Detroit Research Volume 1

173
Image courtesy of the artist
The modernist
artist studio developed
in tandem with the age
of industry. As much as
we are in a post-factory
condition, we are also
post-studio. Yet, poststudio
is also an art historical
situation. It can
be thought alongside
post-Fordism, occurring
at a similar aesthetic
period, marking movements
from material to
immaterial, from objects
(commodities) to intangibles
edges, languages,
codes, information,
affects—here I’m calling
upon potential elements
of the Common
(knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects—here I’m calling upon potential elements
of the Common as Negri and Hardt would have it). 1 The post-studio attends to the call of Robert
Smithson, “Deliverance from the confines of the studio frees the artist to a degree from the
snares of craft and bondage of creativity.” 2 The studio as snare. It is to critique the cube, its
whiteness and geometry. The sterility of its surfaces. In an art historical context the move from
studio to post-studio can also be about necessity… a move to the streets (in the words of Carl
Andre) 3 or the kitchen table (for Felix Gonzales-Torres), “I’m sorry. I don’t have a studio. I’m just
a kitchen-table artist.” 4
For the dancer it is to dislocate from the reflected image, to forget frontal orientation, to
dislodge the fourth wall, to lose step without the aid of the sprung floor, trip on the surface, or
slide as the frictionless ground plane falls away…
Para is call of the contemporary.
Giorgio Agamben discusses the contemporary as a particular “untimeliness.” As “a singular
relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance
from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and
an anachronism.” 5
“Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither
perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands.” 6
1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2009), 132.
2 Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice, The Fall of the Studio: Artists at Work (Amsterdam: Antennae, 2009), 28.
3 Barbara Rose, Carl Andre, http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/carl-andre/#_
4 Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, The Studio Reader: On The Space of Artists (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2010), 119.
5 Found emphasis. Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 41.
6 Agamben, What is an Apparatus, 40.