We usually consider retiring to the art studio, gently closing the door and contemplating the comforting and enfolding walls, to untether from the interchange of the social and find a space reserved away from the world. This is a place where, and through, the removal from the ordinary can begin the labor of art freed from the constraints and the conventions imposed by existence of a world predicated on the predictable, mundane, and restricting. The artist studio is granted as a grounding stone to all artistic practice. This view of the artist studio, however, began to wane with the last vestiges of modernism and came into full blown crisis with Barthes and Foucault’s discussion of the “Death of the Author”, and the rise of the recognition of the cultural mechanisms of art production in the mid-20th century. 

In acknowledgment of the nature of “reading” and the externalized construction of the art piece, elaborated in poststructuralist rejections of essentialism (and finding fruition in a full-blown Postmodernism of the late 70’s), a new recognition was granted to context as foundational to construction of the artwork. The mechanisms of the social, political, cultural, educational, institutional, (etc.) meanings abounding around the artwork came, in this new regime, to be considered the constituting elements of the artwork more than the supposed internal characteristics which composed it. When viewing a work to exclude or ignore the forces playing around it and permeating it was to misunderstand what art really was. 

Just as this reevaluation of the art piece began to occur in the new regime of postmodernism, a concurrent evaluation of the artist’s studio began to take place and this supposedly removed space, as the first and separate site of art creation, came under intense scrutiny. The studio, just as the art object itself in this new era, came to be undermined as an isolated site for production of the art piece, and was approached, instead, as a site where countless forces manifested both the social and the personal, the communal and the different, an tumultuous amalgamation of the institutional and singular. The studio came to be accepted as a shifting space, dependent on factors immensely multiple and unsteadily precarious, and understood, in the best of lights, as a slight constancy in a vast field of instabilities, and, in the worst, as an idea best to be abandoned entirely. 

This lecture will explore the idea of the PostStudio from its beginnings in Smithson’s early institutional critique theory and Daniel Buren’s The Function of the Studio, up to a shift from the idea of studio/production to situation/process. In line with Grant Kester, this talk will underscore the recognition that the PostStudio, operates not as a stable site but, instead as locale to motivate an art “to break down the conventional distinction between artist, art space, artwork and audience-the relationship allows the viewer to speak back to the artist in certain ways, an in which this reply become in effect a part of the work itself”. 

Monday Lectures is a public platform combining invited guest lecturers and professors and researchers of the faculty at KMD. Monday Lectures aim to create a diverse programme of lectures exploring a wide range of disciplines and research topics. Lectures typically take place on Mondays at 10:00 at the Knut Knaus Auditorium and are free and open to all.

Image: Jonathan Meese in his studio