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Studio and Cube On the relationship between where art is made and where art is displayed Brian O’Doherty A Buell Center / FORuM Project Publication This book is published by The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture 1172 Amsterdam Avenue Columbia University New York, New York 10027 © 2007 The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York Text © 2007 Brian O’Doherty Distributed by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East Seventh Street New York, New York 10003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Second Printing, 2008 Printed and bound in China 11 10 09 08 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data available upon request from the publisher. Series editor: Joan Ockman Executive editor: Salomon Frausto Editorial assistant: Sharif Khalje Design: Dexter Sinister, New York Studio and Cube is the first volume in a series of books related to the FORuM Project, dedicated to exploring the relationship of architectural form to politics and urban life. FORuM is a program of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for The Study of American Architecture at Columbia University. Contents Samaras’s studio-bedroom — The artist’s myth — Acconci’s Seedbed — Courbet’s studio — Delacroix’s dilemma — Nesbitt’s studio tour — Cultists’ club / Warhol — Utopia now / Rauschenberg’s studio / The Bed — The tenses of studio time — Studio of accumulation / Bacon’s studio — Studio of reduction / Rothko — The empty studio / Duchamp — Caspar David Friedrich’s studio —The window — An etiquette of looking /Hopper — The model — The painting-in-the-painting — Mondrian’s studio — Brancusi’s proto-museum — The studio defined — Perception — The anti–white-cube 1 In 1964, Lucas Samaras transferred the contents of his studio-bedroom from his New Jersey address to the Green Gallery on East 57th Street in New York City. He reconstituted the studio-bedroom and exhibited it as art, thereby inserting the space where art is made into the space where art is displayed and sold. The studio was now an artwork in the gallery. It was not sold. “...I guess I wanted,” Samaras said, “to do the most personal thing that any artist could do, which is, do a room that would have all the things that the artist lives with, you know, clothes, underwear, artworks in progress. I had books that I had read, or that I was reading. I had my writing, or my autobiographical notes. It was as complete a picture of me without my physical presence as there could possibly be.” Samaras’s gesture superimposed the two spaces — studio and gallery — where art solicits its meaning. In his artwork, the mythologies of the studio, which precede and then parallel that of the white cube, overlapped those of the gallery space. By placing the studio in the gallery, he forced the two to coincide, thereby subverting their traditional dialogue. Samaras exhibited a lifestyle— frugal, messy, indifferent to the gallery-person’s etiquette of taste. He had, you might say, created a kind of period room — mid-1960s — in a gallery. Period rooms in 4 museums suggest how a representative of an era lived. By putting on display a lifestyle embalmed in the gallery’s artificial time, Samaras was imagining an absent artist: himself. By declaring the residues of the artist’s life as art, he reified the image of the absent artist as eloquently as the mourning dog by the empty chair in a Victorian painting calls up the departed master. So, in this work, the gallery framed the studio, which in turn framed the way the artist lived, which in turn framed the artist’s implements, which in turn framed the ar