The Post-Post Studio

One of my Professors at NU sent me 2 articles related to the upcoming Post-Post Studio Panel Discussion at Northwestern. Also a link to a Blog that Lane and Annika started. http://ad502sp2006dialogue.blogspot.com/ (i checked it out and its cool how some of the stuff we're talking about comes up in the other Blog.)

About the Post-Post Studio...
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DEAR POST-POST PANELISTS: I thought it might help if I expanded on the topic a little more. My own initial thoughts have focused on the "studio" which the notion of "post-studio" implies is superceeded. (This is the reason for choosing "post-studio" as a topic rather than "institutional critique.") It's hard not to hear an echo of industrial versus post-industrial in the opposition between studio and post-studio, with the former corresponding to a permanent address, labor and object-making (and by extension collection-based museums) and the latter aligned with "immaterial labor," temporary contracts, mobility and the new project spaces. Post-studio has a specific history to which I alluded in my first email when I cited Baldessari; Allan Kaprow and Dan Flavin also ridiculed the studio in the '60s (Flavin: "The romance of days of belabored feeling, of precious, pious, compulsively grimy studio-bound labor by haphazardly informed neurotic 'loners' is passing from art...the contemporary artist is becoming a public man"). In the '80s Craig Owens warned that "a widespread backlash against the '60s counterculture" that Flavin and Kaprow represented was signalled in the "return to the tangible -- and, what is more important, marketable -- object" and the corresponding "massive retreat to the studio ... where the artist, screened from public view, produces work in intense privacy." The target of the original '60s post-studio argument was of course Abstract Expressionism, but it was indeed media interest during the 1950s that started evacuating the privacy of the studio (I'm thinking of Hans Namuth filming Pollock, those regular Artnews pictorials titled "so and so paints a picture," Conde Nast's Alexander Liberman publishing "The Artist in His Studio," even Kirk Douglas in "Lust for Life," etc.). The photos Hollis Frampton took in 1958 of Frank Stella painting stripes was an ironic comment on all this, and yet both the studio and its publicizing and pictorializing continued to preoccupy a lot of art during the late '60s and '70s, like Nauman's early video's and photo-based work. Recently Claire Bishop has argued that the artworld has erected new project spaces and kunstahalle to accommodate a kind of '90s work that is project-oriented, open-ended, interactive (think Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija) and which Bishop claims "is essentially institutionalized studio activity" -- the studio made into showroom display, tableau vivant. What's perhaps going on here is not so much the demise of the studio as its dispersal and displacement. Media helps to disperse the studio, not only in the sense of publicizing and theatricalizing the studio's private interior but also by linking the studio to larger communications networks: from the phones, radios and then TVs that enter studios through the 40s and 50s up to today's computers and DSL-powered internet and email connections. The studio becomes one more mixed space, like the "home office," found everywhere and nowhere (the same could perhaps be said of the very notion of practice, especially as its used in cultural studies).