1.Imagine a studio.
One linespace indicates silence as your studio comes to mind.
Imagine a studio; think the studio into light. You think there; you control the light. Silence or Callas or Life Without Buildings is playing. Is there time in your studio? How is it measured? Can you own the time? What enters the studio? What departs? How do you pay your rent? Who are your neighbors? Do the objects in the room support other objects or your body?
2.Imagine not a studio
___a job___
___a shop___
____a stage____
______a school_____
_______a context______
________an exhibit________
2.1Imagine work, not work, discipline, no discipline, interdisciplinary. History, no history, material, new material, new studio, no support. Process, concept, context, site, dematerialize, collaborate.
3I am post-studio in process, not in life.
4.1
o___________o
| |
| | (≠)
| |
| | (+)
| |
o___________o
4.2
/\ B.
/ \
/ \ B.
/ \
/ \ A.
/______\
4.1Virginia Woolf. Two o’s in Room too. An o as a point in space; having two is the possibility of space.
Virginia knew that you needed two o’s. She married two o’s but through another name inherited the money for a ro_____om, and because of this ro_____om she could write, become a feminist, become famous, take up space. Wo_____writer_____olf
4.2Daniel B.uren, John B.aldessari, and Michael A.sher = The discomposed pyramid of post-studio.
A triad of authors post-authorship on post-studio. Daniel Buren wrote “The Function of the Studio” in 1971. Beginning in 1970, John Baldessari taught a class at California Institute of the Arts called Post-Studio, which was taken over by Michael Asher in 1977 and attended religiously for decades by scores of artists and pilgrims. In his 1971 text Buren said, "The museum and gallery on the one hand and the studio on the other are linked to form the foundation of the same edifice and the same system.” He wrote that the studio is “a stationary place where portable objects are produced,” and thus the art goes “from one refuge to another.” Buren thus theorized “the site of production” into his work.
4.3It is 2015. Post-studio B.B.A. takes form in the 1970s, and I’ve reached back to Woolf’s ’29. Approximately exactly studio-ly, forty-three years between these events. Let someone else write the history. In 2005 John Baldessari was in my studio, and after a little while he said, “Well, it looks like you know what you’re doing.”
5.Mary Kelly leads an Interdisciplinary Studio program at UCLA that prioritizes the project. The project, as well as the method of critique used to read works, is related in time, genealogy, and geography to the discussion of post-studio. But Mary knew that we had to keep the studio, keep our space, Woolf’s ro_____om, even while de-disciplining art making into a project-oriented, political, conceptual, context- and material-specific, often collaborative process. Mary’s dynamic history as a maker, an artist who was entrenched and named as both a conceptual and ( + ) a feminist artist, is the ro_____om making crossroads.
600.(5–600 due to inflation and institutional bloating.) It’s a Pyramid scheme. I need to talk about the economy of production. The politics of post-studio are different in 2015. In the arguments of the 1970s we are able to consider independent spaces, site-specific work, and interdisciplinary process. When I say I’m post-studio in process, I speak within this history and the discourse that it has produced. When I say I’m not post-studio in life, my concern is that contemporarily, post-studio ubiquity essentially masks precariousness. Institutional needs, circulation, ephemerality, no history, event culture: over life. Post-studio can now serve the institution even more directly than the studio once did—all the infrastructure is institutional. The criticality once crucial to a post-studio pose is no longer embedded.
601.The feminists know not to give up space. I want to add the brilliant Woolf to the conceptual history of B.B.A. and MK and restrategize the studio. Place, context, work, network, time. I want to buy back my time. I just got a studio.
For Further Reference
The work of A. L. Steiner.
All the homemade, independent, collaborative schools popping up over the last ten years (the Mountain School of Arts in LA, Open School East in London, etc.)
The work of Ahmet Ögüt.
LTTR, an artist group and annual feminist genderqueer independent art journal, 2001–6, collectively edited by myself, K8 Hardy, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Ulrike Miller, and Lanka Tattersall.
Rhizome.org, founded by Mark Tribe in 1996.
