The Studio Reader by Mary Jane Jacob

Author:Mary Jane Jacob
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

At least in some instances, Ashton’s purpose for visiting studios is to continue an ongoing dialogue with artists she supports. “If you’ve already established a friendship, as I had with one or two artists over many, many years, to come and see them in their studio was to engage in the continual conversation that goes on for years. Whether they were visiting me or I them, we would pursue certain ideas that impassioned us mutually.” Paradoxically, the social calls she describes, including dinners over which friends slog out issues, seem more intellectually demanding of the artist than other critics’ studio visits. Once in the studio, however, Ashton forgives the artist all, or, at least, puts herself in the self-abnegating service of the artist. The function of the critic in the studio, as Ashton sees it, is that of sympathetic witness, nurturing the artist to whom she is predisposed.

Beyond the occasion to see the art and pass on it, Gilbert-Rolfe’s purpose in paying a studio visit seems to involve testing the limits of the artist’s understanding of issues crucial to the art on view. Unlike Storr, Gilbert-Rolfe proceeds from ideas and ideology to the properties of the artwork, with the sort of dismantling intellect inspired by poststructuralism being a criterion for value. Admittedly competitive within his own generation (“I’m a middleaged abstract painter, and so have most difficulty with middle-aged abstract painters”), Gilbert-Rolfe means, through such sparring, to get an artist to defend his art—his assumption being that the critic is properly abrasive if the artist is not tough enough on himself to provide this form of selfpurifying negativity.

To satisfy curiosity about the art is only a part of Storr’s anthropological interest in visiting the studio. Seeing “however the artist chooses to present himself” in his habitat interests him as well. Because studying the artist’s motivation to do art is Storr’s special concern, any explanation the artist delivers is useful, for it reveals the unconfessed and involuntary agendas he sustains. Storr’s theory of no theory—the viewpoint of comprehensive empiricism—sets his apart from the other critics’ approaches.

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