Amsterdam University Press

Chapter Title: Studio Matters: Materials, Instruments and Artistic Processes

Chapter Author(s): MONIKA WAGNER

Book Title: Hiding Making - Showing Creation

Book Subtitle: The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean
Book Editor(s): RACHEL ESNER, SANDRA KISTERS and ANN-SOPHIE LEHMANN
Published by: Amsterdam University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wp7vb.6

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 Chapter 1
Studio Matters: Materials, Instruments
and Artistic Processes
Monika Wagner

In 1834, the German painter Johann Erdmann Hummel devoted a

drawing to the famous founding myth of fine art (fig. 1), passed down
by Pliny and highly popular in the late eighteenth century. Pliny re-
ports that the Corinthian potter Butades had invented portrait-like

Fig. 1 Johann Erdmann Hummel, The Invention of Drawing, 1834, Berlin,

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

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pictures in clay with the help of his daughter Debutadis, who “for the
love of a departing young man, outlined on the wall the shadow of his
profile by the light of a lamp.”1 While most other pictures of the sub-
ject from around 1800 concentrate on Debutadis and thus on disegno
as the master art,2 Hummel shows us a twofold scene.3 We see the
potter’s workshop, where the old Butadis is seated at a potter’s wheel.
While his hands form useful vessels out of formless clay, his eyes fol-
low his daughter’s drawing. In Pliny’s story, Butadis thereupon filled
the outline on the wall with clay and fired the likeness along with oth-
er sundry items. Clay, the “primordial material” in Gottfried Sem-
per’s terminology, serves for both common objects and for fine art,
with its high aim of producing lasting memory. Thanks to the transfer
of the outlined picture on the wall into clay, the image became inde-
pendent of its location and could be traded and transported, like pots.
Following Pliny, Hummel combined high and low — drawing and the
production of useful things.
As we know, the combination of the working processes of the fine
and applied arts within a confined space was disrupted in the course
of time, and has been theorized differently. On the one hand, the
workshop as a site for handicraft persisted; on the other hand, the
studio for the conception and realization of the fine arts emerged. In
studio pictures, artists since the Renaissance have staged themselves
mainly as intellectuals — as thinkers, not as craftsmen.4 Hummel,
however, who had been a teacher of perspective and optics at the Ber-
lin Academy, here programmatically links both realms. This relates to
his conviction that drawing should form the basis for artists as well as
for artisans. Ignoring the Academy rules, Hummel’s drawing lessons
remained open to craftsmen and architects, as well as to artists.5
Both those workshops that were dependent on everyday manu-
al skills and artists’ studios were public, in the sense that they were
usually open to their particular customers. In the case of a pottery
producing everyday items, customers consisted of all sorts of people,
while those of the art studio were a few selected patrons and clients
who came by appointment. In modern times, access to all sorts of pro-
duction changed. With the transition from craft to industry, the pro-
duction process disappeared from public view. Since prefabricated
color pigments and oil paint in tubes were available, painting, unlike

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sculpture, could be practiced in almost any room, regardless of size.
It was thus the painter, working in a hidden studio, who became the
incarnation of the lonesome genius, and not the sculptor, who gener-
ally needed more space, more physical materials and more specific
tools (including a transport system). The Romantic conception of the
painter, who sits like Wilhelm Camphausen meditating in front of the
tabula rasa hoping to find inspiration for his picture,6 was promoted
in a variety of paintings and numerous novels, among them the most
tragic, namely Honoré de Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece.7 Origi-
nality was conceived as an individually bred competence.
At the same time, for the “exhibition-artist,” as Oskar Bätschmann
characterized the modern artist, publicity became crucial.8 This pro-
voked a stern bashing from rivals. Although anecdotes of competing
artists carefully hiding their works from each other stretch back to
antiquity, the fear of having one’s idea stolen seems to have persisted
and even increased during the nineteenth century. Rivalry was a driv-
ing force behind the isolation of the studio. In addition, there was the
long-standing idea that a picture comes as easily as the shadow of
Debutates’ lover, and nobody should witness the fact that most of the
time, sprezzatura was hard work.
From Joseph Farington’s seventeen-volume diary of the London
art scene during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, we learn
that it was extremely rare to see a painter painting — even among
friends. When artists showed their pictures, they were almost fin-
ished. Increasingly, they were presented in specially furnished private
showrooms, often called studios, a term that causes much confusion
in the literature, as it does not necessarily indicate the artist’s place
of work.9
I would like to illuminate the clandestine artistic working process
with an exception. At the end of the 1830s, William Turner unaccus-
tomedly invited the famous surgeon and zoologist Richard Owen,
together with the journalist Theodor Hook, to his studio. The follow-
ing occurred, according to Owen.10 The men knocked at the door of
Turner’s house; the door opened only a crack and a suspicious female
voice asked them what they wanted. When they replied that they had
an appointment with the painter, the door was shut in their faces. Only
after some time were they permitted to enter and were directed to a

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pitch-dark room, where they were left for a “prolonged interval” so
that their eyes might adapt to the darkness.11 Turner believed this nec-
essary to condition his visitors to experience the nuances of the colors
with which he was working. What they saw when they were finally ad-
mitted to Turner’s studio upstairs shook their faith in artistic creativi-
ty: Turner stood in front of several easels beside a circular swivel table;
loading his brush with a particular color, he painted on one canvas
and then went on to another, until the brush was empty.12 He repeated
this process with another color and a new brush, and so on. Turner’s
economical serial production of pictures was completely contrary to
contemporary ideas about a creative painter’s method — but it does
explain the thousands of unfinished pictures in the Turner Bequest.
An opportunity to gain insight into the actual working methods of
painters outside of their studios presented itself in London during the
first half of the nineteenth century. Some days prior to the opening of
the Royal Academy exhibitions, the Royal Academians were permit-
ted to varnish their pictures. Some painters took this as an opportuni-
ty to repaint their works, which already hung on the walls and could
now be viewed in the context of all the adjoining works of their com-
petitors. Other artists dreaded Turner, who sometimes completely
reworked his pictures, thereby outplaying the adjacent exhibits. His
most important competitor, the landscape painter John Constable,
was one of his many victims. Turner made extensive use of repaint-
ing: he used to arrive as soon as the exhibition hall opened early in the
morning, and left as the very last, late in the afternoon. He temporari-
ly made the exhibition hall his studio.
But colleagues who hoped to observe Turner’s working methods as
a key to his extraordinary success were mostly frustrated and gave up
waiting. For the artist sometimes stared at a painting for several hours
without doing anything; then he went away, came back, and finished
the picture within minutes, simply by adding an unexpected color.
In one case we have a minute description of how Turner repainted a
stormy seascape merely by pressing white paint into the bumpy sur-
face of the canvas, transforming it from a gray, stormy-looking work
into something brilliant, white and shiny, as if — a colleague noted —
he had turned on the light.
These painting performances during the Varnishing Days in the

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Royal Academy took place in the presence of the country’s artistic
elite. Although there was much gossip on the Varnishing Days and
the newspapers tried to obtain information about spectacular altera-
tions to the exhibits, such insights into the painters’ working process
were the exception, and therefore esteemed as well as feared by col-
leagues. Even in the age of outdoor painting and photography, it was
still exceptional to watch a painter painting. Usually it was only nosy
peasants and children, that is, laymen, who accompanied the work-
ing process. As Michael Klant has shown, the photographers mainly
followed the topoi of artists’ self-staging that had been coined in the
history of studio painting.13
This did not change until photography and film were fully able
to record the process of painting. Gijon Milis’s famous lumigram of
1949 constituted the prelude to this transformation. It shows Picasso
painting a centaur in the air with the light of a flashlight. The light
drawing, which first becomes visible in the photograph together with
the artist, whose image was added by means of a final flash picture,
was published in Life and immediately became a sensation. Milis’s
lumigram and Hans Namuth’s photographic series of Jackson Pol-
lock dripping color on a canvas on the floor in his Long Island studio
(1950)14 for the first time gave visual access to the working process of
contemporary artist-titans in their studios. The influential New York-
based critic Harold Rosenberg coined the term “Action Painting” as
a result of seeing Namuth’s shots.15 These photographic impressions
of the working process thus came to define a whole stylistic trend and
shifted the interest from the artwork to the artist and his production
methods. Pollock, however, became less an artist-as-maker and more
an artist-as-actor, as Barbara Rose put it.16
Picasso’s and Pollock’s studios were transformed into semi-per-
meable spaces, as the transparency of the photographic medium al-
lowed the beholder to peep into the creative sphere, while the artist
was kept enclosed in his surroundings. It was Georges Mathieu who,
in 1956, first began to perform his paintings outside the studio for a
mass public or in live television broadcasts.17 From the early 1950s,
numerous publications on the “artist in his studio” were published
(the most renowned of these being Alexander Liberman’s The Artist
in His Studio, 1960).18 None of them came close to the action concepts

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captured by Milis and Namuth, but rather followed the traditional
line of studio painting, providing a portrait of the artist surrounded
by his works.

The most radical change undoubtedly occurred in the 1960s, when

many artists ceased painting and sought new production methods
outside the studio. They transferred their artistic production from
the studio to public or semi-public spaces where they worked in situ.
The concept of the studio as a place shrouded in mystery shifted to
the studio as a function for creating new experiences.19 Daniel Buren
radically stated: “Mon atelier ... est le lieu où je me trouve.”20 Perhaps
studio art was only an interlude. But what is called post-studio art in-
itially kept its genesis as invisible as traditional genres. Significantly,
artists gave up specific artistic working methods and thus left the can-
on of classical artistic tools and materials behind. Since they appro-
priated methods, instruments and practices from fields beyond the
fine arts, the term “deskilling” has become widely used. It is worth
taking a closer look at some of the new practices.
Many artists began to use common everyday methods, working,
for example, with foodstuffs — like Dieter Roth, who handled them
like a cook in his kitchen.21 Instead of casting bronze sculptures in
a workshop at a temperature of about 1200 degrees Celsius, Roth
used sugar, fat and chocolate to cast self-portraits and other figures.
As a consequence, he could install the “foundry” for his ephemeral
sculptures almost anywhere (fig. 2). Nothing more was needed than
kitchen camping equipment. Studio, workshop and private gallery
conjoined, as in the former Schimmelmuseum in Hamburg, were
Roth lived and worked,22 and which became an installation in itself.
Land artists such as Walter de Maria and Michael Heizer, on the oth-
er hand, needed specific instruments and technical equipment for
the realization of their gigantic projects in remote areas such as the
deserts of New Mexico and Nevada, which they could not operate
without professional support. Deskilling is not the keyword here, but
cooperation with specialists during the period of production. For both
Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) and De Maria’s Lightning Field (1977),
airplanes were necessary in the first instance, in order to search for
suitable locations over vast stretches of land. For the realization of

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Fig. 2 Dieter Roth, Kitchen from the installation Selbstturm, Löwenturm, situation 1999,
Basel, Emanuel Hoffmann-Stiftung, Museum für Gegenwartskunst

Heizer’s 450–meter long, 9–meter wide, and 15–meter deep exca-

vation on Mormon Mesa, 240,000 tons of sandstone had to be dis-
placed. Heizer engaged the chief blaster of the neighboring borax
mines, and hired a number of workers, bulldozers, caterpillar trucks,
vans and excavators. Although Double Negative is situated in an un-
restricted area, only five miles from Overton, Nevada, the construc-
tion of the gigantic work remained unnoticed in the art world for 22
years, until the Los Angeles County Museum published an exhibition
catalogue in 1991.23 While the process-related decomposition of the
work with its entropic potentials was stressed from the beginning, the
genesis of the gigantic negative forms, rivaling the natural incisions
formed over millions of years, was completely hidden from view.
In the case of De Maria’s Lightning Field in the desert of New Mex-
ico, to which the visitor is exposed for 20 hours, everything that could
indicate a working process or any everyday commodity is excluded
from the field of vision. Four hundred polished stainless steel poles
seem to grow out of the ground, appearing to be not the result of hu-
man labor in the wilderness but rather of an overwhelming experience
of almost supernatural precision. No information about the excava-
tion of the waste land, the casting and lowering of the 400 concrete

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blocks for the steel poles, the planning or the calculations that engi-
neering students from the University of Dallas, Texas, carried out has
been published to date. This indicates that the processuality to which
these works are devoted applies exclusively to the alteration of the
work after its completion. The making itself, carried out with external
know-how, and the odium of labor bound to it remain omitted, as if
the ideal of sprezzatura were still valid. The Lightning Field is to keep
its mystery as an epiphany, not as the result of its making.
At the same time, artists like Robert Smithson or Richard Serra,
who felt freed of the studio’s burden and “the snares of craft,”24 be-
came interested in handling the specific materials and the fabrica-
tion processes of their works.25 At first, Serra himself performed his
site-specific splashings of liquid lead inside exhibition spaces. Pho-
tographs of the early splashings, dating from the late 1960s and early
1970s, show Serra in full action, wearing a respirator. Namuth’s pho-
tographs of Pollock as an action painter come to mind, but Serra act-
ed not in a distant studio, but in Leo Castelli’s Warehouse, a famous
New York exhibition space. When Serra, at the request of the Ham-
burger Kunsthalle in 1996, recreated a splashing for the Galerie der
Gegenwart, a local art historian and photographer accompanied the
five-day working process with Serra and six professional assistants.26
While technicians oversaw the oven and the whole melting process
of the extremely noxious metal, the actual splashing was performed
by Serra and one of his personal assistants. For many years, the pho-
tographic documentation of the event accompanied the exhibit of
Serra’s work. It was of vital interest for visitors because the material,
the instruments and the labor all connected the artwork with expe-
riences of the old mechanical industries — an interest that continues
to grow as the manufacturing activities of former industrial nations
disappear.
The spaces of highly specialized industries that have migrated
elsewhere survive as artists’ workshops and, at the same time, as mu-
seums of industry and craft. Generally speaking, the interest in mak-
ing has intensified enormously in recent decades, due to some extent
to diversified production methods in the fine arts that preserve the
knowledge of labor. This complements the growing interest in mate-
rials, objects and instruments, visible not only in art history but in cul-

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tural studies in general. Exhibition catalogues, books, photographs
and films have been published, demonstrating the concern with tra-
ditional as well as new forms of production. In the case of Antony
Gormley, the artist himself published extensive photographic docu-
mentation on the fabrication of Field (American) (1993), an installa-
tion of 40,000 clay figures, fabricated by around 100 brick workers in
Mexico.27 For three weeks, men, women and children aged between
six and sixty were Gormley’s intelligent, self-acting instruments in
their brick manufactory (fig. 3). Manual labor was outsourced so that
the Mexican workers became the hands of the artist, their simple fac-
tory his studio.28 In the age of the mouse-click and the disappearance
of manual labor and manual skills in Western industrial societies,
Gormley’s method seems an exoticism. But the exoticism also seems
to indicate a deficiency, potentials that our hands might have already
lost, as Richard Sennett observed.29
The activities of artists working with physical stuff — as is the case
for Richard Serra or Antony Gormley — can be visually reconstructed.
The cooperation of studio, workshop and industry make production
processes interesting for a public that is no longer subjected to such
processes in their daily lives. In works of the new digital media, pro-

Fig. 3 Antony Gormley, Making of Field (American), 1993, Mexico 1990. © the artist

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duction is to a large extent hidden in the programs. Since the hard-
ware cannot show the capacities of the software, the beholder or user
of an interactive artwork does not know what to expect; this is even
true for a participant in the expanding field of biofeedback.
In an installation such as Ulrike Gabriel’s interactive environment
Breath, one of the trendsetters in biofeedback art dating from the
early 1990s, the sensor system is configured to register the partici-
pant’s breathing; that is, the involuntary activity of the body. Adapt-
ing the principle of the eye-tracker, a technique that was originally
developed in the context of perception analysis for labor physiology,
Gabriel combined it with medical data on the expansion of the lungs
while breathing, and with the help of a computer technician translat-
ed the movement into an abstract visual pattern. The computer has
become the studio where the know-how of different workshops and
research fields are integrated. The studio and the workshop are — sim-
ilar to Hummel’s picture — once again combined. But they have both
been vitally transformed, as the physical experience of the workshop
seems to have been lost.
In his masterpiece of decadent literature, A rebours, published in
1884, Joris-Karl Huysmans praised the “horticulturalist” as the real
artist of his time: the author considered him able to manipulate the
genetic code of plants and effortlessly create previously inconceiv-
able and exciting species. His studio was the greenhouse. Today it
seems to be the composer of digital programs who is the creator of
new worlds. One would hope that he has the same artistic compe-
tence as Huysmans’ horticulturist.

Notes

The author would like to thank Philipp Lange for his work on the translation.

1 C. Plinius Secundus, Naturalis Historiae XXXV, XLIII.

2 See Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem of Iconography of
Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin 39 (1957) 279–290; George Levitine, “Addenda to
Robert Rosenblum’s ‘The Origin of Painting’: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic
Classicism,” Art Bulletin 40 (December 1958) 329–331; Frances Muecke, “Taught by Love:
The Origin of Painting Again,” Art Bulletin 81 (June 1999) 297–302; Shelley King, “Amelia

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Opie’s ‘Maid of Corinth’ and the Origins of Art,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37/4 (2004)
629–651.
3 Monika Wagner, “Ein materialistischer Butades. Berliner Plädoyer für Kunst und
Gewerbe,” Kritische Berichte 3 (2011) 29–39.
4 For the emancipation of the artist as an intellectual see Martin Warnke, “Der Kopf in
der Hand,” in: Werner Hofmann (ed.), Zauber der Medusa. Europäische Manierismen,
exh. cat. (Vienna: Gesellschaft Bildender Künstler Österreichs, Künstlerhaus, 1987),
55–61.
5 Marsha Morton, Johann Erdmann Hummel: A Painter of Biedermeier Berlin (Diss.
New York University 1986, Ann Arbor: UMI 1995), 340.
6 Monika Wagner, “Die tabula rasa als Denk-Bild. Zur Vorgeschichte bildloser Bilder,”
in: Barbara Naumann and Edgar Pankow (eds.) Bilder — Denken. Bildlichkeit und Argu-
mentation (Paderborn: Fink Verlag 2004), 67–86.
7 Honoré de Balzac, “Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu,” L’Artiste (Paris 1831).
8 Oskar Bätschmann, The Artist in the Modern World. A Conflict Between Market and
Self-Expression (Cologne: Dumont Verlag, 1997).
9 Anthony Hughes, “The Cave and the Stithy: Artist’s Studios and Intellectual Property
in Early Mondern Europa,” The Oxford Art Journal 13/1 (1990) 34–35. Michael Cole
and Mary Pardo show the distinction between studio and bottega in Italian art of the
Renaissance; see Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, Inventions of the Studio. Renaissance to
Romanticism (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 1–35.
10 James Hamilton, Turner. A Life (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997).
11 Monika Wagner, William Turner (Munich: Beck Verlag, 2011), 20–21.
12 Hamilton 1997, 273.
13 Michael Klant, Künstler bei der Arbeit von Fotografen gesehen (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz
Verlag, 1995), 164f.
14 Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio. Constructing the Postwar American Artist
(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
15 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 51/8 (December 1952)
22ff.
16 Barbara Rose, “Namuth’s Photographs and the Pollock Myth,” in: Barbara Rose
(ed.), Pollock Painting (New York: Agrinde Publications, 1980).
17 Monika Wagner, “Der kreative Akt als öffentliches Ereignis,” in: Michael Diers and
Monika Wagner (eds.), Topos Atelier. Werkstatt und Wissensform (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 2010), 45–58.
18 Alexander Liberman, The Artist in His Studio (New York: Viking Press, 1960).
19 Diers and Wagner 2010, vii-ix.
20 Daniel Buren, “Fonction de l’atelier,” Studio International 181 (1971) 181–185. See also
Wouter Davidts and Kim Paice, The Fall of the Studio (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2009).
21 Monika Wagner, “Vom Umschmelzen. Plastische Materialien in Kunst und Küche,”
in: Beate Söntgen and Theodora Vischer (eds.), Über Dieter Roth (Basel: Laurenz
Stiftung, 2004), 121–135.

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22 Dirk Dobke, Melancholischer Nippes. Dieter Roths frühe Objekte und Materialbilder
1960–75 (Diss. University of Hamburg, 1997).
23 Richard Koshalek et al., Michael Heizer: Double Negative, Sculpture in the Land, exh.
cat. (Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles/New York: Rizzoli
Publications, 1991).
24 Robert Smithson, “The Dislocation of Craft — and Fall of the Studio,” in: Smithson:
The Collected Writings (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: The University of California
Press, 1984), 107.
25 Dietmar Rübel, “Fabriken als Erkenntnisorte. Richard Serra und der Gang in die Pro-
duktion,” in: Diers and Wagner 2010, 111–136.
26 Dietmar Rübel and Olaf Pascheit, Richard Serra in der Hamburger Kunsthalle (Ham-
burg: Christians Verlag, 2003).
27 Antony Gormley, “Making Field,” in: Antony Gormley, Field (Stuttgart: Oktogon
Verlag, 1993), 19.
28 Monika Wagner, “Geliehene Hände. Antony Gormleys Field,” in: Matthias Krüger
and Philippe Cordez (eds.), Werkzeuge und Instrumente (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2012).
29 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2008).

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