Abstract
The artist’s workshop as a prelude of the artwork exhibition space attempts to explain the connection between the display of art and the place where it was created, and focuses essentially on the sculpture of the 20th and 21st century. This study aims to understand the dynamics of the act of placing a work of art into space within the creative process, and the spatial labour that the artist develops during its production both at the creation place and at the public exhibition. The analysis focuses on different relevant artists and their workshops or studios, and covers the period between 1900 and 2020; a compilation of multiple cases that, like a constellation, enable relationships and connections between them. The research attempts to demonstrate that, for some artists, the display of an art object is part of the production process; that its definition and control begin at the creation place and continue when it is installed at the exhibition, and that, ultimately, that spatiality given by the artist is part of its essence and meaning. The research is structured in four chapters, illustrated by various artists, that represent not only four concepts of creation place but also the different approach to the spatial relationship with the artwork; of them, the studio and the piece of art are the actors that relate in different ways: The first chapter, the workshop-factory, analyses Auguste Rodin’s workshops -as a case study- and Andy Warhol’s Factory, and finishes with a brief approach to the contemporary artistic industries represented by figures like J. Koons, D. Hirst or T. Murakami. These factories of creation, may well link with those places that, from the Renaissance, were used for the collective artistic production and apprenticeship, and like them possessed an important amount of assistants and workshops specialised in different phases of creation and production of the work. A part of this space is open to the public -like an ancient bottega- to introduce the art market: it turns into a place to display the creations, into the frame or showcase of the work, where promotion and exhibition are part of the artistic process. The second chapter, about the workshop-artwork, penetrates Alexander Calder’s and Marcel Duchamp’s studios and Constantin Brancusi’s Impasse Ronsin atelier as a paradigmatic case, and, as a more contemporary example, Bruce Nauman. In this model of studio, the limits between the artwork and the workspace, as well as the production and exhibition, get dissolved. The creation place turns into a global environment where the piece of art and space shape a whole; an indissociable group that becomes a work of art by itself. The third chapter, the workshop-lab, analyses Jorge Oteiza’s and Louise Bourgeois’ studios, and -as a case study- Alberto Giacometti’s Rue Hippolyte Maindron atelier; with Anselm Kiefer’s studio as a present example of this model. All of them show a workspace that creations progress parallelly to artistic production, achieving the work gradually its place in this process. The fourth chapter, the expanded-workshop, starts at the concept of empty studio -proposed by Marcel Duchamp-, and the post-studio of Robert Smithson or Daniel Buren–, together with the analysis of workspace by Gordon Matta-Clark, the immaterial workshop -Sol LeWitt and Guerrilla Girls-, or the platform-workshop of Ai Weiwei -as extended case study-, with a brief analysis of two other contemporary examples like workspaces of Thomas Hirschhorn and Doris Salcedo. These models draw the crisis of the traditional workshop, in consonance with the dematerialization of the art object. The artist uses multiple creation places, and the concept of the studio as a physical space opens up towards outside, multiplying its shapes and spatial relationships: a space objectified by the very artwork; which evolves from the form to the place, and integrates the public in the materialization of the creation. The different studios visited during this research show the workshop and the exhibition like a context where the artist not only creates the object and its display but also models the space where it is inserted. Production and installation could be considered the two faces of the same creation phenomenon. Thus, we can say that, in all of them, the spatiality is an intrinsic feature of the work of art, which is part of its plastic dimension, and, at the same time, generate a physical and emotional encounter with the observer.
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