The exhibition "Production Site: The Artist's Studio Inside-Out" on the first level of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago was easy for me to like, but that ease also made me a bit uneasy. I was initially exuberant about the show, but also slightly repulsed by the twinge of nostalgia that I detected in the show's premise, a nostalgia for the days when artists toiled away in their studio. This feeling was exacerbated by the layout of the exhibition in which each artist had their own partitioned area of the gallery, as if they had their own studio space within the museum. This twinge (only a twinge) stuck with me, but so did this sense of joy that I attribute to the earnestness with which the artists in this show addressed the meaning and importance of the studio.
As evident in this conflicted opening, this show nearly caused me to develop a split-personality: the artist side of me loved it, the critic side of me was suspicious of my love for it. As an artist, I enjoy being in the studio. I enjoy imagining and building things in a space apart that somehow also feels as if it is at the very center of everything. This show reminded me of how important my first studio was. I had just returned home after finishing college and my whole world seemed to be turned upside down, but things started to right themselves when I found a studio only blocks away from the neighborhood where I grew up. More than a place to make work, the studio produced a feeling of authority, in the sense that I felt the studio gave me permission to be an author. I rarely feel this way in the studio anymore, but when I was just starting off as an artist, this sense of authority that I felt when I entered the studio was incredibly important.
Some of the works in this exhibition, particularly the pieces by William Kentridge and Deb Sokolow, describe a similar sense of the studio as the locus of a certain "groundedness", not in a repressive way, but as a ground against which endless experimentation and inventiveness can take place. As a critic, however, beneath all of this romance, there was a staid quality to some of the works in the show that made them difficult to connect to this idea of the artist's studio as a production site when everything seemed so perfectly poised and placed. For instance, Andrea Zittel's work was displayed in much the same way as her show at Andrea Rosen Gallery. Neither the works themselves, nor their installation, gave much away about her studio practice. Ryan Gander's piece plays on this idea, and the installation itself seems to question what, if anything, the artist can reveal about their studio process in the gallery. In Gander's work, sheets of paper falling to the floor appear caught and held within glass bubbles, pointing to the impossibility of capturing the process of change and transformation that occurs at the studio inside the museum. Tacita Dean's film, Section Cinema(Homage to Marcel Broodthaers)from 2002 shows the remnants of Marcel Broodthaers' studio and also refuses to depict the "workings" of an artist's studio. Instead Dean projects the image of a studio out of work, the artist's process again held still, preserved, but lodged in the past. In contrast, Gander's piece titled A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor (2008) alludes to the floating sheets of paper as so many new ideas or potential artworks. Dean's piece reminds the viewer that there will be no new works made by the artist in this studio, except for her film, of course.
The most interesting aspect of this show, which at first glance appears as a celebration of the artist's studio, is that, in fact, it is pervaded by some skepticism, and perhaps even some confusion about the studio as a place for contemporary artists to work any longer. It is notable that Kentridge, who in part makes Charcoal drawings on paper, created the only space in which an unabashed enthusiasm for the studio is detectable. Kentridge's space was painted a deep blue-gray with multiple black and white projections filling the whole room. The projections include animated drawings that are changing and being reworked. Other projections showed Kentridge at work as he climbs up and down ladders while positioning and re-positioning pieces of paper. These transforming images imparted the feeling that, for Kentridge at least, the studio still holds some magic as a space of constant, epic invention.
