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9 These “impersonations of the studio in the museum” have worked to fetishize the popular conception of the studio in producing creativity both as an identity and as a form of expertise. This was most visible at the recent exhibition at the Design Museum, London- “Hello My Name Is Paul Smith”-where curator Donna Loveday included two reconstructions of the home and work studio of fashion designer Paul Smith to give an insight into his working patterns and routines. 8 The design studio is also developing its own cult status in the museum. 7 The permanent installation of Francis Bacon’s studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and Eduardo Paolozzi’s studio at the National Gallery of Scotland indicates the shifting function of the studio from context to content. Most famously, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara Vanderlinden’s Laboritorium, first shown in the Provinciaal Fotografie Museum, Antwerp (June 27–October 3, 1999), explored the fluidity between the artist’s studio and the science lab, emphasizing the shared moments of experimentation that unite science and art practices. Reconstructions of the artist’s or designer’s studio within the gallery are often used as a shorthand method of explaining the creative process to the general public. Museum curators have played an important role in securing a representational function for the studio in contemporary culture.
STUDIO CULTURE THE SECRET LIFE OF A GRAPHIC DESIGN STUDIO PROFESSIONAL
5 Contemporary sociologists and cultural theorists have further accounted for the studio as a kind of “sociological wrapping,” holding together the social practice of creativity across professional cultures in art, design, and architecture. In the 1990s, emphasis shifted to “environmental” theories of creativity, in which institutions, professions, and geographies provide the setting for idea generation and innovation. 4 Since then, the studio has formed a meeting place and point of exchange for interdisciplinary scholars from sociology, engineering, cultural theory, business management, and geography. 3 Whitehead’s theory of creativity, as “a process by which entities and phenomena, human and non-human alike, come into being and change,” shaped and informed a vibrant studio culture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the postwar period. In the study of creativity, the studio has endured transitions from metaphysical to physical conceptualizations and back again, securing an idealized position in the academy and in the cultural imagination, as a place where “magic happens.” This can first be identified in the work of the philosophers John Dewey (1859–1952) and Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). 2 Forty years on, the romance of the studio holds strong. As Daniel Buren put it in his famous 1971 essay on the subject in Studio International magazine, the studio has served an “ossifying and idealizing function” in art discourse. 1 This has, in turn, resulted in the production of the studio as a cultural ideal, a signifier through which to imagine creative work.
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Over the years, the studio has acquired a mythology of its own via the work of critics, theorists, historians, and curators, who have found it to be a potent source through which to imagine and reimagine artistic practices of designing, making, and self-fashioning in the creative fields. It is a site on which disciplines are reinvented, in theory and practice. Like art and design itself, the studio is inevitably an unfinished project. Indeed, one of the most fascinating things about the studio as a subject for academic inquiry is its exceptional malleability as a mediating concept through which to explore and investigate questions of social and cultural significance. A durable feature of art and design discourse, the studio has been subject to reinvention and refashioning over time. What do we mean, as art and design historians, when we talk about the studio? Answering this question can provide valuable insights into what it means to study art and design at a particular time and place.