Judith Richards, Inside the Studio

Citation: Richards, Judith Olch. Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York. New York: Independent Curators International (ICI), 2004. Print.

Summary:

Inside the Studio: Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York is an intimate collection of writings by artists functioning in New York during the 80’s and 90’s. It provides great insight of the personal opinions regarding art, art making, and the studio practices of some of the key artists working in New York at this time, and is a great companion text to have on hand for any young aspiring artists.

Response:

I think this book is effective in what it sets out to do. I enjoyed reading the first-hand accounts of the artists and prefer this format to an interview format, which the book could have easily been written in according to some agenda. Allowing the artists write in whatever format they choose allows for the greatest degree of originality and personal insight. However, Michelle Lassaline brought up a really interesting point in our class discussion, which I did not pay attention to while reading the book: each artist first has their work represented in a photo followed by a writing excerpt, and all the artists are represented in a photo after their respective writing samples. This format totally has the ability to alter our perceptions of the artists, and allows us as readers to disregard whatever the artists have written, and instead judge and formulate preconceptions of them by first looking at these photographic representations. I agree with her that I wish the artists had not been visually represented in the book, because there were some artists who I didn’t read about simply because I judged them by their artwork or by their personal image…which obviously isn’t a good thing! If the book consisted merely of the artists’ writing it could have been more effective, and would require more effort from the reader to dig and explore.  

As far as our presentation assignment goes, the three artists I have chosen to present are: Duane Michals, a photographer and writer, Amy Sillman, an abstract painter, and Allan McCollum, an artist who works with a variety of materials, whose work is prominently sculptural installations. I chose these artists because their art was relatively appealing to me at first glance, and also because I wanted to focus on artists who work with mediums that I am not personally very familiar with. Below are some brief notes and images taken from my PowerPoint presentation on these 3 artists.

Duane Michals:  

Duane Michals has influenced me a great deal as an artist. From what I’ve read about him from Inside the Studio, interviews, and other books, I can agree with a lot of what he thinks regarding art, art making, and life in general.

• ·         He is a photographer most known for confronting, challenging, and overcoming  the conventions, limitations, and expectations of photography in a variety of ways.

• ·         What seemingly most fascinates Michals is the belief that because of its democratic and documentary nature, the camera and the photograph are representative of reality, with the ability to capture what one sees with one’s own eyes. However, and agreeably so, to Michals reality is much more complex than the physical world we are presented with: reality lies within us as human beings, and to Michals photography is a way to make visual the intangible things we feel and experience on the inside.

• ·         Michals also challenges the conventions of photography by adding written text on or alongside his photographs, believing that the photograph itself is not always sufficient in communicating the photographer’s intent. By doing this, he adds a dimension of poetic intimacy, mortality, and humanity, as the text seems to be personalized to each individual viewer, and reveals a sense of vulnerability while voicing emotions that are too often pent-up.  

• ·         Michals realized the potential of a camera to record a false appearance of reality… “a tool for invention rather than a straightforward recorder of appearances” …and that appearances should not be taken as representative of truth. At the same time he realizes that we place a huge importance on the camera for the purpose of verifying reality.

 

 In context, Michals’ work related to ideas we have explored in the class such as those in Ways of Seeing by Berger. When Michals adds accompanying text to his images, he challenges our preconceptions of that image and tinkers with the belief that photographs are representative of truth, when in fact they are just simulations of reality. What we see is affected by what we want to see…what we see is affected by what we read…there may exist tension between the two, and the words that are written on Michals’ photographs may clash with what we see/want to see/saw before reading these words.

Amy Sillman:

• ·         It was difficult to find much information on her beside her website and reviews from art critics who only talk about the formal and aesthetic qualities of her abstract work, having to do with color, balance, line weight, gesture, etc. It is difficult to contextualize her artwork because of this. A lot of what she says her artwork is about does not translate for me unless I read her statements or titles telling viewers what it is they’re seeing. It’s not that I don’t like her work, but to me it isn’t much more than a bunch of colors energetically painted on to canvas…I feel bad saying this for some reason, but f I had to tell someone what her wrtwork was really about I would be at a loss for words.

• ·         For me this brings up the questions of: in a time that majorly emphasizes a shift toward the conceptual importance of artwork, concept being something that is becoming more important than the art product itself, what are the challenges that abstract artists face? Can they default on their choice of making abstract work in the sense that form can outweigh concept? Is abstract art a more true form of art in the sense that it heavily relies on emotion, feeling, and subjectivity?

Allan McCollum:

• ·         Applying strategies of mass production to handmade objects, McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the value of the unique work of art.

• ·         Although his art may be easily dismissed with the notion that his installations default on a shock factor---because of the dizzying quantities produced for each exhibition—I believe their remains a specialness in the sense that everything is unique and is made by hand although it appears to be mechanically produces…there remains a human element that at first appears unfathomable, but that exists as the driving force of his artwork nevertheless.

• ·         He embraces the notion of individuality among the masses, and that although the individual may easily be lost or overlooked in the context of the whole, the individual reigns supreme, although its status may be challenged or trivialized. 

In context, McCollum’s work relates to the idea of mechanization and the resulting loss of individuality because of it…Walter Benjamin and The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction. Although McCollum works in a "mechanized" way, each of his pieces, are made by hand and each are unique although they do not appear to be at first glance.