At work : studio and production as a theme of art today

In the history of art, the studio was always the place where the artwork was produced. After its creation it is then »released into the world«; into galleries, museums and private collections. This »order« of places and their function at the same time corresponded with the unity of author and artwork, which in turn en­sured stylistic as well as genre-­specific identities. Today these fixed orders and allocations no longer exist – conceptual art does not have a uniform style, nor is production understood as an ­autonomous piece of workman-ship – but despite this, both playful and associative strategies give rise to diverse frames of re­f­erence. Interestingly, it is precisely at this point, where this situation is ­variously also interpreted as a »crisis«, that the art-historic genre of the studio image is entering artists’ field of vision, becoming an allegorical »motif«. The book, like the exhibition, is conceived as an essay and talks about how reflecting on art, the process of ­making art and the locations of the art are reflected in the artworks them­selves; because it is the »shadows of art« – to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes – that are now ­finding their way into the artwork itself. Thus 20 works from the last 15 years are shown, in which the questions of authorship, finding ideas, style, participation and relationships between studios and exhibition spaces are ­addressed.