A Century of the Artist's Studio

Whitechapel Gallery, 24 February - 5 June 2022

Let's think about that special place called the artist's studio. We could call it a sanctum for the free play of creativity, where Art gets done. We might also remember that this kind of studio is in a building and is someone's property, so it has to do with money and economics too. So some artists can't afford an external studio and work in their homes, or the street is their studio, or their studio exists only in the mind or they've rejected the studio altogether, and have something called a 'post-studio practice'. 

The Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition, 'A Century of the Artist's Studio: 1920-2020', would seem to be a great place to explore the studio as a central idea of modern and contemporary art, a chance to consider the history of the modern studio. 

It does neither of these things. Instead, the exhibition takes the conventional idea of a studio as a given and shows us lots of artworks which represent the rooms where artists work. You can see one of the Hans Namuth photographs of Pollock with his bucket and his floor, or Picasso with his cigarette and stacks of canvases, or one of Freud's paintings of a model on a sofa (in his studio), or videos of artists working (in their studios). There are even mock-ups of real artists' desks - with real pens!

There is work by artists from all over the world, all presumably floating around in their lonely boxes, divorced from place, separated from history, crammed into two floors of the Whitechapel Gallery. To universalise the studio in this way is to betray artists' struggles to gain access to studios - women to art schools for example, or non-Western artists who have adapted to the practices of their former colonisers. Where is the history promised by the title? Didn't anyone tell the curators that the Whitechapel has itself published a book on the history of the studio? 

The exhibition can be expressed as a simple formula: Artist + Studio = Art 

You might want to defend the conventional idea of the artist's studio. It is a wonderful idea - the freedom to work as you see fit, in private or with close collaborators. To experiment with techniques without worrying about the outcome. To wander around naked and smear paint over your breasts. To Walk in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square like Bruce Nauman, without people asking if you're ok. 

But this retrograde show neither defends nor attacks this kind of studio, it just presents it as if that's the only kind that exists. Instead of history there's a long, pointless list of names. Walking through the two floors of the show, the potentially infinite ways of imagining the studio are been shut off, the idea imprisoned within four forgettable walls.