feel comfortable with, its development has been organic rather than through sheer logic.
I started with the view that SPACE had been the first of the studio organisations and had been a pioneer. Like many pioneers others had followed in its wake, and learned from its mistakes as well as successes. By the late nineties SPACE seemed to have a much less distinguished profile in the art world and amongst artists. Gradually over the past five years, we have turned that around. Property is still the core business and we have eighteen leasehold buildings housing between 450 and 500 artists. Rents are set as near cost as is sensible and rents start at about £25 a week. This is inclusive aside from heat and light.
There is always a very high demand for spaces and turnover is about 2 - 3 studios a month. However this is still too much money for many people and this is where some of our other services have become really helpful. We have two Commissions Studios of 800 sq ft, which can be rented for periods from a day up to three months for specific projects. We also hire out any other spaces on this basis if they are not being used. We now have two open access facilities; the first has been running for three years now and consists of a digital suite and a moving image suite where artists
hire a machine and use of peripherals for a day or half a day at a time. When we first started the digital suite it was very popular, but now we have converted two further machines for moving image work because that is where the demand is. We subsidise the use of these machines and receive no core funding support, which makes life a little tense at times. The suites are serviced by a technician and regular volunteers, who give time in exchange for machine time.
These facilities are popular and well thought of, despite being in a difficult-to-reach location. They are also showing other major advantages; working in the same space is encouraging co-operation and joint projects in a very healthy way. Also we have a higher than average percentage of artists from black and minority ethnic backgrounds amongst studio occupants. We have opened a printmaking facility based on a similar premise. SPACE has provided the print studio and bought much of the equipment. The East London Printmakers are a co-op who share the rent of the studio and in return look after the equipment and provide two and half days open access per week. We have sculpture space for which we hope to make similar arrangements when we have raised the funding to equip it.
We also run training programmes, which provide a mixture of continuing professional development, and skills-based training, particularly in the use of computers. Increasingly we are seeking out opportunities to develop individual learning plans and mentoring opportunities. We find that this directed learning is very popular. The mentoring when carefully managed has a very high success
rate in providing further opportunities. We have also set aside a room at the Triangle, which we hope will become a reference library in due course.
In addition, the Public Art team works very closely with Training to provide mentoring opportunities for artists on their programmes. The Public Art team works mostly in the local context. For example SPACE has developed and managed the Tower Hamlets Housing Action Trust’s Public Art Strategy. Through this we have developed strong links with the local community, and provide opportunities for them using our facilities. The Bow Festival this summer provided work opportunities for between 40 and 50 artists. We also, along with ACME and WASPS see our role very much as advocates for the sector in the hustle for space and work in the city.
So this is what we do, and now why do we do it. I have spent quite a lot of my life fighting for change. It would be quite easy and morally justified to say that artists in society are in general very undervalued both for what they contribute and in how they are rewarded, and that the fight should be for greater rewards. I am a pragmatist and so I see that what we do is to try to make up in a small way for society’s disregard. We accept that there are constraints, but make use of loopholes such as the charitable 80% exemption from rates. We nonetheless insist that artists are in business and are entitled to secure affordable work space; that as self- employed freelance people they need and deserve business support and skills training in the same way as any other micro business and that they should be paid the rate for the job. Our public art projects endeavor to be exemplars in this field.
Some might accuse us of patronage, but I see it differently. I am equipped to carry out this work; it is, if you like, my talent to listen and react, and to promote the needs of artists. Their talent is to make work, and become involved in our programmes if they want to, but not if they don’t.
And what is the place of ‘the studio’ in this? Practice changes and many of our services are in response to this. Not all artists have the same needs, and individual’s needs may very enormously
during their lifetime. What they do need is access to resources and facilities when they need them and at prices they can afford, - not easy to crack, but we are trying.
I sometimes have difficulty in distinguishing between physical space and headspace. By ‘headspace’ I mean room to think things through logically and act, whether it be painting or writing or making. Physical space is not a prerequisite of this but it can make the mental development process much, much easier. It is for this reason I think many artists find that regardless of their type of practice they need physical space in which to allow their ‘headspace’ to develop effectively. One often hears of the great success stories ideas born and initially developed on the kitchen table. You can develop an idea on the kitchen table, but if you are to be taken seriously and take yourself seriously, you probably need to grow beyond the kitchen table. Since artists are even more human than most, my final point would be that if something works for an individual, go to it, but don’t proselytise or over-generalise.
John Gerrard
John Gerrard - Artist
Artists have frequently, both now and over history, used skilled practitioners to either make or assist in making work. From the painting studios of the old Masters, through Rodin and his skilled scaling and casting assistants, on to Warhol’s Factory and in the contemporary era Damien Hirst's production strategies. The advent of computing technology, and of the artist producing media and software-based works, has placed another layer upon this history and one in which the eventual outcome is certainly not fixed or established. New contexts for the contemporary media artist pivot around this murky production site, its form, its structure and the mechanisms which support its presence.
To contextualise my presentation to the National Sculpture Factory on the topic of ‘The Changing Role and Significance of the Artist’s Studio’, and to situate my own work in this changing paradigm of studio as research-lab / office / studio / computer, I begin by making a brief overview of my academic career to date. This training has seen me experiencing a number of different environments, from white box art studio to crowded lab, each with their particular influence on my production and on the form and audience that the ensuing work produces.
Soon after completing a BFA in Sculpture in the Ruskin School of Oxford University, I studied in the United States - primarily to enable access to new media technologies and expertise. The Art Institute of Chicago presented a studio-based workspace with extensive external access to technology but little potential for collaboration. A communal workspace was provided and also a personal white box space which I used as a shooting space and thought space. Upon completion I returned to Ireland and completed a Masters of Science in multimedia at Trinity College Dublin. This completed my formal education.
The MSc threw me into a desk-based office environment with absolutely no studio aspect at all, but allowed for a number of successful collaborations. Working in the States I was continually frustrated by the consistently 2D and collage base of most media and began to investigate ways to circumvent this and to input some physicality into media. The result was works such as ‘Responsive Portrait: Benjamin’ in which the public could initiate responses in the portrait through touching with a mouse. This work was shown in the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in that city.
At around this time I began to take a serious interest in the possibilities afforded by 3D. This was to be a major influence on my decisions and movements. This interest culminated in a nine-month period as artist in residence to the Ars Electronica Futurelab in Austria. I will speak extensively about the Futurelab and its approach to production and the role of the artist in this presentation. Many research labs see artists as valuable creative inputs, and are willing to fund their presence and projects in the interest of creative fusion and inspiration. The new media artist must be very prepared to fight their corner in these environments, as the emphasis is on innovation and not artistic content and the unwary will find their production subsumed within the wider interests of donors, corporate funding, marketing and the global research economy.
Sophisticated works in 3D, and in particular real-time 3D, frequently require extensive collaboration, moving me increasingly away from the traditional single author studio production model and closer to a film production model, with a multitude of roles and tasks for a large team. In the Futurelab, I was presented with an adequate budget and a project manager and set about initially working up a suitable proposal, (from an existing under-developed idea), and designing a team derived from the lab to enable the project to come about. This team was paid from the monies / hours allocated to the project. Thus to enable the project to come about, a standard transactional business was put in place with collaborators paid an hourly wage. The project was funded by the Art4Eu Pepiniere programme and the AEC Centre itself.
The generation of software is in itself a complex and highly creative process. The theme of the Ars Electronica Festival in 2003 was ‘Code’, showcasing works by practitioners such as Casey Reas and others, and engaged with the extent to which software itself was becoming an artform. Thus there is a significant difference between the historical ‘studio’ and collaborative models in which instruction is key and the contemporary media artist working with large teams to create sophisticated new works of art using software. The process of software creation as a creative
endeavour in its own right
problematises the idea of the artist as the sole ‘owner’ of any work he or
she spearheads. It is not clear how this will play out in art terms. The
disciplines of computer science and hardcore coding, frequently lie at a
tangent from the traditional training and development of artists in
Western secondary and third level institutions with its emphasis on craft,
intuition, the non-logical and abstracted conceptual referencing. It
remains to be seen to what extent programming is celebrated and recognised
in the mainstream art world, if at all.
During the development of my concept in the Futurelab, there was
significant friction between the Lab and myself over the issue of
precedent. A concept or idea was designated void if a related precedent of
any sort was uncovered. From an artistic point of view, this posed
significant problems, given that many art ideas develop and expand upon
previous themes and sometimes even artworks themselves. Research
foregrounds innovation in a manner that artists traditionally
do not see as strictly relevant to meaning. Eventually a middle ground was reached and the work ‘Portrait Diptych (Nadia)’ went into production.
The process of discussion was a novel experience, in that the traditional autonomy of the artist, one that I was accustomed to from years of working as an artist, was seriously challenged. The effects of these and other challenges are still not entirely clear, as is the legacy of extensive collaboration, now that I find myself outside of an institutional frame once again.
The experience of the Futurelab was one of a complex series of negotiations, occurring within an office setting. I had no access to a studio, thus my thinking and planning had to occur at a desk. Shared studio workspace was available for production. But since the work was fabricated in Vienna and shipped complete to the museum in which the work was first shown, this was not necessary. One strategy that I put in place to counter my lack of clear ‘thought-space’ was to begin to produce 3D models of all the works, which I had in production or were thinking about. These models were useful in that I could work out scaling, placement issues and overall effect through rendering images from these models. In each case I have created a virtual room and created and placed works in progress in the spaces. These virtual white box spaces are perhaps a logical reaction to a lack of space and peace in an office environment. In their form however one sees the traditional form and notion of a studio recreated within the confines of a computer.
Another recent project in which the studio is placed in a new context through the implementation of new technologies was ‘Digiboarding’, a radical community art project in the Liberties area of Dublin. In this a large wooden skateboard park was constructed. 120 kids from the local area used AVP (Audio Visual Presenter, a new video editing software package, collaboratively developed by the artist to create videos on the fly). Mobile cameras attached to the kids’ clothes transmitted footage back to the AVP interface, allowing the skaters to make videos of their movement through space. Through technology the entire park became a site of production, as well as play and learning. The project grew out of a fruitful collaboration between Stephen O’Reilly, scientist and programmer, Jobst Graeve, curator and John Gerrard, artist. The site in which this collaboration occurred was the shared space of the MSc computer lab in Trinity. A shared space produced a project, which was about education, openness, collaboration and art. The US approach to art and technology operates firmly within the gallery context and single author model and remains that way, with much of the work engaged within the traditional parameters of the object and the privileged site of the cultural space.
- The contemporary media artist as project manager and fundraiser.
- The studio as ‘anywhere work can be made’.
- The studio as a constructed virtual space in which to place ideas and models.
These are some of the paradigms that I now find myself working within. The spectre of the artist as desk bound project manager is one that is of the most concern. There is a function of the studio as a blank space to fill with thoughts, which is difficult to recreate in an office environment. Isolation is at once introspective but can also give rise to spectacular flights of fancy, enormous creative leaps and juxtapositions.
All these requirements will find their place in a myriad of different production strategies worldwide, as is already happening. The role of the studio is in exciting and liberating flux, as is the role and significance of the artist. These shifts are also affecting the modes of display and the potential
audience for works of art (and we have not even touched on the web and its possibilities in this presentation). As computing technologies become increasingly seamless and more artists use them in significant ways, the art made in those contexts - be it as solo producer or team - will continue to affect the form and organisation of the studio space. Over time these artists and artworks will be affected by the changing studio context in return.
Postscript
One of the issues, which required greater treatment here, is the vogue for exhibiting studios and studio processes. Space does not allow that I argue the point further here but I would wish to suggest that the established formal device of exhibiting the studio is generally a trap. It tends for the most part to make a claim for authenticity, which acts as a refusal of the critique offered in the 1970s and earlier by modernism and its critics, and which refuses to recognise that the exhibition of the studio is also the construction of the studio: the nature and truth of the studio does not pre-exist this construction. This seems to me to be precisely the claim that is repeatedly made in various exhibitions of studios.
'The Studio is Dead/Long Live The Studio'
Response by Declan McGonagle
We need to question our own current and future role – we know we offer physical space (that too needs developing). Are we offering psychological space to develop, grow and interact? We could argue that we provide this through support systems, discussion and lectures, but we need to look into offering the metaphorical studio/symbolic studio - support to artists in other ways.
What are the other types of support and value the studio has for the artist and what it represents, (aside from the practical facilities which studios and studio complexes provide)?
It is clear also that changes in the codes governing forms of art production in recent years have allowed in fact, insisted, on us thinking of the studio as a function and not just a place. We have had to rethink notions of sites of production and by extension we cannot physically localise where artistic production or, for that matter, where the production of knowledge happens.
During conference contributions I was reminded of a story about Damien Hirst and his mother and the artist's observations about a visit they made to an exhibition. Damien Hirst noticed that in the white box gallery his mother was very wary, suspicious and was distrustful of the experience, of the transaction. However when, on the way home, they had to go into a chemist’s shop he noticed that
his mother had complete trust in the transaction in the chemist's shop - even though the wrong medication or drugs could have been literally lethal. Mrs. Hirst had complete trust in the experience
in the chemists shop because she understood the codes governing the transaction whereas she was completely distrustful of the experience in the gallery because she was unfamiliar with codes governing the transaction with contemporary art. Damien Hirst cites this moment as being an important determinant for his early work. It is a telling anecdote.
Our discussions seem to me to be governed by a shift, from the question - what does it (art) mean? - The traditional model whose absence from Mrs. Hirst’s experience of the white box exhibition made her distrustful - to the question - what do we mean by it (art)? This is a question for the production of art and its site of production therefore as much for as for its distribution.
There is also a strong sense of there being no innocent space - not even the space of the traditional model of the studio.
Speakers acknowledged the extensive intermeshing of production and distribution, which determines and describes present practice.
There is a 'longing', a powerful impulse to get the 'art' out of the studio - to distribute once having produced, which also describes the decision to position the artwork/activity in a public process. While not always articulated clearly as such, it was argued that this represents a fundamental impulse for social connection and relevance. As one contributor said there is a need 'to get the
work out of the computer'! This may be why the artist is not content to stay quietly in his/her room as recommended by a philosopher who stated that all of our troubles arise from the 'inability of man to stay quietly in his room'.
The impulse to get it out underpins the whole art process, and this requires a full understanding of the terrain of the 'studio' – the site of production and the terrain beyond the studio - the site of distribution. Crossing that boundary and moving back and forth between those terrains is clearly where an important dynamic lies in contemporary art practice - co-existence, and negotiation, not the replacement of one terrain by another.
The fundamental question of course is to what end? What is the production and distribution of art for and for whom? And it is only by foregrounding and addressing these larger questions that we will be able to track back into the art process and understand and support new concepts of studio as part of the distribution process - (i.e.) where the meaning and value of art is negotiated, made and remade as a process and not just a product.
Artist’s talks with reference to the role of the studio in contemporary practice were presented by Jordan Baseman and Irene Murphy.
Daniel Jewesbury and Ronan McCrea conducted a public conversation on the topic.
Participants in panel discussion were: Tara Byrne - Director NSF, Sheila Pratschke - Director Tyrone Guthrie Centre*, Megan Eustace - artist, and all other listed presenters.
Jordan
Baseman Daniel Jewesbury
Ronan McCrea Irene Murphy
Brief Biographies:
Declan McGonagle
Declan McGonagle is currently Director of INTERFACE, a new practice based research centre dealing with art and context issues, at the University of Ulster in Belfast. He was the first Director of the Orchard Gallery in Derry and, after a period as Director of Exhibitions at the ICA in London, returned to Derry to extend the Orchard's remit into public art and community and education programmes throughout the city. He was the first Director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art and, in 2001, joined the City Arts Centre to direct its strategic review process, the Civil Arts Inquiry, which has created a new model for the organisation and its work.
Mick Wilson
Mick Wilson is an artist critic, lecturer and cultural commentator and writer. He is currently coordinator of M.A Studies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Technology and Design, Dublin.
Michael Dempsey
Michael Dempsey is currently Curator of Art and Public Programmes at Galway Arts Centre.
Charlotte Robinson
Charlotte Robinson has been Chief Executive of SPACE, London since 1998. She trained as an architect, was a founder member of Save Piccadilly, the Soho Society, the Soho Housing Association, and Kingsway Centre, a workplace nursery. She has worked in a variety of sectors, including Government, Local Government, the private sector, the voluntary housing sector and education. Much of her work has been property and regeneration-based but has also included running a second-hand bookshop
Irene Murphy
Irene Murphy is an artist based in Cork. Her recent exhibitions include Something Else – Contemporary Irish Art touring Finland. Us Live at Guinness Storehouse, Dublin, Pavilion a solo installation at the Crawford Municipal Gallery, Cork and Project Arts Centre, Dublin. She has also participated in Electric Rain, Cork (various venues), and Utter at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin. She has participated in many group and collaborative projects in Ireland and has exhibited in Germany, Belgium, London and Lithuania. She is a member of the Cork Artists Collective.
Ronan McCrea
Ronan McCrea is an artist based in Dublin. Throughout the 90’s McCrea produced many publicly sited projects in such contexts as a shopping center, historical museum and an airport. He was a co-founder of Multiples in 1998 and a former Assistant Curator at IMMA. He has worked as a free-lance photographer and has taught at Limerick School of Art & Design. Recent solo exhibitions have been at Glassbox, Paris (2002) and Projects Arts Centre (Mar-Apr 2003) and numerous group exhibitions. McCrea was guest curator at The Return, the visual art space at The Goethe Institut in Dublin.
Daniel Jewesbury
Daniel Jewesbury is an artist and writer based in Belfast. He has completed a PhD in Media Studies at the University of Ulster, where he also teaches. He was previously on the Board of Circa, to which he has also contributed a number of articles. His artist’s book Of Lives Between Lines was published by Book Works and he has curated and programmed a number of events as co-Director of Cinilingus.
He has exhibited widely internationally in such events as Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Urban Control in Graz and Dnet at the Lux Centre, London. He presented a solo exhibition Mirage at the Project Gallery in 2000 and won the Victor Treacy Award the following year. His most recent projects include Exchange as part of Visualise in Carlow, for which he used radio, local media and cinema to present the various strands of the project. His project One to Ten, which used interviews with bus workers and videos of bus journeys around Belfast, was presented in cinemas and other venues across the City.
John Gerrard
Artist John Gerrard was selected as one of two Irish artists to participate in the 2002 Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes, concluding in mid 2003. He obtained his MSc in Multimedia Systems at Trinity College, Dublin, having obtained his MFA in Art and Technology at the School.
He has previously taught a course on Digital Tools for the Fine Artist at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology.
Gerrard has shown widely internationally with recent exhibitions including Portrayal at the Model Arts Centre, Sligo, 20/20 at the Temple Bar Gallery, a screening at the Darklight Digital Film Festival, performances in Holland through The Percussion Group and the public art event Digiboarding, The Liberties in Dublin.
Jordan Baseman
UK-based artist Jordan Baseman is highly experienced in taking residencies in public contexts. Previous residencies have taken place in a Town Hall Registry Office, Grizedale Forest, Papworth Hospital Heart and Lung Transplant Unit, the Science Museum and London Arts Board. He principally works in film and video.
He is presently MA Course Leader, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art: Sculpture at Wimbledon School of Art. He is also Lecturer, MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. He regularly gives lectures and runs workshops at the UK’s major galleries including the Hayward, ICA, Serpentine, Tate and Royal Academy. He also runs seminars and gives lectures on his own art practice at the major art colleges and galleries. His screenplay SHUP was published by Book Works.
Acknowledgements:
The National Sculpture Factory would like to gratefully acknowledge the ongoing support of the Arts Council, Cork City Council, FAS and the generous support of the Granary Theatre through the venue provision.
We especially thank the Chair, Declan McGonagle, and all presenters and participants for their contributions to this symposium.
Copies of this document can be obtained on request from:
The Changing Role and Significance of the Artist's
Studio;
The Studio is dead, long live the studio’.
29 November 2003
The Granary Theatre, Cork.