Francis Bacon, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock and Agnes Martin [PDF]

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STUDIO HABITS FRANCIS BACON, LEE KRASNER, JACKSON POLLOCK AND AGNES MARTIN

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2014 Andrew Hardman School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

Contents

List of figures ................................................................................................................... 3 Abstract .............................................................................................................................6 Declaration .......................................................................................................................7 Copyright Statement .........................................................................................................8 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................9 About the Author .............................................................................................................10

Introduction .................................................................................................................... 11 1. Francis Bacon ................................................................................................................ 54 2. Lee Krasner ................................................................................................................... 97 3. Jackson Pollock ............................................................................................................138 4. Agnes Martin ................................................................................................................174 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................210

Bibliography .................................................................................................................231

Word count: 71259

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List of Figures

Fig. 1:

The Francis Bacon Exhibit at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Photograph by Andrew Hardman..................................................................11

Fig. 2:

The walls of the studio-barn at The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Centre, Springs, Long Island, New York. Photograph by Andrew Hardman. ......................................................................................................................11

Fig. 3:

The floorboards of the studio-barn at The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Centre, Springs, Long Island, New York. Photograph by Andrew Hardman. ......................................................................................................................11

Fig. 4:

Agnes Martin painting. Still from Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World (2003, Dir. Mary Lance)...............................................................................11

Fig. 5:

Francis Bacon (1984). Photograph by Hans Namuth ..................................15

Fig. 6:

“Lenore Krasner, 1962” Photograph by Hans Namuth ...............................15

Fig. 7:

Jackson Pollock (1951). Photograph by Hans Namuth ...............................16

Fig. 8:

Agnes Martin (1973). Photograph by Alexander Liberman ........................16

Fig. 9:

The Francis Bacon Studio at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane ............ 55

Fig. 10:

Frank Auerbach in his studio. From the Hugh Lane archive ...................... 60

Fig. 11:

Cover of Pollock Painting (1980). From the Hugh Lane archive .............. 60

Fig. 12:

Francis Bacon, Corner of the Studio (1934); Interior of a Room (1933); Studio Interior (c.1934) .............................................................................. 62

Fig. 13:

Francis Bacon, Two Figures (c.1952) ......................................................... 64

Fig. 14:

Francis Bacon, Two Figures in the Grass (1954) ....................................... 64

Fig. 15:

Bacon in the studio (Overstand Mansions, Battersea) (c.1955). Photograph by Cecil Beaton ........................................................................................... 69

Fig. 16:

Map of Bacon’s studios (and other relevant sites) pre-1961 ...................... 71

Fig. 17:

The studio at Millais House ........................................................................ 72

Fig. 18:

George Dyer in the Reece Mews studio. Photograph by John Deakin ....... 75

Fig. 19:

Bacon in his studio (1952). Photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson ............ 75

Fig. 20:

Francis Bacon, Double Portrait (Auerbach and Freud) (1964) ..................77

Fig. 21:

Francis Bacon's studio floor (c.1951). Photograph by Sam Hunter ............85 3

Fig. 22:

Edweard Muybridge’s series of photographs of two figures wrestling. Taken from Edweard Muybridge, The Human Figure in Motion (Dover Publications: New York, 1955) ....................................................... 88

Fig. 23:

The Pollock-Krasner Studio by Maurice Berezov (undated). From the Archives of American Art .............................................................98

Fig. 24:

The rear of the Pollock-Krasner House .....................................................101

Fig. 25:

Examples of materials in the studio at Springs...........................................101

Fig. 26:

The National Historic Landmark plaque .................................................. 104

Fig. 27:

A section of floorboards in the studio at Springs and Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles (1952) ...............................................................................................107

Fig. 28:

Lee Krasner, Gaea (1966) and the walls of the studio at Springs .............108

Fig. 29:

The sitting room of the house ................................................................... 112

Fig. 30:

Krasner's bedroom .................................................................................... 112

Fig. 31:

Industrial paints and Krasner’s boots, trolley, paints and brushes ............ 116

Fig. 32:

Krasner watching Pollock. Photograph by Hans Namuth (c.1951) .......... 118

Fig. 33:

Krasner in her north-facing bedroom studio in the Springs house. Photograph by Hans Namuth (c.1951) ...................................................... 118

Fig. 34:

Lee Krasner in the studio (1956). Photograph by Waintrob Budd ............ 119

Fig. 35:

Krasner in the studio (1958). Photograph by Hans Namuth ..................... 119

Fig. 36:

Krasner in the studio (1956). Photograph by Maurice Berezov ............... 121

Fig. 37:

Krasner in the studio (c. 1960-1961). Photograph by Paul De Vries ........ 121

Fig. 38:

Lee Krasner's Manhattan studio (1972). Photograph by Ray Eames ....... 124

Fig. 39:

Jackson Pollock, Number 29 (1950) ......................................................... 139

Fig. 40:

Still taken from the out-takes of the Naumth-Falkenberg film [6.55] ...... 140

Fig. 41:

Sheridan Lord and Cecil Downs Lord holding Number 29 (1950) behind the Pollock-Krasner House, c.1956. Courtesy of the Pollock-Krasner Study Center, Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonné Archives ............................ 140

Fig. 42:

The floorboards of the studio-barn ........................................................... 147

Fig. 43:

The masonite flooring and aluminium paint found on the concrete footings ....................................................................................................................147

Fig. 44:

Still from the Namuth-Falkenberg film. [6.02] ......................................... 153

Fig. 45:

Still from the Namuth-Falkenberg film. [7.06] ......................................... 153

Fig. 46:

Still from the Namuth-Falkenberg film. [12.35] ....................................... 153

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Fig. 47:

Pollock and Krasner in the studio-barn (c.1951). Photograph by Hans Namuth ..................................................................................................... 165

Fig. 48:

Agnes Martin, Tree (1965) ........................................................................ 176

Fig. 49:

Three stills (41.15-42.16) from Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World (dir. Mary Lance, 2003)..............................................................................183

Fig. 50:

Martin's working-out sheets ...................................................................... 196

Fig. 51:

Detail of Agnes Martin, Leaf (1965) ......................................................... 196

Fig. 52:

Detail (bottom right corner) of Agnes Martin, Tree (1965) ...................... 203

Fig. 53:

Thomas Demand, Barn (Scheune) (1997) ................................................ 211

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Abstract

This thesis is about studio habits. Specifically, it considers what happens in practice in the artist's studio and ways in which creative acts have been visualised and disseminated. The chapters of this thesis are organised around views of the studios of four twentieth century painters: Francis Bacon (1908-1994), Lee Krasner (1909-1984), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Agnes Martin (1913-2005). Each of these artists' studio habits has been fundamental to their respective mythologies and the studios they occupied in their lifetimes have inflected discussion of their work. Drawing on critical theories of sexuality, gender and space, this thesis argues that the idea of the artist as a master continues to dominate as an explanation of art-making but that this characterisation is called into question by these four artist's specific practices in the studio. Close readings of the studio habits in these case studies, considered here as a situated negotiation between artist and studio, challenges the idea of mastery that studio-view exhibits and images tend to promote. Notions of mastery are inclined to construct practice as a paradigm between an active artist and passive studio materials and these, in turn, are apt to be read in terms of masculinity and femininity, respectively. Thus, the role of studio artist has tended to privilege a male lead. Therefore, analysing particular performances of masculinity by these artists provides a means to contest reading studio-view images as statements of mastery and the damaging and inequitable connotations this designation implies. Furthermore, this thesis argues that the recent trend to preserve studio material, or to otherwise encompass traces of practice in exhibits, films and photographs, may be correlated with theoretical shifts which took place in latter half of the twentieth century as a response to philosophical losses entailed in the critique of authority and objecthood and the rise of performance and conceptual art practices.

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Declaration No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

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Copyright Statement I. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. II. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. III. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. IV. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx? DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.

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Acknowledgements This thesis was supported by a Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The AHRC also funded research trips to Long Island, New York and Dublin, Ireland. Thanks for help, support and hospitality from Helen A. Harrison and Ruby Jackson at The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Springs, Long Island, New York, USA. Thanks for help and support from the staff at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in Ireland.

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About the Author

Andrew Hardman studied design and illustration and left higher education in 1994. He returned in 2005, gaining a first class BA (Hons.) in History of Art and an MA in Art History from the University of Manchester. In addition to his research, Andrew runs a film and media company, Belle Vue Productions, making research-led film content for education and the museum sector. He is currently working on projects for the Institute for Cultural Practice (UoM), Tate Liverpool and Grizedale Arts.

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Introduction

There is something enticing in the invitation to peer around the door of the studio where Francis Bacon (1908-1994) worked, or to trace the splashed paint on the walls and floor of the barn in which Lee Krasner (1909-1984) and Jackson Pollock's (1912-1956) celebrated abstract paintings were created; or to be allowed to follow an esteemed artist like Agnes Martin (1913-2005) as she painted, lingering on the production of art as it is staged in the studio. Since the early 1990s, the working spaces 11

of these four inhabitants of the studio have been made visible (and sometimes visitable) in representations that make such invitations, professing to offer up something of their lives and working methods to our scrutiny, and for our enjoyment [Figs. 1-4]. Three of these artists' studios were posthumously archived, preserved and exhibited – at the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio (a project begun in 1984 and opened to the public in 1990) and The Francis Bacon Studio at The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery (begun in 1998, opened in 2001) which now serve as popular visitor attractions. Similarly, though her studio materials were dispersed after Martin's death, her practice was extensively documented as subject of a 90 minute film, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World (Dir. Mary Lance, 2003). This thesis concerns these presentations and the continued appeal of the studio they demonstrate for the institutions that preserve, archive or otherwise document, in increasing numbers, these architectural spaces; for researchers seeking to engage with the artist's working methods; and for a wider public that view and visit these sites. It seeks to explore the desire to inhabit (imaginatively, at least) the artist's studio and to examine the claims made for insights offered by the material remains of artistic practice. The focus of this study will be the habits that surface in these images of the studio. Apart from its incidental visualisation as a backdrop to innumerable still-lifes, elaborately-staged history paintings and portraiture, art-making practices have long been purposively referenced in works whose subject matter is the act of painting itself: a genre that has been known as studio-pictures, vue d'atelier or, as I will use it here, the studio-view (a rough translation of the French).1 While studio is now, most often, taken to mean the room in which the artist works, this use of the term is, in fact, a relatively 1 I am using the term studio-view as a translation of the French vue d'atelier. Studio-view carries with it the implication of practice from its etymology. The French harks back to the model of the craftsperson's workshop. Moreover, this project's subjects are all working in a British and American context, one in which the French dominance over art was being contested. Use of the term atelier might, therefore, be inappropriate.

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recent Romantic pretence which took the Italian term for study – as meaning working practices – to also designate the artist's workplace.2 Inasmuch as studio was taken to mean, at this time, a place – a study as a support and shelter for the artist's acts of painting, say – it also, initially, brought with it another meaning, as a verb indicating a set of artistic practices: to study.3 In what follows, an emphasis on studio habits recalls this former, lapsed meaning of the term; an expanded definition of “studio” – as the practices by which art is made – structures this thesis. Specifically, it turns to exhibits, films and photographs that concern the relationship between the artist and studio and the studio habits that occur between them as a means to explore what the studio-view can offer in examining what happens in practice in the studio.4 The definition of habit employed in this exploration of studio-view imagery can begin to be described as “the mode or condition in which one is, exists or exhibits oneself” (OED).5 This thesis considers studio habits to be spatial and temporal activities that occur in the making of art, between artists and their working spaces, that, in certain ways constitutes the co-production of both.6 This means to consider the visualisation of art-making practices in studio-view imagery as producing artistic figures, by means 2 “Until the late seventeenth century, Italians called the artist's shop a bottega, or simply a stanza, and used “studio” primarily to denote the room or even the desk, where the scholar sat.” Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, “Origins of the Studio” in Cole and Pardo (eds.) Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism (The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill and London, 2005) p.3. 3 According to the OED, the first two instance of the term's usage occurred in 1819. The first mention is attributed to the Edinburgh Review in which a (slightly derogatory) mention is made of Cimabue's work space: “The greatest work which proceeded from his studio, was his scholar Giotto.” The second by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) is made in a letter (dated 25 February) in reference to preparatory sketches (or studies): “The most remarkable is the original studio by Michaelangelo of the day of judgment.” 4 The term, “studio habit,” is used by Svetlana Alpers to talk about Rembrandt's studio practices; however, I use the term differently in this thesis. Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1990) p.59. 5 Modes of being are also defined by Giorgio Agamben as “habits.” Agamben, “Special Being” in Profanations (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2007) pp. 55-60. 6 If we take the artist's creative practices to encapsulate elements of sensibilities, dispositions and tastes, the term habit is similar to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus; that is, as the means by which people – and, by extension, artists – produce and reproduce the social circumstances in which they live. Through the acquisition of habits – by pedagogical and other means – habitus becomes, claims Bourdieu “durably incorporated in the body in the form of permanent dispositions” and is, thus, generative. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1977) p.72.

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characteristic of Harold Rosenberg's contention that: “An artist is a person that has invented an artist.”7 Considering the production of space, it also means to account for the studio in Michel de Certeau's terms as “a practiced place.”8 This sees the “artist” and “studio” as enmeshed co-productions which emerge where creative practices or habits are visualised or otherwise represented. The four artists considered here lived and exhibited themselves habitually as studio artists. The particular working habits employed by Bacon, Krasner, Pollock and Martin, as seen in studio-view imagery, are key components of their respective biographies. In addition to the studio exhibits and film that form the basis for the following chapters, each of these painters had their studio spaces documented repeatedly throughout their careers. To some extent, each has been written into history according to these representations and, subsequently, complex (and sometimes contested) biographical narratives have grown up around their inhabitations of the studio. Bacon habitually posed for studio shots throughout his career, using, in particular ways, the studio's cachet to craft a distinguished artistic persona for himself [Fig. 5]. These habits were the cause of both negative critical attention and high praise; controversy over his designation as either modern master or untrained amateur centred on the reams of reference material brought to light in photographs of his South Kensington studios. Krasner's popular image also hinges on her inhabitation of a particular studio and her role in its preservation [Fig. 6]. Her contentious sobriquet as the New York art establishment's “Art Widow” was illustrated with photographs of her supposedly mournful occupation of the studio-barn where her deceased husband formerly worked. Foregoing traditional studio practices of easel painting, Pollock's use

7 Harold Rosenberg, Discovering the Present: Three Decades in Art, Culture, and Politics (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1973) p.214 8 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1984) p.117

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of horizontally-laid canvas, household and industrial paint, and documentation of his gestural performance of painting set him apart from his peers [Fig. 7]. Views of his studio, and his painting practices, secured this site's place in histories of art and made the artist a media star. Images of Martin's self-imposed seclusion in New Mexico illustrate her role as a celebrated hermit (a contradiction in terms) [Fig. 8]. She claimed to have painted the same painting every day for forty years – a disciplined and dedicated habit. Moreover, her meditative practices suggest that letting go or ceding control shaped her studio habits and the eventual fate of her studio materials. The specificity of these habits can be revealing and transform a study of the studio-view genre. Their nuances, when closely observed, challenges the idea of any comprehensive definition of artistic practice; when, where and how practice is undertaken; what we can say is produced in artistic practice; and what practice looks like. A turn to studio habits, in these cases, differentiates itself from the tendency to read studio-view images as statements of artistic mastery.9 Where these artists' practices have been brought to light the studio can tend to be read as “a workplace under the control of a creative subjectivity.”10 Accordingly, Bacon could be claimed to be the controlled and still centre to his studio's chaotic setting in photographs staged there [Fig. 5]. Similarly, Krasner domination of the studio can be made to support assertions of her mastering the studio and its painting paraphernalia as she poses in the centre of the image space, haughtily facing down the camera's gaze [Fig. 6]. The studio-view genre is also adept at suggesting a direct relationship exists between the artist's mind and the studio: in which an expressive flow from one interior (the artist's mind) to another (the supportive studio's architectural space) is conveyed. In this regard, Pollock might be 9 The OED defines mastery as “[a] comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular subject or activity […] the action of mastering a subject or skill: a child's mastery of language” and “[the] control or superiority over someone or something: man's mastery over nature.” 10 Christopher S. Wood, “Indoor-Outdoor: The Studio around 1500” in Cole and Pardo, Inventions of the Studio (2005) p.36.

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argued to be shown to be “in” his painting, a claim he made in celebrated statements [Fig. 7].11 Ignoring the important element of performance that each artist's studio-based pose entails, the figure of the artist is romanticised in these interpretations of the studioview: the artist's mastery of practice seems assured; the studio is constructed as a special place – a space apart, autonomous and isolated – for a special being, one attributed with extraordinary skills and vision. In Alexander Liberman's photograph of the artist, it could be claimed that Martin is presented in a sort of reverie, facing away from the viewer (and the wider world) [Fig. 8]. The canvas she stands in front of could be read as a window through which she, epitomising the artist figure, is afforded special insight. Through these types of reading, the position of the artist is thus imagined as one of virtuosity and superiority – expertise and authority in (and over) the studio go hand in hand. Characterising artistic practice in terms of mastery is underdeveloped, unrealistic and inequitable. Spatial occupations are infinitely various, as the briefly sketched out studio habits of these four artists attest. There can be, therefore, no easy or universal definition of the artist's inhabitation of the studio; the underdeveloped classification of practice as meaning one thing – the artist's mastery – is unrealistic. Studio materials (as most artistic practitioners would agree) are as likely to confound practice, thwarting creative intentions and the sense that the artist is, in any way, in full control. Moreover, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains, when “making things” is configured as the mastering of a practice, a dualistic paradigm of “doer” and “done-to” tends to be constructed.12 The language of artistic mastery thereby sets the artist's activity against the studio's constructed passivity. This inequitable patterning sets the artist's mastery 11 The following statement was made for the journal Possibilities (1947): “On the floor [of the studio] I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from all sides and literally be in the painting.” [Original emphasis] Quoted from Francis V. O'Connor, Jackson Pollock, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1967) pp.39-40. 12 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness” in The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) p. 79.

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against his materials, securing their passive femininity as his “other,” configured (and deprivileged) as a foil to secure the artist's spectacle of masculinity.13 What follows considers how art-making is characterised as mastery, what this designation connotes, and how this is challenged by close readings of studio habits. Though its language has been criticised and lampooned (by artists and critics alike) since the second half of the twentieth century, assertions of the artist's mastery of practice and material space continue to be part of how art-making is still communicated and understood today.14 In this thesis studio habits are a means to describe the artmaking practices, that studio-view exhibits, films, photographs and other accounts make visible, in ways that avoid a reliance on, and pose a challenge to, this language of mastery. Studio-view imagery sustains and promotes (even, it will be argued, incorporates) still-dominant modernist notions of the artist as a master and, therefore, as male and heterosexual – wherein a heterosexualised paradigm of masculinised “do-er” (the artist) in place in opposition to a duly feminised “done-to” (studio materials). This thesis proposes a turn to studio habits as a resistance to viewing art-making in terms of mastery, and as a more realistic and politically transformative approach to studio-view imagery. The following case-studies – on the Bacon Studio Exhibit, The PollockKrasner House and Lance's film of Agnes Martin – explores how this works in practice. Avoiding mastery, an investigation of studio habits sees, instead, the relationship that 13 As Griselda Pollock argues, regarding the image of the Abstract Expressionist artist, in “Killing Men and Dying Women” in Orton and Pollock (eds.), Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (1996). 14 Between the end of World War Two and the end of the century, the studio was subject to direct critical examination. This reflexivity can be defined in artworks, notably performances: Carolee Schneemann's Eye Body-36 Transformative Actions (1963), for instance, in which the artist considers her role as the artist (who sees) and a woman (who is seen); or in Bruce Nauman's Failing to Levitate in the Studio (1966) one of a series of studio-bound performances by the artist in which he challenges the special status of the studio. Jane Blocker has written about Schneeman's performance of this piece as “engaging in the gender dynamics of subjectivity” in What the Body Cost, p.61-3. Other studio performances by Nauman include: Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio (1967-8) and Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-8). For more recent artists critical focus on mastery and the studio see Julia Gelshorn, “Creation, Recreation, Procreation: Matthew Barney, Martin Kippenberger, Jason Rhoades, and Paul McCarthy” in Davidts, The Fall of the Studio (2009).

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these images make visible, between artist and studio, as a network of practices, habits and spatial occupations in which neither the artist nor material is privileged. In considering the network of creative practices, occupational tendencies and situated performances of personas as spatial practices occurring over time in the production of “historical identities” this thesis draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on sexuality and space.15 Habit, Sedgwick argues, “suggests ways of mediating back and forth between active and passive; between space and time; between the intimate and the most public space; and also among the realms of static objects and places, movements, and behaviour.” Thus, the closed systems that characterise dualistic readings of the studio-view may be negotiated in this turn to habit; for Sedgwick, these include connotations of occupational practices but also spatial practices of inhabitation or occupation of a space, the social practices of character, bodily comportment, or customary practices. This enriches the artist-studio relationship in seeing it as complex set of spatial and temporal orientations. The paradigm in which the active artist does something to passive materials in order to produce art is modified when we consider the practices or studio habits that interface these two poles; and so, this thesis considers artmaking as a negotiated practice between the artist and her materials, disabusing the fantasy of painting practice as mastery. The traffic between these habitual occupations and occupying habits is outlined in a focus on practice.

15 Sedgwick, “Queer Sex Habits (Oh, no! I mean) Six Queer Habits: Some Talking Points” Queer-e Vol.1, no.1. No page numbers. Sedgwick's thinking on the issue of sexuality and space was made, according to this document, in conversation with a number of scholars including Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley. Sedgwick's focus is on “queer spaces” – the practices and performances that, specifically, “constitute sexualities.”

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In either its visual or visitable iterations, the studio-view excels in suggesting a correlation between the workplace and its artist figure (even when absent). The manner by which this relationship – between psychic and architectural senses of “an interior” – is constructed, by both the institutions that produce and exhibit the studio-view and the publics that consume this image, is a central concern of this thesis. In the context of the writer's room (and its place in expressive writing practices) Diana Fuss wonders: “what exactly links the interior furniture of houses to the interior furniture of minds?”16 Where Fuss finds the answer lies in the body's senses, I find that transposed to the more physical arena of the studio the senses seem too gentle or passive. Designating the interface between space and self as the realm of habits reorientates Fuss's question in thinking about what we do in space and what it does to us in return in terms of acts or actions (and complicating active and passive registers). This orientation to practicality suits an investigation into the studio, a space in which doing, making, moving and, importantly, working makes a recourse to senses alone seem too weak. A focus on habit, therefore, foregrounds the contradictions of artistic practices this thesis considers: habit is something excessive (an addiction) but also ascetic (a discipline); habit can be rote or mechanical but also ingrained knowledge or a learned practice; and habit is a guise (or drag) but also a uniform. Mismatching registers read into the layered meanings of studio habits that interface and perform both “studio” and “artist” can productively undermine the stability of both, their alignment in a mirroring duality and the unrealistic and inequitable versions of art-making that this perpetuates. Addressing studio habits provides an opportunity to study, in all its complexity, the relationship between artists and the spaces they inhabit; how this has been articulated; how it continues to be portrayed in studio-view exhibits and imagery; and 16 Fuss, Sense of an Interior p.17. Fuss argues, “the most critical bridge between the architectural and psychological interior is the human sensorium: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.”

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how this material has been read in ways that enable the continued dominance of modernist thinking in interpreting visualisations of artistic practice. A reason to consider these four artists is that each made use of a language of artistic expressionism, or modes of introspection, in explaining their work in ways that slide between two kinds of interiority: an inner self (or psychological interior) which may be expressed, or externalised, on canvas in an interior space (or architectural interior) or studio.17 Distinctively, Bacon, Krasner, Pollock and Martin could all be designated as artists of the interior.18 As much as they inhabited, day after day, their own studios, these spaces, in certain ways, inhabited them.19 In claiming that “the places I live in, or like living in, are rather like an auto-biography,” Bacon's articulation of his own art-making practices, for example, reiterates this tendency toward a neat construction of artist and studio as counterparts: the features, characteristics and organisation of Bacon's mind is, for him, legible in the studio. This mimetic relationality or reflection-ism, in which the artist's “reality” is represented legibly in the studio he occupies, structures the analysis of studio imagery in two popular books on the studio from the late twentieth century: Alexander Liberman's The Artist in the Studio (1960) and Alice Bellony-Rewald and Michael Peppiatt's Imagination's Chamber: Artists in their Studios (1985).20 Gathering together a 17 Bacon: “One brings the sensation and the feeling of life over in the only way one can.” Quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson: London, 1975) p.43; Krasner: “I think my painting is so autobiographical if anyone can take the trouble to read it.” Quoted in Cindy Nemser, Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists (The University of Michigan: Ann Arbour, 1975) p.100; Pollock: “I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well. The source of my painting is the unconscious.” Quoted in “Statement for the Guggenheim” in Francis V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock (MOMA: New York, 1967); Martin: “Work is self expression. We must not think of self-expression as something we may do or something we may not do. Self expression is inevitable. In your work, in the way that you do your work and in the results of your work your self is expressed. Behind and before self-expression is a developing awareness in the mind that effects the work.” Quoted in “The Perfection Underlying Life” in Dieter Schwarz, Agnes Martin: Writings (Schriften) (Ostfildern: Cantz-Verlag, 1991) pp. 67-85. 18 Diana Fuss designates her case studies as “four writers of the interior” in Sense of an Interior p.5. 19 A study of habitation, according to Sedgwick, considers “our home (when we have one); what we make it; what it makes of us.” Queer Sex Habits, no page numbers. 20 In reviewing the literature on the artist's studio, Svetlana Alpers contrasts both these “illustrated books” to more scholarly studies. Alpers, The Vexations of Art. p.263. A copy of Liberman's book was

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life-long documentary photography project in book form – published previously, partly, in Vogue magazine – Liberman considers: “what relationship exists between the painting and the vision of reality that daily the artist has before his eyes?” His photography, he claims, is a means to reveal “the core of [the] creative act, to show the creative process itself, and thereby to relate painting and sculpture with the mainstream of man's search for truth.”21 The artist's intentions, as a “truth” imparted in his painting or sculpture, is to be found in the creative processes indexed by their remains in the studio. Published 20 years later, the title of Bellony-Rewald & Peppiatt's historical survey of the studio-view, Imagination's Chamber, announces from the outset a familiar claim that “in many ways, the studio is the artist.”22 Substituting one interior space for another, slipping between psychic and architectural constructions, the authors conceive of the studio as “the recess of vision, the shell of the artist's mind.”23 The form that these books take – a biographical narrative of juxtaposed photography and textual exposition – wraps this version of art-making in a convincing language of documentary veracity.24 Both books use the studio-view genre to add weight to their suggestion that entry to the studio can be correlated to accessing the artist's mind and intentions. Fulfilling a favourite fantasy of modernist thinking, the studio's indexing of the artist's inner self, externally expressed, is made legible. Moreover, these studio books participate in producing for public consumption familiar lineages of Great Artists, for which the studio becomes shorthand for. The correlation of architectural interior and psychic interiority (inscribed or projected on or as the artist's body) is, in these cases, a

21 22 23

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found in Bacon's studio as it was dismantled and accessioned into the archive at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Peppiatt, co-incidentally, is Bacon's biographer. Liberman, The Artist in the Studio, p.9 Bellony-Rewald and Peppiatt, Imagination's Chamber, p.vi Bellony-Rewald and Peppiatt, Imagination's Chamber, p.vi. The spaces documented illustrate the mysterious acts they have borne witness too: Pollock's studio-barn, for example, “has acquired [an] aura as one of the high places of contemporary creation: an ordinary space rendered magical because an excitingly original approach to painting was evolved within its walls.” [182] “High modernist reportage,” is how Mary Bergstein succinctly describes Liberman's work. Bergstein, “The Artist in his Studio: Photography, Art and the Masculine Mystique” The Oxford Art Journal, 18:2, 1995. p.45.

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simplistic but seductive narrative device. The studio signifies here as an attribute of the artist, a way of identifying (and materialising) the artist's “special” deeds and actions.25 Based on personalities, types and recognisable attributes and habits, forms of biographical narrative are ones that traditional (and potentially “masculinist”) forms of art history have been predicated on.26 This has been achieved textually through a longestablished trope of artist biography that dates back to (at least) Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550). The studio-view provides a stage for such narratives in these books. Taken together with a language of studio mastery, mirroring artist and studio presents further problems. In suggesting that it is the artist's creative mind (an immaterial mental space), rather than the body, that is correlated to working space, the artist's body – as, perhaps, the “material condition of subjectivity” – is configured as another tool for a disembodied imagination (and, in this way, it is both the body and the studio that are configured as “imagination's chamber”).27 These readings construct the artist's occupation, and art production, in ways that privilege masculinity. A reason to reject or challenge reading mastery or mirroring in the studio-view is, therefore, that when read as a binary relationship between artist and studio (the one mirroring or mastering the other) art production is masculinised.28 Subsequently, the artist's 25 Zirka Filipczak claims that, given the lack of a “northern Vasari,” the studio-picture came to stand in as a biographical trope via early modern Flemish painting. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, p.5. 26 Art history has succeeded in designating the studio-artist as heroic through, Griselda Pollock notes, discursive structures of “the biographic, which focuses exclusively on the individual, and the narrative, which produces coherent, linear, causal sequences through which the artistic subject is realised.” Pollock, “Artists, Mythologies and Media — Genius, Madness and Art History” in Screen (1980) 21 (3) p.59 (original emphasis) 27 Elizabeth Grosz considers the body as the “material condition of subjectivity.” Grosz, “Bodies-Cities” in Colomina (ed.), Sexuality and Space, p.241 28 Grosz has claimed an implicit “phallocentric coding” to be in play when architectural space is mimetically compared with the human body. “Bodies-Cities” p.247 Returning to my example of the studio-view as representing the social order of the artist's studio, Grosz's example underlines potentially unacknowledged sexual positioning at work when the studio is placed in a duality with the artist. Moreover, as a model of social ordering, paralleled to the artist's body (as seen in the studioview) an opposition between nature and culture is implied as culture (the body-politic) supersedes and perfects nature (the body). Grosz concludes her critique of the mirroring of body and space in stating: “nature is a passivity on which culture works as male (cultural) productivity supersedes and overtakes female (natural) reproduction.” (248).

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occupation – as studio artist – is reserved for bodies capable of connoting the “correct” gender. The studio, consequently, appears to alienate artists whose bodies do not comport to its stringent codes and the role of the artist is constructed as one reserved for a male lead. Where women have occupied the studio, often they must inhabit certain roles: the model or muse, for example, or as the artist's wife (or widow) in Krasner's case. It has been a feature of writing on Krasner's practice to wonder about the effect on her painting of her use of domestic space on the Springs farm she shared with Pollock rather than the large studio barn in which he worked. This has been equated with perceptions of her side-lining from a history of Abstract Expressionism.29 However, this narrative fails to take into account the detail of Krasner's studio habits (or those of Pollock). Attention to these might note that her workspace in the spare bedroom of the Springs house was a fantastically well-appointed studio – with north-facing light and a decent amount of space – and, indeed, that Pollock had also used this domestic space.30 In addition to its neat isomorphic conflation of spatial exclusion and historical omission, the critical limits of asserting Krasner's alienation can be seen in responses where her “exclusion” is rectified with triumphal occupation of the prized studio barn after Pollock's death.31 Finding a solution to alienation from the studio in feminine mastery seems only to serve to ensure the continuation of the heterosexualised paradigm they contest, further entrenching their gender bifurcations. In addition to perpetuating modernist versions of art-making, the recourse to heroic narratives, masterful rhetoric and the mirroring of artist and studio rationalises an infinite combination of practices, habits and occupations of space entailed in the artist's 29 As I will turn to in chapter two, Krasner's alienation is part of her personal mythology – one which the artist herself participated in constructing. 30 Though it should be noted also, on the other hand, that Krasner had also used the house's kitchen at various points. 31 A notable example of this angle in recent studies is Caroline A. Jones analysis of Krasner's image in Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago; London, 1996) pp.36-38.

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occupation of the studio. These conventional readings of the studio-view are problematic in a number of ways. Firstly, the studio favours a male inhabitant when read as a space of mastery; his imagined other, duly feminised, is relegated to a supporting role making it difficult for all but a privileged sub-set of people to inhabit the role of the studio artist. Secondly, the studio-view suggests a meaningful origin for works of art when considered as the privileged space of production. Interpretation of the artist's intentions is encouraged when, as described above, the image of the studio circulates as a narrative device which mirrors the mythic artist-subject behind the work. Thirdly, the presence that the studio-view is prone to suggesting (which, I propose, is a condition apparent in all rooms) risks being mis-recognised as “the artist.” Thus, the studio itself may metonymically stand in as an authority behind the work, palliating the viewer with comforting narratives of presence and plenty in spaces (particularly the exhibited studio) of absence and loss. But studio-view imagery can provide invaluable information – as to historical techniques, for example. Therefore, this project does not advocate a looking away from the studio-view genre but asks: what might alternative approaches look like? And how precisely can they challenge the modernist versions of art-making that return via considering studio-view imagery in terms of a duality of mastery and mirroring? In addition to examining the imagined relationship between artist and studio, exploring the studio habits of Bacon, Krasner, Pollock and Martin can also be revealing about historical patterns in Euro-American art that emerged from the mid-twentieth century onwards, trends concurrent with wider philosophical critiques of authority.32 The careers of these four artists span a shifting critical milieu ostensibly from high 32 See, for example, Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979); Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977); Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1979) pp. 141–160

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modernism in the immediate post-war period to an expanded field of post-modernist art practices in the latter twentieth century. Each artist began their career in the first half of the century, immersed, from their earliest education, in a culture of modernist art practice and theory. Each subscribed to a romanticised rhetoric of artistic expressionism. Yet, during the second half of the century, these artists (Pollock, for the most part, posthumously) found their work, and images of their studio spaces, increasingly considered according to an emergent anti-modernist (or post-modernist) movement: responses to Bacon's work, for example, noted his use of reprographic reference material, evidenced in studio-view images, as a precursor to British Pop art in the 1950s; Martin's work was, from an early point in her career, theorised according to its conceptual use of grids. In general terms, artists and trends of art-making moved away from traditional forms of painting in the decades after World War Two; yet, these four artists adhered to conventional practices and the “romance” of the solitary studio even as that mode of art production was challenged by new forms of making and engagement.33 During the second half of the twentieth century, a crucial element in the emergence of conceptual and performance art practices was the increased prominence of processes of art production: elements which studio-view imagery excels in making visible. Consequently, in the period during which these four artists worked, the studio has been functionally reconfigured as both a stage and a study. One, particularly wellrehearsed, example of this rearrangement is the scene set by photographs of Jackson 33 As such, this project moves away from Jones' project in Machine in the Studio (1994) in which she traces moves towards a “post-studio” situation in looking at, for instance, the radical departure from standard models of art-making by Andy Warhol and his salon-like Factory. Warhol's factory might be an ideal place to consider studio habits but this study's interest is, specifically, in the historical model of the solitary master artist in the studio. If Warhol's Factory was consciously drawing on a historical studio model it is the salon – a performative space for exchange between artists and patrons – or even the renaissance workshop staffed by assistants – a place of hierarchical and pedagogic relationships. Critically, the gender models re-inscribed by these studio models differ from those repeated in the romantic solitary paradigm that developed, as I will turn shortly, through studio-view imagery and crystallised during the nineteenth century.

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Pollock at work. Documentation of his performance of expressionist painting by his collaborator, Hans Namuth (1915-1990) made the studio in which he (and Krasner) worked one of the most infamous sites in modern art history. Through dissemination of these images (at least, in part) the act of painting itself began to be seen as a performance, with the studio its stage (or, famously, as an “arena in which to act” as claimed by Harold Rosenberg for Pollock's method of painting and its image). In an obituary article (1957), the artist Allan Kaprow reflected that Pollock “created some magnificent paintings. But he also destroyed painting.”34 This destruction, Kaprow contends, is a direct effect of the artist's acts as they diverted critical attention away from the painted canvas; a reading which relied, at least in part, on Namuth's photographic account of Pollock's habits – his dripping of paint on a horizontally place canvas, the movement of the artist's body as it labours around studio space.35 Knowledge of Pollock's performance before the camera, staged in the studio, is, therefore, pivotal to this definitive critical turn for art theory. The sanctity of the art object – where modernist theories of art, in particular, are concerned – was challenged by the theorisation of performance practices Kaprow's article begins to outline and by which he would produce his own “Happenings.” In cataloguing the “dematerialisation” of objecthood in the years 1966-72, Lucy R Lippard noted an implicit reformulation of the studio's functional purpose.36 With reference to a shift from expressionist art-making and criticism to “ultra-conceptual” art in that period, she states: As more and more work is designed in the studio, but executed elsewhere by professional craftsmen, as the object becomes merely the end product, a number of artists are losing 34 Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958)” in Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (1996) p. 3-4. 35 Noting the exceeding of canvas in Pollock's practice, Kaprow's summation, therefore, is not completely reliant on Namuth's photographs. “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” p.6. 36 Lippard characterises this “dematerialisation” as “deemphasis on material aspects (uniqueness, permanence, decorative attractiveness.” Lucy R. Lippard (ed.), Six Years: dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972... (University of California Press: Berkeley; LA, 1997) p.5

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interest in the physical evolution of the work of art. The studio is again becoming a study.37

Thus, trends away from the understanding of “artwork” as a product in the 1960s impinge on the studio's status as a workshop. The need arose, according to Lippard, for the studio to be reconsidered as a space of intellectual enquiry, a place to think, to conceptualise, not only a place to produce valuable art objects. With art understood more broadly in this period as both “idea” and “action,” the relevance and meaning of the image of the artist at work in the studio was also modified.38 Referring to traditions of the studio – modes of working that Bacon, Krasner, Pollock and Martin adhered to even if their practices were read as radical Caroline A. Jones claims that “the concepts of the studio that operated in America during the 1940s and '50s were inextricably tied to nineteenth-century Romanticism, and to the apotheosis of individual genius that reached its peak in that climate.”39 This “romance of the studio” was used as a historical model for mid-twentieth century artmaking. She continues: [...] the artist's isolation in the studio was merely metonymic of his relation to the world, but through metynomy the studio became a figure for the isolated genius. Thus loaded symbolically, it became a prime site for critique and conversion in the 1960s, with artist as manager and worker in social space, or engineer of a decentered and dispersed 'post-studio' production.40

Jones contends that a mystification of the studio spurred artists in the 1960s – Andy Warhol, amongst others – to challenge studio conventions; artistic responses that would become, she argues, precursors of an influential postmodern, or “post-studio,” take on art-making. In this mode, Daniel Büren's (1971) rationale for his own site specific work, 37 Lippard, Six years, p.42. 38 “The visual arts at the moment seem to hover at a crossroad that may well turn out to be two roads to one place though they appear to have come from two sources: art as idea and art as action.” Lippard, Six years, p.43. 39 Jones, Machine in the Studio p.4. Furthermore, I would suggest that the romantic isolation of the artist in the nineteenth century itself needed to draw on historical models of solitude. For example, the nineteenth century studio-view, created via new mechanisms of photograph and circulated by the carte de visite, drew on a familiar trope of the solitary artist alone in the studio despite this medium – the visiting card – being suggestive, ironically, of the studio being part of a social network in which studio visits and company (the opposites of solitude) were the norm. 40 Jones, Machine in the Studio p.9

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for example, is structured around his critique of the “bourgeois” studio as the “unique site of production” diametrically opposed to the gallery's “unique space of exposition.”41 Büren's point is that the spaces in which his artworks were “made” are, inviolably, the same spaces in which they are experienced. However, his solution was for the abandonment of the studio, entirely; yet, the studio has not been abandoned.42 Artists still inhabit studio spaces as a practical necessity. What is more, the portrayal of the artist's occupation, as an individual endeavour undertaken in a solitary habitat, has proved to be a remarkably persistent visual trope.43 Given that this version of art-making is at odds with changes to the definitions of artist and art-making over the last sixty years how, why and where does a “romance of the studio” persist? The tension between theoretical and practical considerations of the studio suggests that, for this project, there are two distinct cultures where the studio is concerned – cultures in which a problematic, romantic and modernist images of artmaking exists in tension, in the present, with a post-modernist “post-studio” culture. How the theorisation of artistic processes in the latter half of the twentieth century enable another culture's incongruously modernist fantasy of “the artist,” the studio and art-making to persist is a central concern of this thesis. To characterise the interaction between a “romance of the studio,” modernist versions of art-making and the “poststudio,” we might, along with Raymond Williams, consider these as “residual, dominant 41 Daniel Büren, “The Function of the Studio” in October, Vol. 10 (Autumn 1979) pp. 51-58. 42 As Wouter Davidts notes, forty years after Buren's statement the studio is still going strong. See Davidts' introduction to Wouter Davidts & Kim Paice (eds.), The Fall of the Studio (Valiz: Amsterdam, 2009) 43 The studio-view continues to fascinate. Recent books of studio-view photography include Hossein Amirsadeghi and Maryam Homayoun Eisler (eds.), Sanctuary: Britain's Artists and Their Studios (Thames & Hudson: London, 2012) and Jean-François Chaigneau, In the Studio: Artists of the 20th Century in Private and at Work (Olms: Hildesheim, 2012). More specific texts on the studio include: Svetlana Alpers (1990, 2007) on Netherlandish studio-pictures; Victor Stoichita (1997) and Zirka Filipczak (1987) on the studio-gallery pictures of the sixteenth and seventeenth century; Caroline A. Jones (1996) on “post-studio” practices of the twentieth century. Other recent collected works gather together shorter essays and artist statements; notable recent publications of this type are collections of essays: on early modern studios Michael Cole and Mary Pardo (2005); and the studio after the socalled “post-studio” debate by Wouter Davidts & Kim Paice (2009); and two readers of collected texts on the studio, The Studio Reader (2010) and The Studio (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2012).

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and emergent” formations, respectively.44 Accordingly, the “romance of the studio” could be styled as a stubborn residue; not merely a “surviving past” but an “effective element of the present.”45 The “post-studio” might be claimed as an emergent culture whose “new meanings and values, new practices and kinds of relationships” are “substantially alternative or oppositional” to what then might be seen as the dominant culture – as the modernist studio ideal. Claiming a disjunct exists between “art-world” and mainstream views of artistic practice, therefore, necessitates examining how the studio has been considered in popular culture – via studio exhibits and the continuing popularity of studio-view images and their connotations, for example. Additionally, it is necessary to examine the specific ways in which emerging formations encompass outmoded, residual concepts in order to shore up their legitimacy and the incongruities these may allow to persist: how, for example, “Post-studio” thinking encompasses images of making (as performance documentation, for instance) as part of the interest the processes of art and, therefore, the historical connotations the studio-view genre brings with it. If emergent (and dominant) cultures shore up their legitimacy, as Williams argues, through the active selection of traditions, the manner in which these formations incorporate residual traditions of the popularised and romanticised studio-view indicate one way in which “post-studio” concerns invite back the “romance of the studio” – themselves previously incorporated by dominant modernist formations, as Jones has claimed – as part of the process of becoming “mainstream.”46 Thus, for this thesis, 44 Raymond Williams argues in Marxism and Literature (1977) against an understanding of culture as a coherent system with singular tendencies but, rather, as a dynamic system of interrelated cultural movements and tendencies. p.115-127 45 This “surviving past” is “still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the bases of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous cultural institution or formation.” Williams, Marxism and Literature, p.122. 46 Williams notes: the most active incorporation happens in emergent formations. Marxism and Literature, p.125.

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strategies of “incorporation” become a key concept. This entails asking how the shifting frames of art-world discourse produced studio material as meaningful material – evidenced by the trend to preserve artists' workspaces. But, inherited from the “romance of the studio,” what problematic connotations does the incorporation of “selective traditions” enable? What does incorporation mean when considering the concept of preservation or the documentation of practices? How might incorporative strategies impact upon the image of the artist? As performance and conceptual art have become the mainstream of art theory and history, what is encompassed by the terms “artwork” has been actively questioned. In the last twenty five years, the documentation of performance, and the archival status of its remains, has proved to be an area of acute concern for performance studies and the writing of art history. The tendency to argue for the preservation of spaces in which studio habits have taken place make an investigation of the studio-view and studio habits timely.47 Attending to the studio habits of my four case studies, and the manner in which these have been visualised or materialised, can expand on theories of preservation, documentation and, in turn, elaborate on narratives of loss that these theoretical turns have produced. This focus is then a means to question the impulse to preserve and document, often at great expense, studio spaces, and to ask, what precisely is entailed in archiving an artist's practice. What, for instance, is believed to be gained by these cultural processes? What cannot be saved, documented or archived? Ephemeral art practices, unrepeatable and lost forever, are changed in various ways in their reproduction, their fixing in substance, in order to bring them into views of various institutions as knowledge.48 In Unmarked (1993) Peggy Phelan contends that 47 For example, Tate Research have recently (May 2013) organised a programme of interpretation around the preservation of the Hepworth studio at The Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St. Ives. 48 See, for example, Taylor, The Archive and the Repetoire (2003); Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (1989); Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, (1997).

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performance's “only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented […] once it does so it becomes something other than performance.”49 If acts of painting (or otherwise creating) in the studio are inherently live, they are, according to Phelan's account, antithetical to the archive – a troubling position in regard to claims made for the studio exhibit. The circulation of studio acts in the museum or gallery, or their transference or value in an art market, fundamentally changes them. Thus, Phelan might argue, these performances should remain ephemeral, immaterial and, in certain senses, lost to the archive otherwise they become something else. However, if conserved (or “conservative”) traces of events are “reactionary” on account of their being documented, as Phelan later claimed, what approach should be taken to the studio-archives this project turns to without abandoning the studio, and its potential wealth of knowledge, altogether? In claiming that the potential radicality of ephemeral events is undermined by documentation, Phelan warns that “the desire to preserve and represent the performance is a desire we should resist. For what one otherwise preserves is an illustrated corpse, a pop-up anatomical drawing that stands in for what one most wants to save, the embodied performance.”50 There is, I suggest, a sense of the “illustrated corpse” about the historical homes and studios that form an art-historical heritage trail that is taken through this project's chapters. Phelan contends that the “restored outline” of this lost object of desire should be abandoned in favour of tracing the “affective outline” of the missing body; yet, where does that leave the restored outlines of the Bacon Studio Exhibit, for example?51 For this project's material archive, these comments present a clear problem: what constitutes a correct historical approach when the preserved outline is already there? How should we handle what we want to save and how do we approach 49 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge: New York; London, 1993) p.146 50 Phelan, Mourning Sex, p.3 51 Phelan, Mourning Sex, p.3

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events or acts that have already been preserved, conserved or otherwise immortalised? Attention to studio habits – some necessarily ephemeral – can indicate how these are changed in their documentation, preservation or accessioning into museum archives. Moreover, considering the dispersal of Martin's studio materials after her death enables us to question, through comparison, the consequences of preserving (or not) the studio. A crucial relation to loss is suggested by the language of preservation and documentation by which the studio-view is articulated: losses that are either threatened or have already occurred. What follows explores the possibility that the visible studios of Bacon, Krasner, Pollock and Martin may exemplify what Eng and Kazanjian (2003) have claimed as, “the numerous material practices by which loss is melancholically materialised in the social and cultural realms and in the political and aesthetic domains.”52 Where the studio-view is concerned, loss may be subject to multiple entwined definitions. Studio-exhibits are, for instance, posthumous recreations; in the stilled and empty studios of Bacon, Krasner and Pollock – staged as if their former occupants may have just left and may, at any moment, return – loss could refer to the literal absence of the artist. Loss might also relate to equally absent, never-to-berepeated, ephemeral acts of painting that these studio remains index. As noted above, the documentation or preservation of studio space is, in part, a response to loss. Furthermore, in considering a relationship between the burgeoning trend to preserve studio space and the changing critical focus of the late twentieth century, the sacrifices demanded by the emergent theoretical protocols of the late twentieth century may also be related to loss. In this regard, Jane Blocker wonders: Isn't postmodernism itself defined by lost belief and the clinging to lost belief? It concatenates the death of the author, the fragmentation of subjectivity, the loss of the real, the play of the signifier, the waning of affect, and the failure of the avant-garde. It both exults in these losses and obsessively mourns, revives, and mourns them again.53 52 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California Press: Berkeley; London, 2003) p.5 53 Jane Blocker, What the Body Cost: Desire, History and Performance (University of Minnesota Press:

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The revival of what was lost in the anti-modernist critique of the late 1960s – the authoritative artist, for example, or the self-contained, ever-present, and valuable art object – and how this might be perpetuated through studio-view imagery is a central concern for this thesis. What follows notes the entangling of these definitions of loss; of particular interest is the tendency for losses of one kind to be mapped onto another and the definitional incoherency this can cause.54 For example, though Krasner and Pollock's house and studio is designated as a memorial to its deceased former occupants it also exists, I will argue, as a mournful shrine to other “art-world” losses. If the studio-view is, as this thesis argues, materialised in response to loss it is as a reaction-formation to theoretical losses keenly felt by a mournful art-world.55 Much as Craig Owens claimed that postmodernist art between 1965 and 1985 constituted “a response or series of responses” to criticism of the author as unique source of meaning or value in works of art, what follows considers that another response to the same censure on authority and objecthood is at work in the same period and up to the present.56 This means to consider the correlation of historical art-world losses and the recent increase in studio preservation projects and their fascination for institutions of art, curatorial practitioners and their publics. The impetus behind the turn to studio habits in this thesis is the demand to Minneapolis; London, 2004) p.xiii 54 “The ability of the melancholic object to express multiple losses at once speaks to its flexibility as a signifier.” Eng and Kazanjian, Loss, p.5 55 Reaction-formation is explained as “habitus diametrically opposed to a repressed wish, and constituted as a reaction against it […] From a clinical point of view, reaction-formations take on a symptomatic value when they display a rigid, forced or compulsive aspect, when they happen to fail in their purpose or when – occasionally – they lead directly to the result opposite to the one consciously intended.” Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books: London, 1973) p.377 56 Craig Owens argues: “If, as Barthes argued, the author could not – or could no longer – claim to be the unique source of meaning and/or value of the work of art, then who – or what – could make such a claim? It is my contention that, despite its diversity, the art of the last twenty years, the art frequently referred to as 'post-modernist,' can perhaps best be understood as a response or series of responses to this question – even when artists simply attempt to reclaim the privileges that have traditionally accrued to the author in our society.” Craig Owens, “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After 'The Death of the Author'” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (Univeristy of California Press: Berkeley and London, 1992) p.123.

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theorise the studio-view in terms of the relationship between artist and studio this genre of imagery tends to construct; the shifting and overlapping art critical frameworks they have participated in shaping; and the theories of documentation, preservation and loss they further enhance. Ignoring studio habits in theorising the image of the studio sees these as statements of mastery in which the artist's intentions are mirrored or indexed in the studio's materiality – as the remains of practices; it ignores the changing relevance of artistic process in late twentieth century art theory, the role the studio-view played in these shifts, and the changing function of studio space in that period; and, furthermore, the archivisation and exhibition of the studio may be misconstrued as preserving traces of genius, to further, perhaps, the interpretation of the intentions behind great works of art. In all, these are suggestive of a modernist conceptions of artistic practices, enabling a still-dominant version of the artist's studio to circulate. A focus on studio habits in close readings of studio-exhibits, films and photographs are posited against these narrow readings.

This examination of studio habits will proceed through a critical analysis of visual imagery of the studio and their historical contextualisation. Painting the act of painting, or otherwise visualising the studio, is a long-practiced tradition in which artists have often turned to the studio as a means to represent their practices. Typically, four celebrated examples of studio-view painting by canonical artists have been turned to in order to exemplify the self-reflexivity of this genre: these include Rembrandt van Rijn's, The Artist in his Studio (c.1626-8); Diego Velázquez's, Las Meninas (1665); Johannes Vermeer's, The Art of Painting (c. 1662-8); and Gustave Courbet's, The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory (1855).57 However, almost every painter, at one time or another, 57 For example, these paintings form the basis of Brian O'Doherty's investigation of the relationship between the studio and gallery in O'Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship Between Where Art is Made and Where it is Displayed (Buell Center/FORuM Project Publications: New York, 2007).

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has turned to their studio surroundings as subject matter for their work.58 Through these images the artist's profession and the studio itself has been mythologised: from the earliest marginal self-portraits inserted into illuminated texts by the manuscript painters of the middle ages to the repeated portrayal of mythic artists such as Saint Luke.59 The studio as subject also made an early debut as an era of photo-portraiture was ushered in during the nineteenth century. Since then, the power of the photograph (and later, film) to document enabled the recording, for posterity, of the surroundings, techniques and conditions entailed in making art. Together with the burgeoning trend to archive and exhibit the materiality of the artist's studio, a rich seam of imagery is available to a study of the studio-view genre, and of studio habits.60 From images of Saint Luke to Velazquez's Las Meninas and up to present day studio exhibits, studio-view imagery has often been described as statements of their specialised subjectivity – as scholars and professional imbued with unique powers of

58 Bacon, Krasner and Pollock all produced studio-view paintings as well as posing for studio shots. See for example, Bacon's Corner of the Studio (1934) and Krasner's Self Portrait (1930). Ellen G. Landau claims that later studio imagery by Krasner – notably Black and White (1950) – “also quoted Pollock's appropriation in the early forties of Picasso's studio subjects.” Landau and Jeffrey D. Grove, Lee Krasner: A Catalogue Raissoné (Abrams: New York, 1995) p.130. Martin's destruction of much of her earlier work precludes finding any evidence of studio subjects in her work. 59 The self-imaging of manuscript painters, inserted among illuminated pages, are among the earliest known examples in which artists turned reflexively upon their own practices as a subject: see Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Method of Work (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) – especially figs. 33, 49. Sources of these early depictions of artistic include Giovanni Boccaccio's Famous Women. Notably, in a French manuscript of the book, from 1401, three female painters are represented – Marcia, Thamar and Irene from Pliny's Natural History (77-79 CE). Saint Luke – a Patron Saint of painters – became a popular subject during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. These images were part devotional, celebrating the Saint's divine vision of the Virgin Mary. As such, these have been claimed as part statement on the spirituality of the painter and on the professionalism of painting pictures: see H Perry Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer” in Cole and Pardo, Inventions of the Studio, p.111. In addition to allegorising painting, images of Saint Luke have been claimed to have influenced early fifteenth Northern European understandings of visuality. Wood, “Indoor-Outdoor: The Studio around 1500” in Cole and Pardo, Inventions of the Studio (2005), p.44. 60 Examples of these visitable studio spaces include (from the earliest): Museé Gustave Moreau, Paris (1903); Hogarth House, Hounslow, London (1904); Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam (1911) and Atelier Brancusi, Pompidou Centre, Paris (1957, 1997). More recent examples include the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Gardens (part of Tate St. Ives); Donald Judd's former home and studio at 101 Spring Street, New York; and the upcoming reconstruction of Piet Mondrian's studio (2014) at Tate Liverpool as part of the “Mondrian and his Studios” exhibition. For more on artist's houses see Giles Waterfield, The Artist's Studio (2009) p. 38-9. For The Museé Gustave Moreau see Elizabeth Buck Gray “Museum Author-ity and Performance” in Della Pollock (ed.) Exceptional Spaces (1998).

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observation – made by, and on behalf of, the artist.61 In Techniques of the Observer, for example, Jonathan Crary describes Vermeer's paintings of solitary scholarly occupants of private spaces of introspection as performing a “a process of individuation,” individuating the enlightenment subject through his withdrawal into the interior (an architectural metaphor for the delineation of a psychic interiority.62 Constructing a modern sense of privacy in this way, paintings like Vermeer's The Art of Painting (1656) might be taken to corroborate Crary's argument. The photo-realistic space Vermeer constructs could be taken as a statement of the artist's seclusion from the world as the “individuation” of an autonomous inhabitant. However, we might also look at the particular studio habits on display here; particularly Vermeer's use of the studio itself as a camera obscura.63 If taken as a statement on the artist's profession (and the importance of solitary space to that occupation) we might note that the artist is neither alone nor individuated. Painting from the camera obscura within the studio, the artist is joined by two models: the musician and a stand-in artist whose back we see. Thus, Vermeer's invitation to peer behind the curtain, to see what goes is entailed in occupying the studio, suggests it is a space of artifice; publicising privacy is not the straightforward production of modern subjectivity that Crary suggests. This thesis's visual analysis takes into account the enmeshing of histories of the

61 The position of the self-representing painter in Las Meninas, for example, is considered by Michel Foucault in the introduction to The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Pantheon Books, New York, 1970) pp.3-36. The affect of its puzzling perspective – its triangulation of viewer, sitter and artist – is Foucault claims, the very production of modern subjectivity, as one which is incapable of self-representation as both subject and object at the same time. Foucault's reading of this studio-view is disputed by Svetlana Alpers in “Interpretation without Representation, or, the Viewing of Las Meninas” (1983). Peggy Phelan draws on Foucault's analysis in her description of it as a “drama of representation.” Phelan, Mourning Sex, p.29. 62 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (The MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1990) p.39-47. 63 Artists since the early modern used optical devices to perfect perspectival effects. Barnett Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present (The Museum of Modern Art: New York, 1982) p.11. It has been claimed that Vermeer used his studio (or part of) as a camera obscura, or a camera lucida to produce his paintings: see Philip Steadman, Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001) p.83-89, 101-117; and Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer” p.141.

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studio-view with the histories of privacy and sexuality that are often overlooked. This includes the ways in which studio space has been habitually configured as a masculine domain – an important element of the studio-view that is missing from Crary's analysis.64 Notions of privacy have been crucial in defining the studio as a masculine domain and the preserve of the master artist. Mark Wigley has claimed that the studio's architecture was itself gendered from the mid-fifteenth century, arguing that the early forms of a modern, privatised individuality were specifically dependent on the demarcation of private study spaces and the closeting of sexuality from the public realm.65 The sanctioning of the world outside the domestic as a realm of male mobility (against confinement of women to the house) in architectural texts of the period presented a problem in professional cases where occupation of interior space would be preferable, yet domestic and, thus, feminising.66 To approach the problem of male domesticity's queering potential, the need for interior masculine space – for official work, or as a space for study or art-making – required the production of supplementary spaces, or closets, within the domestic sphere from which the taint of femininity could be excluded; in which case, Wigley argues: “the first truly private space was the man's study, a small locked room off his bedroom which no-one else ever enters, an intellectual space beyond that of sexuality.”67 Thus, Wigley claims, (paradoxically) the study-closet was designated as a space of authority and officialdom, precisely in marking a distinction between intellectual and sexualised (feminised) space.68 64 For an example of this line of criticism see: Joan Copjec, Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (MIT Press: Massachusetts, 2004). 65 Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” in Colomina, Sexuality and Space (1990). 66 In this scenario, being the wrong gender in the wrong place was aligned with sexuality: the domesticated male was feminised; the un-domesticated female, outside the domestic realm, was doubly (and dangerously) feminine. Wigley, “Untitled” p.336. 67 Wigley, “Untitled” p.347. 68 The studio and the closet have been, at one time or another, close spatial synonyms. Their shared root is revealed in the closet's definition; according to the OED, “closet” has been taken to be an inner chamber; a smaller room in relation to a larger room (a supplementary space “closet” is derived from the latin clausum, as meaning enclosure); and a private room or place of private study or speculation – a traditional definition of a studio. In recent times, the closet's meaning has hinged on sexual secrecy – the closet is the secret of a space or the space of a secret. The closet has, since at least the 1960s, been

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Historical discourses of domestic privacy and the gendered hierarchies these promote would have had direct bearing on the artist studios of the Italian early modern period from which, via art historical texts and studio-view imagery, models of artistic occupation would be constructed. The emergent architectural fashion for closeted space in Renaissance Italy, that Wigley describes, impacted on the professional painter or sculptor whose workshops were traditionally located within the domestic dwelling of the studio's master. While, in the fifteenth century, the communal workshop (bottega) was the most likely place within which to find painting taking place, it was increasingly the case that as theories of painting advanced the idea that it was an intellectual pursuit (a matter of studium) so a scholarly model of an isolated study became the preferred location to visualise it in.69 As part of this shift, the artist's private, lockable desk (or studiolo) was replaced with, and visualised as, a privatised, closeted antechamber. With the annexation of isolated studio spaces from the hurly-burly of the workshop, it must be considered that the studio's closeting, and the modern sense of privacy that begins to emerge, participate in the construction of a particular version of sexuality where the studio, and its occupants, is concerned. By the nineteenth century, the image of the isolated artist at work in private studio space circulated widely, firmly entrenching this publicity of privacy in the dominant culture. Though, in general terms, the artist's methods, his surroundings and economic situation was infinitely different from these earliest studios whose image the studio-view drew on, the figuration of privacy, autonomy and isolation persisted. closely associated with homosexual secrecy (the closet as something one comes out of, or emerges from, in disclosing one's homosexual preference or admitting to homosexual practices). This later meaning again augments a sexual dimension which may not be immediately apparent in its convoluted etymological history; however, sexuality is implicit in the discourse of visibility and privacy that prove to be central to the closet's spatial situation. See Sedgwick for more on the spatial paradox of considering privatised officialdom and public individuality as markers of modernity in The Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press: Berkeley; Los Angeles; London, 1991) p.112 69 Cole and Pardo provide an extensive discussion of the changing perceptions of creativity and its location from the Renaissance onward. Cole and Pardo, Inventions of the Studio, p.3-31.

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However, the artist remained the epitome of modern selfhood. This is evidenced in a reinvigorated fascination for producing studio-view painting and photography wherein the studio began to appear regularly, and circulate widely, in carte de visite portraits.70 By the late nineteenth century, the studio began to circulate itself as an image – as, for example, the backdrop to literature and theatre as well as studio-view paintings and photographs. Disseminating wider still, the studio and its occupant were celebrated and lampooned in equal measure via newspapers and magazine illustrations.71 The studio-view continued its spectacular life in the nineteenth century (particularly in Impressionist era Paris) as it was modified for new economic situations. T. J. Clark (1984) argues that artists of the period were working within a shifting economic paradigm in which the dealer-critic relationship to the artist took precedence over systems of patronage; a situation that required novel approaches by both parties.72 The dealer, Clark claims, was expected to “speculate on the long term 'creativity' of those artists he favoured.” In turn, artists became adept at marketing creativity “nursing and refining it in a steady sequence of shows, interviews, and promotional literature […] sniffing out the market's approximate wishes while maintaining (to the death) the protocols of individuality and artistic freedom.”73 In this sense, the spectacle of the artist's studio could be considered a statement of control over the means by which art was produced, the artists' mastery of their economic destiny and, moreover, statements on their class. The carte de visite studio-view pictures that circulated in this period 70 An exhibition, The Artist's Studio (Photography at the Museé d'Orsay) in 2005 was based, in part, on the museum's collection of carte de visite or “album cards.” 71 See Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1996) for more on mass-mediated accounts of the studio. For descriptions of the appearance of artist's homes in literature and mass media see Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1999) and Giles Walkley, Artists' Houses in London, 1764-1914 (Scholar: Aldershot, 1994). 72 See the introduction to Clark's The Painter of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Thames & Hudson: London, 1984) pp. 3-22. Clark claims that this period represented a “shift or oscillation” from one kind of capitalist production – one that had re-shaped the industrialised city – to another phase of commodity production: “the marketing, the making-into-commodities, or whole areas of social practice which once been referred to casually as everyday life.”(p.9) 73 Clark, The Painter of Modern Life, p.260

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(including new mass-mediations) ensured that the spectacle of production became a significant trope by the end of the century and beyond. As Carol Duncan describes, the artist – “the liberated individual par excellence” and master of his own destiny – and studio was a key image of avant-garde art production well into the twentieth century. However, as Duncan stresses, this liberation relied on the domination of others, notably women.74 Taking into account how the artist's profession has been publicised – including the particularised construction of privacy and sexuality that this image symbolises – is an important aspect in considering what really happens in practice in the studio. An emphasis on studio habits turns attention, in part, to the artist's pose in studio-view imagery. Studio habits that occupied Bacon, Krasner, Martin and Pollock, documented in the studio-view, include their enacting of artistic selves. Even when understood as publicity material made in collaboration with other artists (or photographers) which presume an eventual public (whether that be an “art-world” audience or more general public), the various iterations of the studio-view that are analysed here – as forms of portraiture – all feature forms of performance. Therefore, the materials that forms this thesis's archive are within the purview of debates on performance documentation. However, what remains (or does not remain) of artistic practice can dictate the parameters within which work by these artists have been disseminated.75 While the studio-view seems to open up to scrutiny the artist's personal habits care must be taken in the interpretation of this “theatre of composition.”76 In making the studio visible, 74 Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting” in Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge; New York, 1993), pp.103-105. 75 Jacques Derrida's diagnosis and deconstruction of the “archive fever” infecting Western philosophy hinges on the fact that the archive constructs what it purports to describe, whoever controls the archive dictates what constitute knowledge about the past. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago; London, 1995). In response, Rebecca Schneider has commented there is a dependence in archival logic on “the pristine logic of all things marked 'original'” which suits thinking the past as singular, history as linear. Schneider, “Archive Performance Remains” in Performance Research, 6 (2), 2001. p.102 76 Fuss, The Sense of an Interior, p.1

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choices have been made, in these cases, as to what can be shown and what must be hidden. As noted above (and throughout this thesis), readings of the studio-view have tended to hide sexuality, sociality and intimacy in the studio. The spatial somersaults entailed in altering the meanings of the studio will be the subject of the following chapters. In addition to visual materials, an evaluation of the visitable studio exhibit forms a crucial part of this thesis. An interest in the peculiarly affective registers of the emptied out rooms in which historically important events (of making) have taken place calls for an embodied investigation of studio spaces via fieldwork. Fieldwork undertaken in Dublin and New York aimed to engage with their archives and with the re-enactments that these exhibits often encourage. For instance, the invitation at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Centre to retrace Pollock's mode of painting allows, in a sense, the visitor to be “in” his painting space as he claimed to be. Though this type of encounter might be said to encourage a false sense of intimacy or engagement with the absent occupants of studio exhibits, this method of re-enacting history (in an embodied sense) is comparable to the modes by which these artists have made use of historical visualisations of studio space in their construction of artistic personas and studio habits and is, therefore, critical to further understanding what it means to inhabit spaces and roles. Unlike the enticement to follow Pollock's footsteps around the studio at Springs, a direct method of material engagement, or re-enactment of spatial occupations, is not available when we consider either Bacon or Martin's studio habits; The Bacon Studio Exhibit is sealed behind glass, Martin's studio materials were dispersed, amongst friends, on her death.77 Therefore, the degree to which studio space can be entered imaginatively, and to what extent these studio-views encourage this, will 77 This information came via conversation with Martin's close friend, Karen Yank, who was taught by and lived near to the artist until her death.

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be addressed; in what ways, for example, does the plenitude of Bacon Studio Exhibit discourage the imagination? Counter-intuitively, can we say that the immateriality of Martin's studio encourages it more? While this method of reconstructing actual spatial inhabitations cannot (and should not?) recreate the thoughts of the absent subjects whose outlines may be traced there, it does allow questions to be asked about lived studio habits. How, for example, are the images of these four artists shaped by the historical image of the studio through which their bodies moved? How did their occupations of these interior spaces, and their proximity to its objects, shape their interior lives? Moreover, how is this interiority projected onto their bodies' surfaces? Thus, I ask, how might a close reading of their studio habits disrupt the historical image of the studio as a space of mastery?

Bodies are shaped by the spaces they occupy. The studio-view is one (of many) means by which gender hierarchies have been re-inscribed in the cultures in which these images circulate. However, where it is made visible (and visitable) the studio is also a place where, with careful consideration, the constructed quality of the sexual differencing of studio roles is also brought out into the open. How exactly it is that repetitions of habitats and habits of the past (as, say, occupations and orientations) articulate bodies and spaces in the present is a question that studio practices can be fielded to interrogate. Part of the problem I have defined above is the limits that conventional readings of the studio-view can place on bodies whose shape does not comport to historically configured (and naturalised) standards. Certain bodies are alienated by the studio, excluded from occupying certain roles, or find themselves positioned in it according to their outward appearance. But what reparations can be made that do not rely on the mastering of space (by, say, feminine bodies) in ways that

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allow the dynamic of artistic masculinity and its privileging to continue? An answer may lie with the historical processes by which these conventional studio masculinities have been generated and repeated. Discussing the live co-performance of bodies and study spaces via habitual writing practices, in a slightly different context of the writer's studio that is apposite nonetheless, Sara Ahmed (2006) has argued that “bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture, and their gestures” and what bodies “do” means they tend to inhabit some spaces more than others. Concerning the masculinity of the study space, Ahmed uses phenomenology to reason that: If spaces extend bodies, then we could say that spaces also extend the shape of the bodies that 'tend' to inhabit them. So, for instance, if the action of writing is associated with the masculine body, then it is this body that tends to inhabit the space for writing. The space for writing – say, the study – tends to extend such bodies and may even take their shape. Gender becomes naturalised as a property of bodies, objects and spaces partly through the 'loop' of this repetition, which leads bodies in some directions more than others as if that direction came from within the body and explains which way it turns.78

Inasmuch as the study and studio have been closely linked, and given a history in which that similarity has been carefully crafted and widely mobilised, Ahmed's example of philosopher and study space can be extended to the artist's studio. The insight Ahmed's argument enables is that if a repeating “loop” of this kind “naturalised” the studio-view and its conventional assumptions regarding the bodies that inhabits its space, then a tendency toward (or occupation with) certain objects are not based on any original act but are the effects of that repetition, of the “tending towards” something. With regard to the studio-views of the mid-twentieth century, we might see them as modes of selfportraiture that cite studios of the past, reiterating (either incidentally or overtly) an original model of the artist's masculinity. However, when considered as habitual acts it 78 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) p.58. In discussing “inhabiting spaces” (pp.51-63) Ahmed asks: how does repetition of actions take us in certain directions: we are also orientating ourselves toward some objects more than others, including not only physical objects but also objects of thought, feeling and judgment. The shaping of bodies by history is an issue taken up by Pierre Bourdieu in his discussion of habitus as “systems of durable, transposable, dispositions.” Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. p.72

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no longer follows that gender is in the studio, nor is gender necessarily in the body that inhabits the studio. Rather, following Ahmed's example, this thesis works on the premise that gender is better understood as an effect of how bodies take up objects or space. Or, more precisely, that gender is effected in how the artist occupies the studio and how they are occupied in it. Where the studio is concerned, a lack of masculinity (or being considered as lacking masculinity) may enable others to claim, as has been the case with critical responses to women artists through the ages, that a woman's occupation of the artist's role is an ill-fit. As the following chapters take on the questions that this opens up, I will ask whether, for instance, a woman's occupation of the studio has depended upon the extent to which she can lay claim to forms of masculinity? Considering the success with which these four artists have signified their occupation as studio-artists, I ask: what historical models of masculinity have these four artists drawn on? How have these masculinities been performed differently? Can this re-enactment disrupt those historical models of mastery? As Ahmed's work on spatial orientation suggests, gender performances in the studio are key to challenging the tendency to read the studio as a space of mastery (and privileged masculinity). This thesis's chapters examine studio-view imagery in terms of the sexualised and gendered mythologies they can promote.79 As these case-studies 79 An examination of the gendered hierarchies that structure the studio were taken up as a feminist concern by Griselda Pollock, and others, in the 1980s. Though a critical counter-modernism structures TJ Clark's argument, for example, Pollock contends that its understanding of the processes of social re-structuring in the period is poorer in its failure to consider modernism as a “masculinist myth” leaving intact the masculine viewer/consumer implied by Impressionist painting (and critical responses to these images). In nineteenth century Paris, “The artist's couch,” Pollock reminds us, represented a place in which female bodies were bought and sold; thus, she continues, although Clark, for example, considers women as caught up in commercial exchange as class subjects, these exchanges are more fully understood as gendered power relations. Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (Routledge: London and New York, 1988) p.73-75. In a similar vein, Carol Duncan claims that the male-female relationship in early twentieth century studio-view paintings, embodied “on a sexual level, the basic class relationships of capitalist society.” The studio's constructions of heterosexuality are unacknowledged inasmuch as the studio-artist's sexual prowess – part of his masculine mystique – is overlooked. Furthermore, Duncan claims, “according to the paintings of the period, sexually co-

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relate to identity-based performances in the studio – playing the role of the studio artist, for instance – theories of performativity inflect the different theoretical models used. As with Sedgwick's early work on sexuality, space and habit, Judith Butler's work on performativity, and her account of gender from the early 1990s will provide another starting point.80 Suspicious of the self-evidence and pre-existence of the subject's constitution in Western philosophical traditions, Butler's turn to performance investigated “the political stakes in designating as an origin and cause those identity categories that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses, with multiple and diffused points of origin.”81 Noting this, what follows works on the premise that masculinity, as a privileged aspect of the artist's mastery over his practice, is produced by institutions of art (or the art-world) rather than a pre-existing requirement of artmaking. Considering sexuality and space entails asking how it is that some bodies more than others are shaped by space. This also means to ask how it is that the bodies of artists with less clear-cut claims to masculinity are modified in order to occupy the position of the artist according to conventional readings of the studio-view. These four case studies can be particularly revealing in this regard due to their particular performances masculinities as they challenge the correlation of this characteristic with artistic mastery. In what follows, specific interest is paid to ways in which these artists' performance of masculinities repeat historical models of mastery but with a difference. What, for instance, does Bacon's camp citation of the former occupants of his studio tell operative women are everywhere available in the artist's environment, especially in his studio. Although they were sometimes depicted as professional models posing for their hourly wage, they usually appear as personal possessions of the artist. Part of his specific studio and objects of his particular gratification. Indeed, pictures of studios, the inner sanctum of the art world, reinforce more than any other genre the social expectation that “the artist” is categorically a male who is more consciously in touch with his libido than other men and satisfies its purely physical demands more frequently.” Duncan, “Virility and Domination” p.103-105. 80 Butler's accounts of gender as the repetition of acts, melancholia, and incorporation in Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1994) underpin this enquiry. 81 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990) p. viii-ix

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us about these artist's constructions of mastery and masculinity? What does it mean that Krasner's mastery as the all-powerful art-widow relies on its framing by her husband, the legal entity that she speaks for? How is the spectacle of Pollock's masculine body put in tension with the body's feminisation in modernist discourse? How does a film that documents Martin's difficulties painting (her inability to master practice in old age) work with her strict studio habits, her isolated artistic practices and her “butch” image and the masculine realm that these aspects have historically connoted? The theoretical approaches employed here were suggested by this project's questions and the research methods undertaken. The correlation between spatial and psychic interiors that is encouraged by certain studio exhibits and their modes of display, for example, calls for a critical approach to the dependence of these narratives on aspects of psychoanalysis. This thesis rejects a mirrored relationship between subject and space – where the artist's mind, for example, may be read in the studio's materiality. Yet, part of my argument – that the heightened visibility of studio material in current visual cultures might be a response to a censure on the privileging of authority, and loss of objects of desire for modernist criticism in the late twentieth century – has also been enriched by psychoanalytic theory. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's theoretical approaches to melancholia and mourning have been particularly revealing for this project in their theorisation of “incorporation” and “preservative repression.”82 Chapters on Krasner and Pollock make reference to these as a means to think through the maintenance and monumentalisation of their former home and studio and how this effects their respective biographies. Abraham and Torok claim that feelings of loss are repressed through the incorporation of material by a melancholic subject unable to mourn fully and move on. The following argues that a diagnosis of perpetual mourning 82 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (trans. Nicholas Rand), “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (Volume 1) (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1994)

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is most often applied to Krasner – producing a gendered image for her, as a widow, as she appears at the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio. However, the mournful air encouraged by this site's display is, in fact, more likely indicative of the art-world's status, in psychoanalytic terms, as a subject of unsurmountable loss, unable to rescind an attachment to its objects of desire, resulting in the incorporation and preservation of studio material at the site and the production of a particular image for the artist. Bridging performative theory and psychoanalysis is Butler's examination of repression and loss in the production of sexed bodies. In this, Butler turns, in part, to Abraham and Torok's theories of melancholia as a psychic response to a prohibition on homosexuality which, in turn, produces heterosexual identity through a literalisation of sex (and heterosexuality) on body through incorporation.83 As I have argued, masculinity is a prerequisite of modernist ideals of mastery, authority and its legibility in artworks. With the artist's body, shown at work, having been firmly placed centre stage since the 1960s, a censure on potential homoerotic interest in this body – where disinterest must be maintained by the modernist critic – is, therefore, placed in tension with a desire for (or requirement of) masculinity.84 Might it be that, to modify Butler's terms, the prohibition of potential homoeroticism for the artist's body is melancholic: a psychic effect, resulting from the lost love object, that literalises on, and as, the masculine (and heterosexualised) body as an incorporated space in studio-view imagery. The gendering of artist's bodies in these case-studies are thus considered here as effected by institutions, practices and discourses that are themselves subject in this period to narratives of loss. In these case-studies, the stage-managing entailed in the period's re-evaluation 83 “Where is this incorporated space? If it is not literally within the body, perhaps it is on the body as its surface significations such that the body itself must be understood as incorporated space.” Butler, Gender Trouble, p.67. 84 Amelia Jones describes modernist theory and practice as dependent on commodities including the artist – as a white heterosexual male. Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (Routledge: London; New York, 2006), p.6

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and re-framing (or bringing inside discursive boundaries) of studio material will be examined. A focus on these movements means to consider Beatriz Colomina's contention that: “the politics of space are always sexual, even if space is central to the mechanisms of the erasure of sexuality.”85 The political moves by which studio space has been subsumed, encompassed or preserved is, I argue, to be found in the erasure of, or repression of, loss. In this regard, the political relevance of sexuality to this project is often to be found in where the loss of desired objects (modernism's attachment to authority and objecthood, for example) has been overlooked, sidelined or otherwise hidden from view in the environs of the studio-view and modernist readings of it.86 To bring into view these shifting boundaries (and the losses they protect the art-world from) is a means to underscore the elision of sexuality (through its masculinisation) from the image of the studio – and vice versa. One method followed here, therefore, entails looking for elements of queer performance in the studio-view and the same-sex desires these enable to circulate. The art-world's institutions – the gallery, the market and academy – have tended in recent years to encompass previously ignored material (in preserving studio material, as traces of process, inside their discursive boundaries) in response to various iterations of loss. This enables a comparison between strategies of incorporation according to psychoanalytic theories of loss, gender performativity and post-structuralist discussions of framing (and furthering Williams' claim that emergent formations – i.e., the “poststudio” – move to encompass residual cultural formations). Together these different theoretical protocols illuminate my central claim for a correlation between art-world losses and the popularised views of the studio that have proliferated over recent years. 85 Beatriz Colomina, Introduction to Sexuality & Space: Volume 1 of Princeton Papers on Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press: Princeton, NJ, 1992) no page number. 86 Gavin Butt (2005) and Griselda Pollock (1996) have turned to studio-view imagery to make arguments about the heteronormativity and masculinist mythologising of modernist art, its practices and theorisation.

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The topics, themes and questions raised in this introduction are dealt with in the following chapters. Examining the Bacon Studio Exhibit in Dublin, chapter one considers questions that the documentation, archivisation and exhibition of studio spaces raises. The influence this preservation, archival accessioning, and display has exerted on critical engagement with the artist's work, in recent years, has shaped many responses to the artist's paintings. This chapter examines this studio-view as an institutionalised version of artistic practice that has had a stifling effect on scholarship on the artist in its reliance on the artist's authorial presence: symbolised by the archive's select studio materials and on the narratives of artistic mastery that the exhibit purports. Turning from these remains of Bacon's practice to the artist's performance in the many studio-view photographs he made during his lifetime, I claim that the image of the masterful artist he performs in this imagery questions and modifies the masculinities of the historical model's of art-making cited. In doing so, these documentations of the artist's practice circumvent any return to thinking of the masterful artist-as-origin that the Bacon Studio might otherwise offer. Chapter two deals with the potentially exclusionary aspects of the gendered space of the studio. It explores ways in which studio-view imagery has imposed, or effected, gender through a discussion of Krasner's occupation of the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio and her role in its preservation and eventual exhibition. Now a US National Monument, the house and it famous studio-barn are split, to some degree, into separate domains along gender lines; the domestic sphere of the house is redolent of her memory, the agrico-industrial barn, to his. Though some effort has been made to redress this imbalance, the studio itself, as a cultural symbol, represents a problem for Krasner's image as an artist. Often relegated to the role of Pollock's wife and widow, it has been,

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perhaps, Krasner's contentious fate to be always considered according to his legacy. Her designation as perpetual mourner, where images of this site are concerned, allows a consideration of narratives of melancholia and loss that this designation produces. This chapter argues that, in art-historical narratives, Krasner's widowhood is enforced on her by a mournful “art world” and that, in this regard, the loss of Pollock, specifically, and, more generally, “the artist” and his authority after philosophical critiques of authority in the 1960s, is an unsurmountable and unspeakable problem. Taking on the psycho-spatial logics of introjection and incorporation in Abraham and Torok's theory of “preservative repression” to explore the fantasy that loss has been evaded at this site, Krasner's gendering – as wife and mournful widow – is a means to explore questions of preservation. What exactly is preserved at the Pollock-Krasner place? What does the preservation of the studio do, in this case; and what (or who) is it for? Staying with the Pollock-Krasner place, chapter three considers how images of the studio, and the artistic bodies it stages, have been shaped according to shifting critical protocols of late twentieth century art. This will begin by following the recontextualisation of one of Pollock's paintings from film prop – as used in Hans Namuth's celebrated film of the artist at work (1951) – to the gallery wall. This trajectory, I argue, is indicative of discursive boundary changes in art theory around the 1960s. As this painting's journey entailed it being brought back to the studio (and the privileged status this afforded it) this will be employed as a metaphor to examine ways in which Pollock's unusual (potentially “post-studio”) practices were stage-managed in order to comport to conventional versions of art-making and thus, in effect, were also brought back to the studio. Crucially, this re-framing of Pollock's image occurs as it is desexualised (in its masculinisation) and mystified according to what I have called a mythology of “dumb genius.” Pollock's image at Springs exemplifies the ways in which

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mastery can be perpetuated by the studio-view. However, I will argue, through close reading of the artist's habits – his pose as dumb, for instance – the figure of Pollock is also feminised and queered by the same functions that seek to re-inscribe these models of mastery. The final chapter considers the dispersal of Agnes Martin's studio in contrast to the preservation of the studio spaces of the other three artists and to the comprehensive view of her practice that is offered up in Lance's documentary (2003). The title of that film – With My Back to the World – reiterates the narrative of Martin's celebrated flight and seclusion from the New York art world: paradoxically, a very public hermeticism. Additionally, from the title (which connotes the solitary artist) to the practices and spaces it screens, the film would seem to work to a conventional model of art-making. Moreover, its description of the artist's disciplined daily painting practice place her, apparently, in a putatively masculine realm of autonomy, control and self-containment – an image bolstered by her “butch” demeanour. Yet, close reading of her studio habits, as documented in the film, also offer an alternative reading. Specifically, the film follows the artist as she paints, with difficulty, in her New Mexico studio toward the end of her career. Her laboured breathing and the aching slowness of her movements demonstrate the sheer physical effort exerted by her elderly body as she struggles to continue to make artwork. Challenging the conventional notion of artistic practice as something to be mastered, I read in Lance's film a frustrating confrontation in which materials don't always do what the artist wants them to do. Considering the documentary's straightforward portrayal of art-making through Sedgwick's frank version of practice, her stressing of the importance of the middle ranges of agency through which “relationality happens” entailed when materials “press back” in practice, allows a disruption of the naturalised heterosexuality and gendered traditions of the studio-view

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and the rhetoric of mastery that are entwined in it. In conclusion, I ask: does letting go – the ceding of control that Martin's studio habits and the dispersal of her studio posthumously demonstrates – avoid rhetorics of mastery; and is the immateriality of her studio now necessarily detrimental to our understanding of her practice? These case studies confront what can be claimed we know of the studio and artmaking practices through examining these artists' particular (and peculiar) habits. The conclusion will consider the contemporary practice of Thomas Demand (1964-) and, in particular, his recreation of a photograph, taken by Namuth, of Pollock working (with Krasner watching) in the studio-barn at Springs. Demand's re-enactment of Pollock and Krasner's studio habits is, I suggest, a corollary of my own; that is, against the grain of previous readings of the studio-view and relationship of mastery this sets up between studio and artist. The artist's recreation, in paper, of a popularised view of studio artmaking foregrounds conflicting approaches to the studio-view genre: a desire to find authority and the artist's presence in studio space and to consider the performance of these artistic figures and the spaces in which they are staged as situated negotiations. Ultimately, Demand's studio-view presents both space and subject as dependent and unstable constructions. The studio-view is apt to participate in enabling mastery and masculinity to persist, in art world and popular cultures, as an explanation of artmaking; yet, as records of the distinctive practices that set these artists apart, the same imagery challenges that view. This thesis turns to the studio habits that perform both artist and studio as a means to undermine conventional readings of the spaces in which these acts occur in showing how this happens in practice.

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1. Francis Bacon The places I live in, or like living in, are like an auto-biography – Francis Bacon1 [...] Bacon's studio carries such a whiff of presence that you can hallucinate the large, restless, reputedly dangerous animal inside as you peer through door and window. What happens to this room when it is frozen in museum time? How does it illuminate Bacon's art? It becomes emblematic, circulating a low-grade energy among artist, persona, studio, and work, enough to sustain the myth it begot – Brian O'Doherty2

1 Francis Bacon quoted in Martin Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson: London, 2005) p.239 n.2. 2 Brian O'Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship Between Where Art is Made and Where it is Displayed (Buell Center/FORuM Project Publications: New York, 2007) p.21

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The art studio Francis Bacon (1908-1992) had occupied at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, since 1961 until his death, was bequeathed to Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 1998 by his sole heir John Edwards.3 The artist's workspace was meticulously dismantled according to precise archeological technique, each item documented and accessioned to a database; the resulting materials excavated were transported to Ireland and reconstructed in a newly-built gallery extension – commissioned and completed by David Chipperfield Architects. Opening to the public in 2001, as The Francis Bacon Studio, the exhibit brings the formerly second-floor studio down to the level of the gallery's floor, housing it in a polished concrete skin within a marble-lined hall [Fig. 9]. Visitors are invited to peep through the previously inaccessible windows (now externally double-glazed with bronze-detailed frames) or through newly-punctured spyholes, strategically placed to allow for iconic views of the studio's fascinating interior. The former door to the space is left ajar; however, glazing bars entrance past the threshold. In a surreal touch, the former staircase, to the front door and mews beyond, sinks into the floor of the gallery allowing, via a glass floor, a viewer to hover above its steep decline. From this position, or others around this encasement, the intimate private space of the studio is opened up. The familiar “compost” of the Reece Mews studio is rendered visible, on display, seemingly stilled and preserved, for posterity.4 Despite appearances, the material remains of The Francis Bacon Studio exhibit – the piles of paper and books, for example – are partially facsimile. The actual materials from Reece Mews are archived elsewhere (in what I will call, to avoid confusion, The Hugh Lane Archive); nevertheless, the re-construction of the studio is seamless. As a tableau-vivant 3 Edwards had tried to bequeath the studio and its contents to the Tate; however, this offer was rejected due to budgetary concerns. Details of the bequest can be found in John Edwards and Perry Ogden, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon’s Studio (Thames & Hudson: London, 2001). 4 Michael Peppiatt repeatedly refers to Bacon's studio floor as a “compost” in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Orion: London, 1996).

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sealed behind glass, it appears to the viewer as if the artist had just walked out of the room, staging the possibility that he may just walk back in again. The elegiac quality of the room is repeated in tender photographs of Reece Mews by Perry Ogden, prior to its dismantling, taken after Bacon's death. This solemnity as a memorial, together with its indexicality signalled by the scientific database that accompanies the exhibit and archive, suggest an authority tracing back directly to the artist, his hand and mind. While the constructed quality of the exhibit is visible – a narrative of its dismantling and re-construction is recorded and available – its materiality, pored over forensically, always threatens to be mistaken for the presence of the “real” artist. There is a propensity with architectural space (“real” or imagined) to assume a narrative with which, as Susan Stewart has argued, “we people the scene with meaning.”5 This chapter contends that (in the ways in which it has been presented) The Francis Bacon Studio at The Hugh Lane conflates the artist and his studio. The tendency, one which many recent studies of Bacon have been orientated towards, is to consider the artist-studio relationship as mimetic: the characteristics of either one are reflected in or parallel the attributes of the other. Auto-biographical wall-texts and video that accompany and inform the Francis Bacon Studio exhibit suggest the mirroring of one in the other; “The mess here around us is rather like my mind,” Bacon muses in one quote decorating the exhibits walls, “it may be a good image of what goes on inside me […].” With particular relevance to the Reece Mew materials, since the artist's death accounts of Bacon's psychic interiority and the architectural interior of the studio tend to merge. Some describe the space as still inhabited posthumously by a sort of energetic resonance. Entering the South Kensington property prior to its dismantling “it was far from being a husk,” claimed Margarita Cappock, the academic in charge with its 5 Susan Stewart, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2005) p.82

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archiving. “It continued to exude an energy that was captivating.”6 In the epigraph above, Brian O'Doherty asserts a continuation of that vital presence in the Francis Bacon Studio exhibit as it “circulat[es] a low-grade energy.” Captivated by the exhibit, O'Doherty “hallucinates” the artist's presence. Having visited myself, I can relate to his experience; the exhibit is presented in a way that suggests the artist has just left the room. The door is left carelessly ajar. A disjunct between its external location and its interior is momentarily forgotten peering through it glass apertures. While it is by no means certain what version of “Bacon” might be suggested here, a sense of presence haunts the The Francis Bacon Studio. Through other wall-texts at the Hugh Lane, Bacon defines the studio's “chaotic atmosphere” as essential to his work. “I can only paint here in my studio,” the artist announces in one, “I cannot work in places that are too tidy. It’s much easier for me to paint in a place like this which is a mess. I don’t know why but it helps me.” A seductive, comforting, link between the architectural and psychic interior is a narrative device that allows us to make sense of what seems chaotic and meaningless. The desire to make meaning ensures it is harder to let go of remains like the Reece Mews materials. If these could be made sense of they might, it seems, satisfy an urge to know more. However, in a reading of Bacon's studio, the psychoanalyst Adam Philips warns against the desire to clear up what might seem a confusing mess in order to make sense. We need to be wary of “what we might be doing when we attempt to clear up clutter [..] Our eagerness for recognition can be self-blinding.”7 6 Margarita Cappock, Francis Bacon’s Studio (Merrell: London; New York, 2005) p.15. Barbara Dawson further conflates studio and artist: “Entering Francis Bacon's studio was like seeing into the artist's mind […]”, she claims. Dawson continues: “The studio material seems to become more pertinent as the years pass as it becomes inherent to an understanding of the paintings and brings us closer to the artist.” Barbara Dawson, “Tracing Bacon” in Harrison, Incunabula (2008). Dawson is the director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and was involved in the relocation of the Reece Mews materials. 7 Adam Philips, “On Clutter” in Promises Promises: Essays on Literature and Psychoanalysis, (Faber and Faber: London, 2000) p.64.

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The Francis Bacon Studio at The Hugh Lane and its complimentary archive raises questions about the more general trend to document, preserve and exhibit studio spaces. This chapter concerns the ways in which this particular exhibit and archive have effected critical engagement with Bacon's paintings since his death and, specifically, the bequest of the Reece Mews materials. Where some critics seek to find answers to the artist's esoteric artwork in the detritus of his studio, heeding Philips' advice, the aim here is precisely not to seek make sense of the artist's practice or to “clear up clutter.” Resisting looking for clues to the workings of the artist's mind, this chapter turns to what remains of Bacon's studio to describe ways in which his living practices ultimately (and inevitably) fail to be contained by either The Francis Bacon Studio or the archive which supplements it. This entails outlining where readings of the artist's mastery of his practice – in part, based on the studio's image – falter when Bacon's lifelong habit for exhibiting himself in the studio is taken into consideration.

Bacon and the studio-view

If considered as a consciously constructed collection, the detritus of the studio at Reece Mews (now an archive) suggests Bacon had a remarkable regard for images of artistic practice and the studio. Among the 1436 photographs found in the Reece Mews materials 254 images detail the various studios he occupied during his career; 85 of these show Reece Mews in particular; and in 39 of those Bacon is shown. Many items archived are studio-posed photographs of the artists friends and contemporaries: including images of Frank Auerbach (1931-) [Fig. 10]; Michael Andrews (1928-1995); Lucien Freud (1922-2012); Lawrence Gowing (1918-1991); Robert Medley (19051994); and Vladimir Veličković (1935-). 49 photographs of Bacon's lover, and recurring 59

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model, George Dyer (1934-71) suggest the potential of the Reece Mews space as an erotic location posed, as he is, in his underwear. In addition, reproduced images of studios were found, clipped from books. These include a reproduction of Michel-Ange Houasse’s oil painting, Academie de Dessin (1715) and studio-based portraits of Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt and Augustin Rodin.8 Finally, books specifically about the studio, are listed in the archive's inventory: Hans Namuth’s Pollock Painting (1980) [Fig. 11] and Fred W McDarrah's The Artist’s World in Pictures (1961) detailing the social lives and working practices of New York artists in the late fifties, a book promising to “[catch] unerringly the look, aroma, feel and light of the artist’s in their studios.” The archived contents of Edwards' bequest of the Reece Mews materials point to the artistic genre of studio-view painting as an apposite angle with which to approach critical work on the artist. The artist's immediate surrounding is both directly and indirectly referred to in Bacon's paintings. Few examples of Bacon's early output survive; like many artists, he destroyed early work, dictating what can be seen. What does remain of the artist's work from the 1930s are three representations of studio spaces: Interior of a Room (1933), Corner of the Studio (1934) and Studio Interior (c.1934) [Fig. 12]. While these cannot be claimed as his first subjects (and their importance is now due to their rarity as early examples), it is interesting to note that these earliest survivors of a self-censoring habit should survive. In addition to being indicative of an attraction to painting his surroundings (an interest in the studio-view genre) these three paintings provide a glimpse of the artist's studio – though one very much abstracted.9 Though Bacon did not paint (or, at least, publicly exhibit) such studio-views directly in the remainder of his 8 From Fred McDarrah, The Artist’s World (1961) and Albert E Elsen's In Rodin's Studio (1980). 9 This studio subject matter may find its precursor in certain paintings of Roy de Maistre (1894-1968) who repeatedly painted his young lover's studio space in the early 1930s providing another look at Bacon's (surprisingly tidy) 1930s studios and a tantalising sighting of what purport to be destroyed paintings. See, for example, Roy de Maistre, Francis Bacon’s Studio (1932) and Francis Bacon’s Queensberry Mews Studio (1930).

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career, component features continue to appear in the artist's later paintings. These everyday elements of interior space – include bare lightbulbs, lighting pull-cords, doorways and doorknobs – furnish the stage-like settings of many of the painter's works. Implying the staged quality of the scenarios he painted, the appearance of these interior details suggest the studio as a staged backdrop to many of the artist's works, paintings not associated in any other way to studio space.10 Bacon's painting of the early 1950s displays a pre-occupation with the publicity of private acts – a marker of the studio-view genre – in painting scenarios in which interior and exterior space become confused.11 In Bacon's Two Figures (1953) [Fig. 13], for example, the demarcated privacy of interior space is without material boundaries and, so, extends beyond its walls into an external void. Conversely, external space is strangely contained in the parkland encounter insinuated in Two Figures in the Grass (1954) [Fig. 14] whose figure occupies a harshly lit circle or arena of yellowing grass. The external world is transplanted, it seems, and restaged in interior space. Though coyly avoiding mention of obvious connotations of homosexual encounters (Bacon's homosexuality being an open secret at this point), Bacon's work was described by Robert Melville in 1949 in terms of “anxious space” in which “every activity […] of men going in and out of curtains, or imprisoned in transparent boxes, has an air of extreme hazard.”12 As Melville suggests, post-war London was an “anxious space” 10 Elements of studio furniture and fittings can be seen in examples drawn from the entirety of the artist's career: for instance, Study for a Human Body: Man Turning on a Light (1973). Another example is provided by Two Studies of a Portrait of George Dyer (1968). Frank Laukötter and Maria Müller comment that this is “a studio scene in which Dyer […] turns his back on a recently completed portrait” in Armin Zweite (ed.), Francis Bacon: The Violence of the Real (Thames & Hudson: London, 2006) p.155. Here, the cord-pull is an everyday studio object drawn into the scene. Elsewhere, in Figure in an Open Door (1990-1), the open door suggest of long shadows in the studio. 11 Ernst Van Alphen makes this clear as he describes “representations of landscapes that are closed off – as interiors” and, conversely (or perversely), “interiors that have the infinitude of an empty world.” Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (Reaktion: London, 1992) p.147 12 Robert Melville, “Francis Bacon” in Horizon, December 1949, pp. 419-422. Notably, this pair of paintings of couples, amongst others of a similar form – Study for a Nude (1951), Study for a Crouching Nude (1952), Man Kneeling in the Grass (1952) and End of the Line (1953) – are suggestively homoerotic in subject.

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though this was, for Bacon, more relevant to his sexuality. The scenarios Bacon painted in the 1950s can be read in the light of the milieu of sexual unease the artist inhabited. Richard Hornsey (2010) reads Bacon's early 1950s paintings as a response to this period's re-positioning, re-definition and legitimisation of homosexuality as these attempted to adhere to conventional (and heterosexualised) codes of public decency and notions of privacy.13 Hornsey concludes that the unresolved tensions in this reinscription of tenuous delineations of public and private, and the consequences therein for “limited possibilities of self-presentation” and visibility, are responded to by the artist and are, therefore, legible in Bacon's paintings. However, if the confused space of Two Figures is taken as being expressive of Bacon's alienation in response to disordered social boundaries, in the way that Hornsey suggests, this might suggest that public space is originally heterosexual. Contesting Bacon's spatial estrangement on the grounds of his sexuality only exacerbates this reading. Moreover, the artist's disorientation in social space may be interpreted, homophobically, as mental disorderliness – a potentially dangerous situation in a period of homosexual pathologising and persecution. Bacon's paintings in the 1950s were responded to homophobically. On its first exhibition at the Hanover Gallery on London's Bond Street in 1954, Bacon's Two Figures (1953) was displayed in a quiet mezzanine half-hidden from the visiting public. The gallery had championed Bacon through the early stages of his career; yet, despite the bravery shown in representing a controversial artist, Two Figures itself was felt to be unsellable, its subject matter incendiary. “Vy do you have to paint these filthy pictures that it is impossible to sell?” Bacon recalled the Gallery's director, Erica Brausen, saying, mimicking her thick German accent. The Gallery's act of censorship was, almost 13 The Wolfenden Committee's report of 1954 formalised a division of public and private space as spheres of crime and sin, respectively, that presented acute problems for homosexual subjects of these laws. For more on the Wolfenden Committee, its institution and findings, see Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (Longman: New York and Harlow, 1981). See also Richard Hornsey, “Trial by Photobooth: The Public Face of the Homosexual Citizen” in The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). pp.117-162.

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certainly, a reaction to the painting's startling (and seemingly subversive) scenario. Grounded in a dark arena, on a bed of crumpled white linen, the two figures of the title are locked in a grim embrace. Their greasy, deadened skin, as stiff and pale as the sheets in the harsh glare of an unseen spotlight, dissolves and tears in its bare description by roughly handled paint. Only vague details can be made out: a toothy grimace, a brylcream-ed quiff, an outstretched hand. These figures inhabit a confusing space in which perspective challenges our perception. It is difficult to grasp whether we are inside or outside the room. This potential voyeurism adds to a palpable sense of menace which suffuses the scene and emanating, perhaps, from the sense of something covert or hidden being suddenly on display: a sense doubled by its first clandestine (non)appearance. The decision to sequester Two Figures in the Hanover Gallery's mezzanine could have been due to the potential of it being interpreted as homoerotic in its thematising of homosexual acts; Brausen may have considered this display foolhardy in a period of heightened rates of prosecution for homosexual activity during 1953 in London.14 Fear of a homophobic response may have been behind the closeting of this painting which might, in turn, reflect the spatial anxieties of a queer subject in an alienating sociopolitical realm.15 But the symbolic representation of alienating space is difficult to argue through without re-inscribing the contention that institutional space – the gallery, for instance – is heteronormative to begin with. What is interesting, with regard to this thesis's claim that the heteronorms of the studio are phobically-charged (in its propensity to gender bodies and its regulatory heterosexual underpinning) is Two Figures re-appearance in 1962, in a Tate retrospective of the artist's work. By this time, 14 Numerous high-profile prosecutions were made in this period including the infamous Montagu case (1954). The consequent fear of disclosure also led to a peripheral rise in blackmail cases. See Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1981). 15 It might be noted that Brausen was a lesbian and, therefore, potentially endangered by interpretations of Two Figures as homoerotic.

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an alibi for its male nudity and intimate scenario had been constructed – effectively closeting any homoeroticism. Crucially this explanation was predicated on the studio as a reference point, a vector instigated by the wealth of reference material revealed in Bacon's repeated and habitual production of studio-view images. As I will turn to shortly, this habit of making his studio visible was formative to a mythology crafted for Bacon as a modern master; however, this fantasy of mastery (and the notion of the originary masculinity of the studio's master) is also fundamentally undermined by the particular ways in which Bacon performed himself in studio space, in his modes of selfpresentation. During this period, Gavin Butt has argued that self-presentation in a studio setting may have been, in part, a survival strategy for queer artists. In Between You and Me (2005), Butt notes in a US context, that the mid-twentieth century represented a period of increasing legal confusion, prohibition and scrutiny in matters of sexuality, and shifting grounds in matters of art. Taking advantage of the slippage between “artistic” and “homosexual” signifiers, artists working in New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s were able to “flirt” with the homosexual signification of the artistic persona as a means to explore, in relative safety, their sexualities. For instance, Butt argues that “manly” yet not “straightforwardly masculine” performances of the male body can be read in publicity shots of the painter Jasper Johns (1930-); an alibi for Johns's camp is found in the artist's stance, clothes, facial expressions and studio surroundings as these re-appropriate or cite mythic (hyper-masculinised) performances of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors.16 As Hornsey, and others, have argued, sexual and artistic concerns are also

16 On a similar subject, Kenneth Silver has claimed that Johns is a parody or “exaggeration” of Abstract Expressionism (1992). Nicholas Chare claims that Bacon's technique is a satiric (drag) version of Abstract Expressionism – his controlled seminal splashes especially. Chare, “Sexing the Canvas: Calling on the Medium” in Art History, Vol. 32 No.4 (September 2009) pp.684-685.

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applicable to the British post-war period.17 Accordingly, Bacon's interest in the studio might also be read, as with Butt's US examples, as a flirtation with the homosexual signification that his “artistic” status might attract via the studio's image. Crucially, this come-on would have come with a modicum of deniability for Bacon in that these homosexual connotations – as modifiers to masculinity – would not have been marked directly on his body, as Butt claims.18 However, the ways in which self-presentation – both artistic and sexual – is explored in Bacon's studio-view images, and the historical predecessors he referenced, differ greatly from Butt's examples; moreover, the model of masculinity that Bacon drew on was of a different order. What follows focuses on Bacon's studio portraits (many of which, ironically, were found in his studio archive). These portraits are a mode of self-presentation in which the artist's public persona and his studio are co-produced; an interpretation which avoids seeing the former mimetically reproduced in the latter. These habits, through which the studio is staged, test the relationship between the artist's performed masculinities and the traditions of artistic mastery he draws on, as his occupation of the studio marks out a territory for queer sexualities.

17 Gavin Butt notes in mid-twentieth century art-critical discourse, a convergence of “artistic” and “homosexual” signifiers. Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963, (Duke University Press: Durham; London, 2005) p.50-52. The US ascendency post-1945 was not only in the production of art but in the critical domain. New critical approaches were global priorities not merely confined to the US. Moreover, prominent critical figures in post-war Britain – Lawrence Alloway, John Berger, David Sylvester, for example – were working internationally. In terms of the socio-sexual re-defining of this period, as Butt notes, the infamous Kinsey Report into the sex lives of American men in 1948 had a UK version – dubbed “Little Kinsey” – in 1949. The effects of these reports on US and UK society are comparable. Simon Ofield provides a further take on the antagonism between homosexual and artistic signifiers in post-war Britain through his essay on the friendship between Cecil Beaton and Bacon in “Cecil Beaton: Designs on Francis Bacon,” in Visual Culture in Britain, Volume 7, Number 1, 2006. 18 Butt, Between You and Me, p.73.

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Staging the artist

In addition to painting the studio as it surrounded him, Bacon's image was enframed by it throughout his career. The now-familiar chaos of his Reece Mews studio is visualised in portraits – and re-constructed as part of the Bacon Studio exhibit in Dublin – together with other less-recognisable studio-spaces. In these photographs, the artist's studio appears to degenerate over time. Seemingly, each studio was more shambolic, paint-smeared, and rubbish-strewn than the last: from the pristine space and

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ineffably modern lines showcased at Queensberry Mews (c.1929) to Cromwell Place to Carlyle Studios to Overstrand Mansions [Fig. 15] to the disarray of Reece Mews, the last in a long line of spaces Bacon posed in [Fig. 16].Though disassembling over the years, Bacon made use of the traditional idea of the painter's studio and its romanticised connotations, which he cited in this performance of himself as a studio artist. As a mythological creation, “Bacon” was staged in the image of the studio. But the specific way in which Bacon performed himself as an artist, making use of the image of the studio, modified those traditions in ways that undermine the conventions of it – as a space of mastery (and masculinity) and as a symbolic mirror of the artist's mind.19 As well as being photographed in its environs, Bacon's privileged socioeconomic status – he was born a member of the British upper classes – afforded him the ability to buy into the traditional image of the studio via his occupation of a grand space at 7 Cromwell Place, South Kensington (or Millais House, as the property was known) [Fig. 17].20 This studio is notable in the development of Bacon's career, both in his debut as an artist, and the foundation of a mythology related to working methods first described here. It was here that Erica Brausen first visited the artist; the studio's location in relation to the Victoria & Albert Museum is important to his discovery of Eadweard Muybridge's photographs; and it was here that Sam Hunter first noted, photographed and publicised Bacon's use of photographic reference material.21 Renting this space from around 1942-51 constituted a canny mobilisation of the studio's image in furthering the artist's nascent career at a critical moment. Struggling to make his name as a painter, Bacon moved here into a building already occupying a central place in the 19 See Peppiatt, for a further instance, in Connoisseur Magazine (September, 1984). Reading a studioview image of Bacon, the artist is shown, according to Peppiatt, “at the center of his studio's controlled chaos.” “Bacon's studio is a complete and accurate archive of the way his imagination is fertilised,” Peppiatt claims, “paint-spattered and ankle-deep in books and images, it forms a mirror of the artist's mind.” (86). 20 For a history of Millais House see Alyson Wilson, “Housed in Art History” in The Art Quarterly (Autumn 1994) pp. 23-29. 21 Sam Hunter, “Anatomy of Horror” The Magazine of Art (January, 1952) p.12

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British art establishment – geographically and historically. Ideally situated near to the V & A and the former buildings that housed the Royal College of Art, the house had been built speculatively, c.1860, in anticipation of interest from London's wealthy artistic elite.22 Its first, and eponymous, occupant, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896), took advantage of its magnificent purpose built studio over a mews of the five-bedroomed house.23 The house's subsequent occupation by the society photographer E.O. Hoppé (1878-1972) spread its fame amongst the list of notables from the worlds of politics, business, literature, fashion, theatre, music and art that came to be photographed there, conferring on it a stellar reputation still in effect when Bacon came to the house in 1942. Millais House provided Bacon not only with a grand, wellappointed studio – with its coffered ceiling and north-facing skylights – but with an equally grand and accommodating lineage and history. Bacon drew on Millais House's suggestive links to Bohemian artists and high society, its “air of diminished grandeur, a certain forlorn sense of Edwardian Splendour in retreat.”24 During a period in his career in which his work was attacked as much as lauded, unsure and unconfident in his style, and guarded about his use of photographic reference material, the heritage and aspect of the studio at Millais House provided a lavish stage-setting for Bacon's performance of an artistic persona, his coming-out, or debut, as an artist.25 22 Bacon would later occupy Rodrigo Moynihan's rooms at the Royal College of Art when it was situated in South Kensington. The house had been built by the builders of the Victoria and Albert Museum – then known as the South Kensington Museum – in an area envisioned by Prince Albert in the nineteenth century and sometimes still known as “Albertopolis.” 23 It was a mews very much like the one the studio was built over that Bacon would later move into on Reece Mews. For an interesting history of 7 Cromwell Grove – now housing the Art Fund – see Alyson Wilson, “Housed in Art History” pp. 23-29 24 Michael Wishart evocatively describes parties at Millais House where “enormous dry Martinis in brimfull Waterford tumblers” were served in the “air of diminished grandeur, a certain forlorn sense of Edwardian Splendour in retreat.” Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Orion, 1996): p.105 25 Simon Ofield argues that suggestions of “Edwardian grandeur” in the artist's paintings may have led to criticism of superficiality in the 1950s - a dangerous connotation considering Bacon's desire to be taken seriously as the producer of more than just decorative art. Ofield, “Cecil Beaton” p.25. For more on the critical reception and doubts as to Bacon's seriousness as an artist see David Alan Mellor, “Framing Bacon: Reception and Representation from Little Magazine to TV Screen, 1945-1966” in Visual Culture in Britain, 10:3, 2009. pp. 227-234.

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Where visualised, Bacon's studio (photographic or otherwise) disrupts the conventions of the studio and, more generally, art-making that they cite. Photo-portraits of Bacon in the studio, for example, are comparable in one regard: he is posed as sitter in each. Never actually shown at work in the studio, Bacon not only appears as the object of a portrait but takes up the position of a model rather than artist. Thus, Bacon is positioned in the role usually reserved for the artist's other, or object of desire; in this regard, Bacon's pose in the studio compares with images of his lover, George Dyer [Fig. 18].26 In another example, Henri Cartier Bresson's photograph of the artist [Fig. 19] has more in common with the attitude assumed by a model (or a matinee idol even) than the stereotypical deep concentration or frustration that characterises the artist figure in the customary studio-view.27 Accordingly, Bacon's image could be considered as being the bearer of an objectifying look rather than, as is the norm, its origin (and, perhaps, a vanity characterised historically as feminine). In this the artist eschews one convention by which the artist's mastery is connoted – his action conferred in relief to the passive material surrounding him. Moreover, the studio Bacon poses in does not quite signify as a space of production, rather these locations suggest the aftermath of events in their ruinous state. Further (visual and written) accounts of affective relationships among men in Bacon's studio modify its norms. The objectivity of the critic's relationship to the artist – disinterest being one cornerstone of modernist criticism – is undermined as it is recalled by David Sylvester in terms of a coquettish flirtation in the studio. The critic remembers:

26 In conversation with Martin Harrison at the Bacon's Books conference in Trinity College, Dublin (October 2012) he agreed with me that there were no known images of Bacon actually at work. The artist used spectacles to work; yet, no images of him in these are recorded either. 27 For a discussion of the gendering of the matinee idol, see Miriam Hansen's work on Valentino. Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA; London, 1994)

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In those early days Lucian clearly had a crush on Francis, as I did. (We both copied his uniform of a plain, dark grey, worsted double-breasted Saville Row suit, plain shirt, plain dark tie, brown suede shoes.) The crush was more interesting in Lucian's case, because he was normally so much in control of every situation. When he was with Francis he gave the impression that he was twirling around him in his anxiety to please.28

In this account, Sylvester betrays a homoeroticism in these studio encounters that is verboten (and this sense of bodily interest contra objectivity in the subject of criticism will be developed further in later chapters on body-phobic forms of modernist criticism and Jackson Pollock). Elsewhere, more evidence (though gossip may be a more apposite term) of the affectionate bonds played out in Bacon's studio can be found in Bacon's double portrait of Freud and Auerbach (1964) [Fig. 20]. Both naked from the waist down, wearing white t-shirts, its sitters recline on the same red chair (one after the other). Freud, in the left panel, sprawls out in a languid stretch, buttocks raised.29 Auerbach, on the other hand, hides his crotch with his hands. It seems amazing that these two would have consented to such portraits and plausible, given Bacon's methods of working from diverse fragments of reference material, that they didn't. Though, typically, Bacon's brushwork ensures their faces are indefinable, the title of the piece fills in the details as to their identity. The manner in which the artist's art posed here toys with social expectations of the period, sexual propriety and the conventions of the studio model. It also describes an affectionate community of artists and homosocial bonding that hints at something more.30 Traditions forms of masculinity are uncoupled from mastery in the Bacon's performance of the studio's master. This parodying of the studio-view draws on a particular history.31 Bacon's occupation of Millais' former studio, for instance, aligns 28 David Sylvester, “All the pulsations of a person” in Independent on Sunday, 24 October 1993. 29 This pose is seemingly based on Michelangelo di Buonarotti's, similarly homoerotic, statue of a dying slave [c.1513] 30 Where homosociality – as theorised by Sedgwick – requires an intermediary between men, it could be considered in the studio that a shared love of art may bond men together. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press: New York, 1993). A further example: the traditional bond of master and pupil was sexualised in Bacon's seduction of his mentor, Roy de Maistre. 31 Rather than strictly parodic, this mobilisation of “faded Edwardian glamour” might suggest instead a

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respectful reverence to the history of Millais House and the PRB. The conceptual art group, Art & Language, castigated Bacon in 1985 for his overly respectful admiration for his predecessors and their similarity – as upper-class painters – to his social position. Art & Language, “Francis Bacon”, Artscribe 53 (Jul-Aug 1985) pp.14-20.

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him with a specific historical model – the upper-class Victorian artist. More generally, these images recite (with a difference) oft-repeated aspects of the studio-view genre. Again, it is art-historical predecessors that are impersonated in these photographs.32 This re-iteration aligns the artist's body with the bodies of former studio inhabitants, their familiar trappings connote their fame, prestige and position in Bacon's publicity shots. As he chose not to pose at work in the studio, the studio-as-backdrop does the work of signifying Bacon's impersonation of the artistic type. The studio itself becomes almost a costume, clothing the artist's body, embodying the characteristics he desires to convey.33 The idiom of a “studio artist” that these strategies puts into inverted commas is a camp play on what are claimed in their prior repetition as studio norms.34 Based on a historically repeated and highly gendered model, partly parodic, partly camp (perhaps, a type of artistic-campery), and as an playful exaggeration of norms allows a consideration of Bacon's studio images as a form of drag act. However, as this instance of gender performance (of a masculinised studio artist) doesn't rest on inverting genders, Elizabeth Freeman's theory of “temporal drag” may be deployed. Developed through her analysis of filmic re-enactments of artistic practice, Freeman's argument is helpful for thinking through the way in which Bacon's photographs (themselves, in some ways, re-enactments) rework historical masculinities.35 Like 32 Impersonation can mean both self-presentation and a parodic presentation of an other's characteristics. OED 33 Ernst van Alphen (1997) contends that Bacon was intrigued by displays of masculinity through his painted figures. Particularly useful is van Alphen's convincing claim that Bacon's paintings are notable for their portrayal of men “dressing up as men.” Given evidence of Bacon's interest in studio-view imagery (as, it could be said, a specific display of a particularised version of masculinity) this offers the possibility that the spectacle of “dressing up” as an artist, rather than the gangsters, businessmen (175) and sportsmen (184) of his paintings, may also be disruptive form of portraiture – un-mastering the figure of the artist. Ultimately, van Alphen assumes and re-inscribes the “stereotyped” masculinity which he claims Bacon's paintings work against. And the configuration of “fragmented” bodies that this relies on require the properties of paintwork. 34 This refers to Susan Sontag's version of camp. “10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.” Sontag, “Notes on 'Camp'” in Partisan Review, 31:4, Fall 1964. 35 In Time Binds (2010), Freeman analyses the film Shulie (2009 dir. Elisabeth Subrin). A shot-by-shot re-enactment of a 1967 documentary film on the radical feminist artist Shulamith Firestone. Freeman focuses on the co-presence in Shulie of two gendered performances and the 2009 film's queer

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Bacon's citation of the studio-view genre, the examples Freeman analyses are not predicated on a delineation of bodies divided by gender differences (as in a commonplace definition of drag) but, rather, through bodies divided by time; a drag that she claims is inflected with more “angst-ridden” elements of camp performance: a “love of failure,” or the “rescue of ephemera,” for example.36 Again these are elements which could be read in Bacon's staging of the studio: the failure of the studio to convince as a productive space or an inability (purposeful or not) to quite connote the masculinity required of artistic mastery. From a different angle, these studio-shots may offer an image of Bacon as a hoarder of the outmoded paraphernalia of art-making. His occupation of Millais House could be read as mobilised out of a love for the trappings of a bygone era – this might include the Edwardian gentleman he impersonates and the homosocial Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (whose own particular relation to gender androgyny Bacon's citation plays with).37 Crucially, though modified, these citations are still legible. A dialogue between two distinct masculinities can thus be read in these photographs as they re-enact studio histories: on the one hand, a conventional “romance of the studio” and artistic mastery; and the other, the homoerotically-tinged homosocial atmosphere of Bacon's studio and its coterie of admirers. The disjunct between these diverse iterations is allowed to remain on display. The pastness of old-fashioned conventions of the studio remain visible as the past in the present; that is, they are not buried, overturned or repudiated (a revolutionary vector which we could perhaps see in retrospective on second wave feminism. 36 Freeman's main claim here is that instances of queer performances – e.g. drag and camp – do not necessarily have to rely on gender inversion. The reference to camp as indicating failure and the outmoded refers to Richard Dyer and Andrew Ross's definitions of camp. See Dyer, “It's Being So Camp As Keeps Us Going” (1977) reprinted in Cleto, Camp (1999); Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp” in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). 37 Marcia Pointon suggests that the relationship Millais and his fellow Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt may have been homosexual in Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed (1989). The potential queerness of the PRB is also hinted at by Sontag in her “Notes on Camp” (1964) when she claims that the androgynous figures which characterise Pre-Raphaelite painting are indicative of a “camp sensibility.”

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van Alphen's analysis of Bacon's approach to masculinity as a “symbolic” deconstruction which might suggest an a priori masculinity; or in Hornsey's approach to post-war queer masculinities as “subversive” and “radical”). Rather the historical masterful studio lies in ruins at the artist's feet. Bacon's queer performance in the studio is not, however, strictly parodic – characterised as such might imply that Bacon's aim was to reveal the artistic-masculinity it cites in its drag act as already an act (and might point to political satiric edge which would misrepresent the artist). Yet, considering these studio-view portraits in terms of Freeman's “temporal drag” and, thus, as a form of allegory can show ways in which they undermine traditional forms – particularly in their relation to gender and history. In literary terms, allegory operates by re-telling an old story – the norms of the artist's studio, say – with a new one.38 Bacon's use of Millais House, for instance, is an allegory, telling the familiar story of the studio artist again, but differently. Where that retold narrative involves the queer performance, the difference between modes of speaking (allegorical or symbolic) become important. Freeman argues: If drag turns bodies into emblems, and if it tells a personal story that is also a story about a bygone form of gender, then it is indeed, allegorical in traditional, literary-critical sense of the term. Normative heterogenders, on the other hand, turn identification with the same-sex parent into identity as that parent, perforce erasing the passage of years. The correlating literary-critical term for ordinary masculinity and femininity would not be allegory but symbol, which fuses incommensurate temporal moments into something singular and coherent, supposedly lifting a thing or an idea out of history and into eternity.39

What if, considered according to Freeman's argument, Bacon's gendered performance of the historical studio-view were a type of “allegorical” drag act? The studio pictures tell a personal story – they are, by genre, self-portraits. His body, as it appears clothed by the studio (in the sense of it as a habit and habitat) gestures toward it being emblematic of 38 We could turn here to the work of Michael Leiris (1983) and Andrew Sinclair (1993) who both expound on Bacon's portraiture practice via a retelling of the fateful, and eventually hideous, portrait produced by Basil Hallward of Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde's novel. See Michael Leiris, Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile (Rizzoli: New York, 1983) p.26; Andrew Sinclair, Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (London: Sinclair-Stephenson, 1994). Both authors reference of Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde are mentioned in Ofield, “Cecil Beaton” p.35. 39 Freeman, Time Binds, p.69

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concepts of creativity and artistic-ness. Based on the conventions of the studio, reanimating and re-working the romanticised figure of a masterful, seminal genius, it is a retelling of a story of a “bygone form of gender.” The studio itself is in ruins. It suggests in photographs – such as those by Cartier Bresson and Namuth – the aftermath of an event in its layered remains, strewn paper, and trampled debris, rather than the typical studio trope of a space of production or of work in progress. Similarly, Bacon's performance fails to quite convince. These photographs do not merely repeat conventional versions of art-making; the artist's pose – his identification with a historical predecessor – does not quite align with that image, symbolically. With the traditions of the studio legibly intact, palimpsest-like, the artist leaves these ruins visible, showing the past as the past.40 Defining Bacon's studio image as allegorical – rather than “the studio as symbol” as Peppiatt considers it to be – offers a different perspective on the remains of the artist's practice and complicates the place of these images and their potential to be considered as illustrative of modernist principles. Firstly, Bacon “himself,” his authority, is constituted in these portraits from elsewhere in time when read as an historical reenactment. The contingency of his “selfhood” challenges the privileged, coherent authorial presence associated with modernist criticism.41 The coherent artistic subject required by these forms of criticism and history is, in some respects, incompatible with the production of the artist's image when understood in terms of commodification. Taking into account the many publicity shots of the artist in the studio, it would seem 40 According to Craig Owens: “Allegory is an attitude as well as a technique, a perception as well as a procedure. It occurs wherever one text is doubled by another. One text is read through another. The paradigm for the allegorical work is the palimpsest.” Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture (University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 1992) p.54. 41 According to Amelia Jones, the presentation and production of photographic self-portraiture has been posited as a problem for artists working within a modernist framework. Self/Image, p.6 The paradox of a mediation in which the objectifying “male gaze” of the camera's lens might “feminise or queer” the subject of the studio-view is not my concern here (though I will return to this question in a later chapter on the image of Jackson Pollock's studio and body).

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that Bacon invested in the production of himself as an image; his self-production as commodity could be said to be part of his early 1950s strategy.42 As much as this collection of portraits could be claimed to be constructing a mythology for Bacon these studio-views unsettle the persona of the artist where understood in the mid-twentieth century as a coherent subject. Crucially, the coherence of the historical model (of mastery and masculinity) upon which his image depends is also put under stress. Blasted out of history's continuum, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, the past's dependence on the present for its meaning has implications for both its excavation of a Pre-Raphaelite moment and a theory of gender performance.43 In both cases their status as originary are called into question, both take on the aspect of fantasy or fiction. Secondly, as a type of drag Bacon's disruptive self-portraiture underlines a mismatch between inner psychic space and its projection or inscription on studio bodies. As Judith Butler has claimed, drag potentially “mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity.”44 This also calls into question the mirroring of the artist's mind with the architectural interior of the studio, its expression in it. The masculinity of the artist's mind has tended to be posited (and repeated) historically as a prerequisite of modernist art discourse; however, its image, the studio-view, does not read here as its proof. Thirdly, the same artistic-campery that challenges the forms that masculinity in the studio takes also unsettles the ground upon which these acts are staged. If, as Butler claims, “gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylised repetition of acts,” then the exterior 42 In this way Bacon is comparable to Jones's example, Andy Warhol. Despite Warhol's rhetoric of surface and lack of depth (self-authored and from elsewhere), he was nevertheless heralded as a genius – and, as others have noted, his biographical sexuality somewhat occluded. For more on Warhol's persona – artistic and sexual – see the essays in Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley and José Esteban Muñoz, POP OUT: Queer Warhol (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1996) and “Dishing on the Swish, or, the “Inning” of Andy Warhol” in Butt, Between You and Me, pp.106-136. 43 “Thus, to Robespierre, ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, (Pimlico: London, 1999) p.261 44 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (Routledge: New York; London, 1990) p.186

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space (here, a specific form of architectural interior) also materialises in the reenactment and re-experiencing of these. Therefore, it seems that, as documented in the studio-pictures, Bacon's version of artistic-camp is one example in which the interface between artist and studio – a set of studio habits or practices – co-produce both. Accordingly, the studio cannot be considered so straightforwardly as a backdrop whose associations confer artistic status on those who appear in it. The studio itself is produced in the same gesture that produces the artist. Neither precedes the other. As a stage for gendered performance of a “serious artist” the studio – itself, a set of presumptive cultural and historical associations which have been related to masculinity – is groundless, dislocated and without an original and this transience has important implication when we consider the studio as an archive.

The archived studio In addition to its use as a backdrop to Bacon's pose as a serious artist and to its appearance – either directly or indirectly (literally or allegorically) – in the spaces staged in the artist's paintings, the studio's privileged status in studies of Bacon's work was cemented in a reported account of the Millais House studio by the art critic Sam Hunter in 1952: At one end stands his paintings, unique and extremely personal inventions. At the other are table littered with newspapers photographs and clippings, crime sheets like Crapouillot and photographs or reproductions of personalities who have passed across the public stage in recent years. The only law governing Bacon's selection of this visual literature is some kind of mysterious topical and psychological pertinence. Violence is the common denominator of photographs showing Goebbels wagging a finger on the public platform, the human carnage of a highway accident, every sort of war atrocity, the bloody streets of Moscow during the October Revolution, fantastic scientific contraptions culled from the pages of Popular Mechanics. The artistic issue of this raw matter is unpredictable and without literal antecedents. Somewhere between the simple cold mechanics of the camera and the most charged moments of recent history it had recorded, Bacon has set up a shadowy and crepuscular world of imagination, playing on associations of violence and horror.45 45 Sam Hunter, “Anatomy of Horror” The Magazine of Art (January, 1952) p.12

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Published in The Magazine of Art (January, 1952) Hunter documented the peculiarities of the artist's painting practice during his studio visit. Tables (rather than the floor) are described as a mirror of the “public stage” of mass media. This “raw matter,” objectively captured by the camera is processed through Bacon's “crepuscular” imagination – itself alluding to sexuality as subject to “mysterious topical and psychological pertinence” – to produce “unique and extremely personal inventions.” Two arrangements of photographic material, set side by side, illustrate Hunter's article [Fig. 21]. More than the written description of the studio, these small photographs have impacted much subsequent theorising of the artist. Hunter's archival documentation of the shifting and drifting image banks of Bacon's studio augmented a direction for attempts to understand or engage with the artist works; furthermore, publicising Bacon's private practices – hitherto unseen, though long-rumoured – this account laid bare the use of printed reference material in the artist's painting process. The demonstration of Bacon's practice has been the foundation of a mythology in which the artist's amateurism (his lack of a traditional art education and inability to draw) is, counterintuitively, reworded as his masterstroke. This particular myth relies on “evidence” provided by Bacon's reiterative depiction of the studio but first noted (and sanctioned) in Hunter's account; here Bacon's (dirty) secret is laid bare: the artist was self-taught and not a gifted draughtsman. Bacon's use of mass-media imagery, rather than models and drawing, for his figurative painting was a potentially dangerous admission. Bacon's technical paucity was hotly debated in the 1950s.46 The myth of Bacon as amateur-master is linked to a narrative of violence in the psychologising of the 46 As evidenced in Hunter's photographs, Bacon's use of photography was heralded as a modern and straightforward approach to the traditional medium of oil painting by David Sylvester in 1952 as: “the medium with which we are used to seeing things.” John Berger, on the other hand, criticised Bacon as melodramatic – with a brilliantly back-handed compliment as a “brilliant stage manager.” For a detailed and comprehensive review of critical debates on Bacon's post-war painting see David Alan Mellor “Framing Bacon: Reception and Representation from Little Magazine to TV Screen, 19451966” in Visual Culture in Britain,10:3, pp.227-234.

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studio's visible ferment; the title of Hunter's piece and the caption to the photographs in questions – as “Anatomy of Horror” and “Violence is the common denominator” respectively – set the tone of his essay. Like Melville's diagnosis of the “anxious space” of Bacon's painting, Hunter looks to the “exacerbated nerves” and “distinct psychological atmosphere” of postwar London for the cause of his affective response of disquiet. As indicated earlier, this turning toward violence serves to closet the homoeroticism of his painting; or, at least, this forecloses on it as a possible interpretation precisely by the newly-discovered evidence of the studio's “violent” reference material. Hunter, for one, chooses to interpret paintings like Two Figures (which, amongst others of a similar theme – male nudes, coupled figures – would have been on display in the studio) as thematically violent. Hunter speaks of Bacon's “taste for ruin” and “disaster” as a “personal predilection.”47 This turn may be indicative of homophobic prejudice – ruin and disaster were risks undertaken by homosexual men and women in the British 1950s (and elsewhere). Whilst a taste for ruins (at least in the outmoded) could be considered a mark of campness, this is turned into something nihilistic here.48 If thematically sexual, it is a taste for violence rather than playfulness that is read in coupled male figures; when mentioned at all, Bacon's sexuality tends to linger on his purported taste for sado-masochism.49 Regardless of whether or not this version of the artist's sexual proclivity is closer to what passes for the truth, what is important is that the artist's queerness is turned in Hunter's phrasing towards a romanticised version of artistic behaviours which include a tendency for self-destruction 47 Hunter, “Anatomy of Horror” p.15. We could also note here that the personal has long been equated with the feminine and feminine culture. The “personal is political” was a well-used slogan in secondwave feminism. 48 Freeman notes Dyer (1977) and Ross (1989) in reference to camp, ruin and the outmoded. Time Binds, p.68. 49 Peppiatt, in particular, reports Bacon's sexual predilections in Anatomy of an Enigma (1996); Bacon in the 1950s (2006) and Studies for a Portrait (Yale University Press: New Haven; London, 2008).

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and melancholia and the heroism (and mastery) that these re-inscribe. The studio's visibility changed the reception of Bacon's work after Hunter's intervention. Two Figures provides an example of this. In its (albeit covert) Hanover Gallery debut, the censorship of this painting brought to the fore the homoeroticism of which it was accused. Brausen's reading of it as a “filthy picture” is only one possible analysis. After the Hanover Gallery exhibition, the painting would not be exhibited again until 1962 when it re-appeared in a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London. By this time Bacon's studio habits were well documented and a reference point for Two Figures – a photographic motion study of male wrestlers by Edweard Muybridge [Fig. 22] – together with an explanatory note were exhibited with it (“in the hope of lending respectability to the painting,” according to Sylvester).50 As outlined here, two explanations of the painting can be made of it: as representing either a sexual or violent encounter. The possibility of the former is discouraged by the Tate's reference to an archive of the artist's studio material and originating evidence of Bacon's use of Muybridge's image. Reading the figures as engaged in a sexual act depends strongly on the artist's biographical sexuality and his “non-archival” sexual habits. Moreover, interpreting Two Figures as erotic can be lead back to an interpretation of violence. In conversation with Sylvester, Bacon underlined the homoeroticism of Muybridge's wrestlers which, he claimed, “appear, unless you look at them under a microscope, to be in some sort of embrace.”51 An erotic interpretation of the figure is, in the light of the studio's archival evidence, made subjective.52 Thus, the homoeroticism of Muybridge's photograph and wrestling in 50 David Sylvester claims the Tate was responsible, in this way for lending the painting “official sanction.” http://www.francis-bacon.com/world/?c=David-Sylvester Accessed on 10 August 2010. Even as late as 2005 Sylvester is prejudicial towards the photograph. “it seemed to me,” he states, “that, ironically, the photograph of the wrestlers, looked more pornographic than the painting of the buggers.” 51 Francis Bacon quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson: London, 1975) p.116-117. 52 For example, David Sylvester congratulates Bacon for the “fluency with which he could combine

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images borrowed from [others] with images from his personal life.” Sylvester in “Bacon's World” online essay. http://www.francis-bacon.com/world/?c=David-Sylvester Accessed on 10 August 2010.

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general is confined to Bacon's mind. The mythology being crafted for Bacon – as master-amateur, a narrative reliant on the evidential studio – is incompatible, in critical studies of the artist before the 1980s, with a homoerotic reading of this painting. One open secret is exchanged for another; gossip about Bacon's sexuality is eclipsed by the incendiary evidence that the artist cannot draw. Potential controversy surrounding the artist's biographical sexuality is shifted to the vexed status of the mass cultural reference material he had been making use of in the studio. Critical responses that heralded this technique as his masterstroke (dependent on the studio's visibility) publicly sanctions one set of private practices (the use of mass media as reference) through erecting a wall of silence around another (the artist's sexuality and the homoeroticism of his work). Despite the open secret of its potential for homoerotic encounter, for propriety's sake, the mythic studio and the archive is expunged of any taint of sexuality. The evidential force of the studio's materiality effects a viewing of Two Figures: as a modern masterpiece and conforming to accepted standards of behaviour (in a period in which overt depictions of homosexual behaviour were not deemed “proper”). An alibi for Two Figures's potential sexual impropriety is provided by the studioarchive, specifically, de-eroticised (or hetero-eroticised) by the reference to Muybridge's photograph of wrestlers. Counter-intuitively, Bacon's studio habits – which provide a challenge to a rhetoric of artistic mastery – are connected to his mythologising in the 1960s as a great artist; a designation that is formulated precisely because of his publicising of the studio. Bacon's pop credentials were first noted by Lawrence Alloway who considered his use of reference material as a precursor to the British pop artists, specifically, the Independent Group. However, as noted previously, Bacon's “pop” credentials rest on his studio-bound portraits which are themselves, as I have argued, on

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an artistic-camp which undermines the masculinity and heterosexuality of the studio. But, this non-archival vector tends to be overlooked in the face of his overwhelming archive.

The Hugh Lane Archive

Bacon's studio was an archive of meanings for Bacon's paintings already before the artist's death. “The strategic importance of Sam Hunter's intervention” David Mellor claims, “was [that] he initiated the iconographic vector within Bacon criticism by seizing upon the photographic sources [of his paintings]”53 Since Hunter's documentation of Bacon's studio practices, through this institutionalised photographic “evidence” and, lately, the studio's material, The Hugh Lane Archive has become a Rosetta Stone for critical work on the artist.54 These methods, the interpretation of paintings based on material evidence of the studio, are largely predicated on the archived remains of the studio at Reece Mews: bequeathed, archeologically documented and dismantled in London, and museologically accessioned by the Hugh Lane in Dublin. However, the archivisation of Bacon's studio materials presents the opportunity for only a narrow range of interpretations, stultifying and circumscribing what can be said about this complex and esoteric body of work. That this archive is large and, in some senses, conflicting gives the impression that there is still real debate to be had as to the meaning of these works; yet, the “iconographic vector” in Bacon criticism cannot take into account what any archive, any institutionalised practice, fails to contain. 53 Mellor, “Framing Bacon” p.229. 54 According to the OED, “The Rosetta Stone was an inscribed stone found near Rosetta on the western mouth of the Nile in 1799. Its text is written in three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. The deciphering of the hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion in 1822 led to the interpretation of many other early records of Egyptian civilization.” I intend to use this term to signal the ways in which The Hugh Lane Archive has come to signal, for certain scholarship, an indispensable key to understanding some previously unattainable knowledge.

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“Archive fever” is, according to Jacques Derrida's conception of it, “to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for a return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement.”55 The “iconographic vector” Mellor diagnoses Bacon studies with, is one concerned with the origin of the artist's confounding imagery: a (somewhat seductively satisfying) methodology which has turned from photographic evidence of reference points (for example, Hunter's studio images) to the archived materials at the Hugh Lane – available to researchers granted the necessary privilege of access to the comprehensive computer database (or to the actual materials).56 Separating individual objects out of the “compost” of the studio’s floor, the archeological dig and subsequent ascension into the archival database at the Hugh Lane in 1998 attests to 7206 distinct objects; each is ordered taxonomically and crossreferenced to their original location in the London studio. As would be expected, much material archived there related to the process of painting. The inventory comprises artist materials, paint; tools; frames and portfolios.57 Dredged from piles of paper littering the floor and shelves were found artworks: drawings (which he famously claimed never to make); gouaches (ditto); and canvases in various states of production (unframed, unpainted, beginnings, destroyed, and used as palettes). There were enormous amounts of reference material found including: photographs (1436 in total); books (and leaves from books) referencing other artists; books about photography (Barthes's La Chambre 55 Derrida, Archive Fever, p.91. 56 On visiting the Hugh Lane, my request to view “actual” material artefacts in the archive were denied. 57 Materials include: rags, easels, tape, palettes, tubes, rollers, spray cans [of paint and fixative], bottles, brushes [artist and household/domestic], plates, lids, cups, colour-charts [e.g Dulux], drawing pins, paperclips, stretcher keys, pens, pencils, lettraset sheets, lay-figures, bottle of brush cleaner, cutlery, rubber gloves, wooden t-square portable easel, easel crank, mixing bowl, empty cans [baked beans, butter beans, and consomme], bottles of tetrachloride, turpentine, and Lefranc and Bourgeois brand “vernis a retoucher.” Paint: (either professional paint, domestic paint, industrial paint, spray paint, tubes of paint, powder paint); expensive raw pigment (bags of Cadmium Orange Yellow; “Lefranc + Bourgeois” brand Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red Orange; “Windsor + Newton” Cadmium Lemon, French Ultramarine, Zinc White, Winsor Yellow, Winsor Orange, and 300g of Rose Madder from L Cornelissen + Son, Great Russell Street) Tools: (including an electric toothbrush); utensils (spoons, knives, scissors, tweezers and nail scrubbers, for example)

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Claire [1981] and Van Deren Coke’s, The Painter and the Photograph [1972]); and books specifically about studio-view images: (Barbara Rose’s Pollock Painting [1972] and Fred McDarrah, The Artist’s World [1961] – a book promising to “[catch] unerringly the look, aroma, feel and light of the artist’s in their studios.”). There were catalogues, magazines, newspapers, many concerning Bacon himself;58 various copies of “beefcake” pornography; and assorted other manuscripts and pamphlets. In addition to the material one would expect in an artistic space is a miscellany of official administrative paraphernalia, correspondence, hand-written notes and official documents; bits and bobs of furniture (including a fabulously aged and mottled round mirror designed by the artist in his days as a furniture designer) and other unexpected items (in large amounts) which had found their way into the studio including 64 items of clothing;59 bizarre items (a packet of “Recital Performance” hair dye, mosquito netting, a pelvis and a plaster cast life-mask of William Blake’s head); the minuscule (tiny scraps of paper, pennies, paperclips, buttons); and the ephemeral (paper-bags, tissues, balls of fluff etc.). These items, some crushed and encrusted with other to such a degree that they could not be separated, were photographed, described, numbered and carefully stored in, what could be described as, an exemplary (and extreme) fit of “archive fever” – individuated in such a way they are made available for re-arrangement and the making of new patterns of meaning (as my taxonomies and particular choices show) by whomever has access to them. The crumpled, battered and torn matter, indelibly touched by the artist's hand, is pored over like a forensic search for DNA. Scraps of paper, tattered leaves of long-gone 58 These include: Michael Peppiatt’s “The Disorderly Genius of Francis Bacon” from Connoisseur Magazine [September 1984]; BA Farrell “Psychoanalysis and Francis Bacon” New Society, [2/8/85] 59 The bewildering array of items of clothing found include: 3 dressing gowns (with 2 unmatching dressing-gown belts), 1 pink bath towel, 15 pairs of trousers (and 5 separate lengths of leg), 5 socks, 1 Valentino shirt, 4 cashmere jumpers (2 blue, 2 brown, 1 with attached hammer), 1 handkerchief, 1 dust-mask, 4 silk ties, 1 turquoise scarf, 1 thigh-length olive-green Jaeger leather jacket, 1 leather belt, 5 pairs of shoes (2 odd singles), 4 pairs of trainers, 3 pairs of sunglasses, 4 spectacle-cases and 19 pairs of spectacles (2 broken) – despite their never being a photograph of Bacon in glasses.

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books and ragged photographs are meticulously reunited with the paintings we are encouraged to assume they inspired. Martin Harrison's art historical method, for instance – a post-mortem technique of cross-referencing studio materials reported in numerous absorbing papers and two books illustrated with studio materials – concerns this type of exploration of material only made available once the Reece Mews studio was archived in Dublin.60 Harrison finds this posthumous evidence “essential to a proper understanding of [Bacon's] methods and pictorial vocabulary”61 but, while what can be learned about the artist's practice has obvious academic worth, this technique of repatriation of reference material to the finished article is troubling in its potential to confirm the studio as an origin of “proper” meaning. This restatement of the studio as an origin forecloses on the worth of experiences and reactions to the paintings not backed up by this one studio-archive's evidential weight. As such, what is unverifiable becomes improper.62

While the studio materials archived at The Hugh Lane could be claimed as “revelatory” (as Harrison claims), Derrida's comments on the structure of archives in Archive Fever (1994) pose further problems for conceptualising The Hugh Lane Archive and studies of Bacon's work that refer back to originary material. In addition to being a matter of privilege, access to (and interpretation of) the archive, if understood as an origin of meaning for the artist's work, risks being tautological.63 In general, as an 60 Martin Harrison, In Camera: Francis Bacon (Thames & Hudson: London, 2005); Francis Bacon: Incunabula (Thames & Hudson: London, 2008). Harrison is part of the organisation that runs the estate of Francis Bacon. He is currently working on a catalogue raissonné of the artist. 61 “Bacon transformed often banal raw material into paintings of exceptional potency and incisiveness. It has been argued that this base imagery is merely ephemeral, and clearly the dynamic between items in this book and Bacon's paintings requires art-historical explication: yet from the evidence that is emerging they appear to be essential to a proper understanding of his methods and pictorial vocabulary.” Harrison, Incunabula, p.7. 62 I was witness to an example of this line of argument at the Bacon's Books Symposium in Dublin (October, 2012). Martin Hammer's keynote on his analysis of Nazi imagery in Bacon's painting was called into question because the “evidence” for it was not in the archive. Therefore, his interlocutor argued, the controversial interest in Nazi imagery must come from Hammer himself. 63 Derrida contends that archives, in general, are subject to, and constitutive of certain power structure:

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effect of the power of the archivist to constitute and interpret the archive, an archive produces what it purports to describe.64 This impacts on consideration of the institutionalised artistic practice (museological or archival). With regard to the events of painting – as that which could be claimed to be documented via the studio-archive (or, prior to that, the photographs of Bacon's studio) – it might be argued along deconstructive lines that the archived-studio produces rather than documents (or records) artistic practice. Specifically, in the case of the Hugh Lane Archive, this presents a problem (if we consider, as some scholars may, that a “proper” understanding of Bacon's painting can be made, or is even desirable); an institutional reconstruction of the painter's practice – in actuality, a production or construction – is taken as an origin and, in turn, used to interpret paintings. Returning to Derrida's formulation of the archive, there is a “spectral messianicity” at work in this hermeneutic reading of the studio's materials; an interpretation that is unavoidably paranoid because it seems to anticipate all possible answers to the meaning of works.65 This tautology presents a closed system which depends on privileged access to the archive. This risks stultifying further discussion of the infinite complexity of these extraordinary artefacts. Any understanding of Bacon’s “work,” seen exclusively through this one lens, is as hermetically sealed as the studio-exhibit we see at the Hugh Lane. “[...] there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratisation can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” Derrida, Archive Fever, p.4, n.1. The archive's abundant display of evidence sets up a power relation as to who has the privilege to access it. As Michael Peppiatt notes: “Having got to know the studio quite well during my frequent visits to Reece Mews (where visitors usually got no further than the spartan bed-sitting room which occupied the remaining space), I used to think of this little work-space as the key to the mysteries of Bacon’s images since it contained so many paint traces and such an archive of books and photos consulted.” Peppiatt, Bacon in the 1950s, p.67, n.43. 64 Derrida, Archive Fever, p.17. 65 “[The] question of the archive is not […] a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself to a very singular experience of the promise.” Archive Fever, p.36.

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However these are not problems for The Hugh Lane Archive alone (or, for that matter, its archivists, or those that make use of its materials); the photographs of Bacon that utilise the studio's iconicity, the references to the studio in his paintings, and Hunter's photographs that initiated its place in his work all work to foreclose the possibility of its disposal. Together they make the studio – prior to its accessioning – an archive already. This all-encompassing archive stubbornly draws an ever tighter grip on what we can know about Bacon. Separating, for a moment, The Hugh Lane Archive from The Bacon Studio Exhibit displayed at the gallery, the exhibit, like other visualisations of Bacon's studio, does have the potential to disturb the closed hermeneutical system of the studio material's interpretation as visible phenomenon with access to “latent content” or truth. The Bacon Studio Exhibit at the Hugh Lane should (and does on closer analysis) also underline its own constructive quality: it is, for instance, radically separated from history, suspended and stilled in the gallery space; interred in a glass and marble sarcophagus its staging is obvious. It is an exhibit, a stage, and a tableau vivant (a stilllife). Like Bacon's pose in the studio, this analysis disrupts any claims for the exhibit as an origin (or original). Yet, its proximity, at The Hugh Lane suggests the exhibit's supplementation to another “real” origin, the archive, out of sight but available. However, this archive too is a construction – a designation it shares with other representations of the studio, including the paintings, Bacon's habitual photographs, and The Francis Bacon Studio. Like these other iterations, The Hugh Lane Archive also fails, inevitably, to satisfactorily convey, contain, or institutionalise the artist's practice. Despite its almost seamless veneer of totality and its overwhelming plenitude, the inability to completely contain Bacon's practice, to institutionalise it completely, is shown in the archive's simple failure to account for the multiple spaces that the artist

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worked in. Bacon complimented his tenure at the comfortable lair at Reece Mews with a Parisian studio, at Place des Vosges and another (though less-used) domestic dwelling at Narrow Street in London's East End.66 In addition to the plural spaces Bacon occupied while at Reece Mews, prior to his occupation of that space, Bacon utilised numerous spaces before 1961.67 The archiving of the Bacon's studio practice only takes in the Reece Mews materials. The existence of multiple and former studio spaces would suggest that the focus on Reece Mews is a myopic one. Moreover, the materials that now constitute The Hugh Lane Archive were subject, prior to its accession, to modifications. For example, John Edwards – the executor of Bacon's estate – recalls throwing out piles of “rubbish” after Bacon's death.68 Before 1992, material was regularly discarded by those around the artist. If origins are important, as some scholarship contends, then it should be pointed out that paintings made before 1961 did not emerge from the Reece Mews studio anyway. Similarly, the studio-archive is consigned in a space other than its former situation in a quiet South Kensington backstreet. Separated from this spatial and historical context accentuates the autonomy of the artist – an individual agent in private studio setting; however, solitarily confined, Bacon's work is considered away from what would have constituted a supportive, and affective, network of other practitioners. This fails to note the links Bacon had with the so-called “School of London” artists or the Independent Group. As I have suggested, there was also a sexual dimension to the lived practices that fail to be institutionalised 66 Peppiatt, Anatomy of an Enigma, p.254-255. 67 I have provided a map of all Bacon’s London studios prior to 1961 [Fig. 16]. For accounts of Bacon’s studio locations see Peppiatt, Anatomy of an Enigma, p.135-137; Peppiatt, Study for a Portrait, p.270; David Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body (1998) pp. 95-96. 68 “Every now and then,” John Edwards starts, “I would clear out obvious rubbish to make extra room for him. Miss Beston from the Marlborough Gallery would also often come round and clear up when he was away, but that always ended up with him not being able to find things. ‘Oh, I can’t find a thing,’ he’d shout. His own mess had some kind of order that he understood, and he could find what he wanted.” Edwards in Edwards and Ogden, 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon’s Studio (Thames & Hudson: London, 2001). At the Bacon's Books conference in Dublin (October 2012) Martin Harrison recalled being told of 20 or so bin bags of material being removed from the Reece Mews studio between Bacon's death in 1992 and its handover to the Hugh Lane in 1998.

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with the archivisation of Bacon's studio because they are both unverifiable and improper. We see “evidence” of these in gossip surrounding the artist and his friends, their “crushes” and flirtations. These communities are overlooked by a disconnected archive that can only be read according to the art-historical networks of catalogue raissonnés, art books and other reproductions and the lineages they construct. In conclusion, the sense of Bacon's part in a world beyond, but including, the studio relies on material not found in The Hugh Lane Archive – in his non-archival, ephemeral practices. These studio habits give a different account of the artist and his practices. That is not to say that the Reece Mews materials are redundant; but they may be overweening (a hypothesis that will be tested in comparison to Agnes Martin's dispersed studio materials in a later chapter). The social contexts referred to above and the domestic context are unable to be documented; other contexts are intentionally hidden or resist documentation; and elements like gossip are unverifiable, unknowable in the sense that knowledge of them (or their documentation) changes them. The archive seems to want to palliate loss but can't help underlining all that it cannot document, what is irrevocably lost.

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2. Lee Krasner [T]he desire too preserve and represent the performance event is a desire we should resist. For what one otherwise preserves is an illustrated corpse, a pop-up anatomical drawing that stands in for what one most wants to save, the embodied performance. – Peggy Phelan1 A crypt, people believe, always hides something dead. But to guard it from what? Against what does one keep a corpse intact, safe from both life and death, which could both come in from the outside to touch it? And to allow death to take no place in life? – Jacques Derrida2

1 Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, (Routledge: New York; London, 1997) p.3 2 Jacques Derrida, “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok” in Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, 1986, p. xxi

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From 1945 Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock shared a farmhouse at 820 SpringsFireplace Road in the quiet backwater of Springs to the north-east of the longestablished artistic community of Easthampton, Long Island. After Krasner's death in 1984, this property was bequeathed in trust to Stony Brook University. Though she left no explicit instructions on how the property was to be used (or even how it would run financially), it was decided to conserve and maintain the site as a visitor and study centre. The site comprises the main two-storey shingle-boarded House [Fig. 23] – built in 1879 and extensive renovated by the couple – and three outbuildings.3 The house is maintained, as much as possible, in the style in which Krasner left it.4 It has, however, been modified to accommodate the site's administrative offices; upstairs, the west-facing guest bedroom and the north-facing former bedroom-studio (where both artists once painted) have been converted for this purpose. Krasner's bedroom and the bathroom are as they were (the bathroom is still in use). Perspex barriers are now placed in front of Krasner's bedroom when, in the summer months, the house is turned over to visitors. The downstairs of the House is mainly given over to a large open space originally knocked-through by Krasner and Pollock. The front portion of the ground floor houses a sitting room. A door leads off to a small bathroom (again, still in use). Between the kitchen (still in use) and the sitting room, is a large space dominated by Krasner's imported English dining table – now used during conferences. 3 There was a fourth outbuilding that Pollock was converting into a house and studio for Krasner when he was killed. This was, purportedly, to make room for his mistress, Ruth Kligman, to move into the house and Krasner's bedroom-studio. This was later sold to neighbours by Krasner. Concrete footings at the site, where the famous glass painting sequence of Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg's film (1951) was shot, indicate where the studio-barn stood before it was moved by Krasner and Pollock. 4 Describing the house in c. 1977, Eleanor C. Munro notes its preservation: “Continuity is the rule in Krasner’s home in East Hampton. There is the Victorian clapboard house in a small field backing up to the marshes and then the bay. Mimosa saplings planted when she and Jackson Pollock bought the place are full-grown now, and in july the lawn beneath is covered with their yellow-fringed mauve brushes. On a sight line from the back steps to the mach is a clump of boulders Pollock hauled there to create a middle distance; wild-flowers spindle from between them. There are differences from what used to be, however: indoors, hanging in the living room, facing the immense dining table (English eighteenth century; to seat fourteen in a circle), are works not by Pollock but by Lee Krasner: two self-portraits from her youth; collages from the 1950s; and Fragments from a Crucifixion from 1962 [...]” Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (Da Capo Press: New York, 2000) p.101

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In what is largely unchanged from its former domestic role, a reception desk is one of the only concessions to the House's new function. Away from the house, the three outbuildings in the large grounds overlooking the beautiful Accabonnac Creek comprise the rest of the site. Two of these buildings are given over to storage and a small visitor centre stocked with postcards and souvenirs. The third, largest outbuilding is the famous studio-barn [Fig. 24]: the location for numerous portraits of Pollock at work and, after his death, portraits of Krasner's occupation of it. It comprises a large open space with high north-facing windows. The front, south-facing, portion of the barn is given over to an ante-chamber with shelving and racks; the artist's materials – both Krasner's and Pollock's – are carefully preserved and displayed behind perspex [Fig. 25]. Reasons for the site's preservation, with all the maintenance and day-to-day running costs entailed, are seemingly straightforward; the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, as the property is now known, memorialises the two artists in a space indelibly marked by their lives and their deaths. The Springs site provides a backdrop to a good portion of the artist's biographical narratives.5 Their occupation of the site is, at least, matched by its inhabitation of their personal mythologies. The house and, especially, the studio are similarly well-placed in canonical narratives of American art. Hans Namuth's images of Pollock absorbed in the act of painting (or “in” it altogether), for instance, places that dramatised “arena” within the boundaries of the house's 5 According to Krasner's recollections, the couple moved to the property in 1945 primarily to deal with Pollock's increasingly debilitating alcoholism. The story goes that the cure was, at least initially, successful. Away from wayward influences and the dive bars of Manhattan's Greenwich Village, Pollock enjoyed a new-found creativity in the sleepy township of Springs. The penniless couple spent their first couple of years renovated the farmhouse and putting to good use the four large agricultural outbuildings. These included one large barn which Pollock had moved from concrete footings in front of the house to a position to the north. At this point, Pollock moved out of the north-facing bedroom he had been using as a studio into the barn where he began to develop further a drip-painting technique. Krasner, who had previously been using whatever space and time was available to her, now moved into the north-facing bedroom-studio vacated by her husband. Pollock continued to paint in the barn until his death in 1956 in a drink-drive accident, upon which Krasner took up residence in the barn. She worked here during summers as well as in a Manhattan studio until her death.

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grounds.6 Krasner inhabited the studio-barn at the Springs site from Pollock's death in 1956 until her own in 1984. The work she produced there forms an important body of work – her brand of expressionist painting are now widely recognised as important to any story of twentieth century American art. An appraisal of merit in Krasner's work is not my concern here. What is at issue is Krasner's image as it is framed by this site and how this has been gendered and disseminated. Where Springs is concerned Krasner tends to be characterised as a “wife” and a “widow” often instead of as an artist in her own right. In addition to gendering Krasner (and the potential exclusion this might suggest) narratives of perpetual mourning, unspeakable loss and thwarted desire are also implicit here. The work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on melancholia and, what they term “preservative repression,” provide, therefore, a way to consider Krasner's image at Springs and to continue to consider preservation in general. Abraham and Torok insist on spatial logics for their theory whereby introjection – taking in of exterior impressions (crucially losses ) as a lifelong process of subject formation – is contrasted with malignant (and fantastical) incorporation wherein the subject attempts to forestall devastation at a loved-objects loss with the conceit that it has been conserved. While introjection relies on the presence of the object in the service of reality and expansion of the ego, incorporation retrieves its desire as a magical union.7 “Preservative repression” 6 “My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. […] When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” Pollock’s statements for a Guggenheim fellowship (1947). Reprinted in Francis V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock (New York: MOMA, 1967). p.39. According to Amelia Jones, as documented the site occupies a peripheral position between modernism and postmodernism in which it registers as both the site of abstractions expression (according to a Formalist critical framework) and a precursor to the reemergence of the artist's body as a locus of meaning in late twentieth century art-making and theory. Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1998) p. 61. 7 Abraham and Torok's work draws on Sigmund Freud's theory of introjection. In Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) theories of the two are intertwined. Freud describes the “work of mourning” in the face of traumatic loss (not only of bereavement) as a gradual acceptance through psychically “taking in” loss. His breakthrough is in describing a disturbed pathway from mourning to

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– as Abraham and Torok call the fantastical processes by which loss has been evaded through incorporation – is used to examine the encompassing of the materiality of this site since Krasner's (and, further back, Pollock's) death. This chapter asks how strategies of preservation shape Krasner's image and whether these are indicative of other losses which the house and studio at Springs could be said to memorialise.

The Cryptic Studio Ten years after Krasner's death, in 1994, The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio was officially designated as a US national monument [Fig. 26]. More than merely a concern for art history and other institutions of art, and in addition to its status as artistic memorial, The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio also serves as a popular monument to American national heroes. During the mid-twentieth century, a critical narrative propounded North America's ascendency as the preeminent cultural force, as well as military and economic powerhouse, in a Cold War world.8 Abstract Expressionism, as epitome of Modernist painting and exemplified, to a certain extent, by the iconic image of Pollock, was celebrated as the vanguard of an American assault on the European monopoly on the avant-garde. Not only were artists, such as Pollock, mythologised for heroism in the field of post-war American art, they were, in Clement Greenberg's

melancholia wherein an interruption or blockage to this inward flowing of the subject’s understanding of loss produces the stasis of depression – or melancholia. Thus imagined melancholia is a failed or incomplete mourning. During the 1970s Psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok developed further mechanisms of mourning in concepts of introjection and incorporation. Introjection (or “normal” mourning) is similar to Freud’s “work of mourning” – a healthy psychic growth through assimilation of trauma. Whereas we could imagine introjection as gradual – bit by bit, day by day – an obstacle to “normal” mourning can be a loss being, literally, too great to take in. The subject thus has to take in the loss as a whole. This Abraham and Torok call “incorporation” in “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation” in Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, 1994. 8 This material is covered by, amongst others, Serge Gilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1985). See also Jean Baudrillard, “Hot Painting: The Inevitable Fate of the Image” in: Serge Guilbaut (Ed.) Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964 (MIT Press: Mass., 1990) pp. 17-29

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analysis, worthy of celebration on the international stage as saving the entire art world.9 The image of Pollock, and artists like him, as the symbolic epitome of new American cultural value, was mobilised as an antidote to communism and “degenerate” effeminacy. Krasner's place in this schema has been characterised as a supporting role. The image of the couple domesticated within their Springs homestead was exploited to shore up the masculinity of the thrusting potency of the American artist in photographs, and latterly, we could surmise, in the preservation of the site as a whole.10 Krasner's position in Namuth's photographs of Pollock from 1950, to give a well-trodden example, are images in which she is posed as passive foil to his action in a studiolocated heterosexualised paradigm.11 The iconic status of the Springs farm may explain why the preservation and maintenance has been considered worth the cost; its image has been disseminated since the 1950s in popular culture.12 This cultural standing is corroborated in the large numbers of visitors attracted during the summer months when guided tours are given around the grounds and buildings. Yet, the narratives that I have described above speak of losses other than the artists themselves: the studio as “arena” of artistic production suggests both the irretrievable pastness of its action and hints at its missing artistic products. The House and Studio is a monument but not, I contend, exclusively to the “actual” artists, Pollock and Krasner. These entities are interred elsewhere; literally, their bodies lie in the Green River Cemetery three minutes drive from the House. The absent artists are, thus, only one of the losses The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio 9 See Clement Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism” (1948) in which he finds the failing powers of the European avant-garde as symptomatic of a wider malaise on the continent. In The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2: Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1986) pp.211-16 10 Wilfred Zogbaum's images of the couple are exemplary in this regard. Anne Wagner has claimed that these images domesticate the Pollock-Krasner marriage. Anne M. Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe (University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 1998) p.123. 11 Gavin Butt discusses “artist and wife” portraits of the 1950s in Between You and Me, p.45. 12 Most famously in Life magazine in an article about Pollock which, Griselda Pollock has argued, redefined the image of the post-war artist altogether. Pollock, “Killing Men and Dying Women” p.239.

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traces. Purloined in plain sight, obscured partially by the straightforward nomination of what the House and Studio purportedly memorialises, these other losses are encrypted within the site, as the site. To use Abraham and Torok's terminology: the PollockKrasner House and Studio might be thought of as another kind of crypt. To refer to the site in this sense (as a space and secret, the space of a secret, or the secret of a space) is a means to frame two questions: who, or what, is interred within? And which specific losses does the crypt trace? To consider the preservation of the House and Studio in terms of Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic theories is to consider it to be symptomatic of trauma and loss. Certain features of the site – for instance, its presentation as conserved, or as a memorial – might be read as in terms of psychotically repressed loss (though the anxious subject of these specific losses, in this case, has yet to be defined). This diagnosis may, for example, note a fixation in the barn on the Studio's floorboards (and walls) which provide the focus of the tour and the main draw for visitors [Fig. 27 and 28].13 The floorboards are preserved and present evocative splashes and drips; visitors are encouraged to walk over these wearing special slippers.14 Reminiscent of the canvases whose outlines they trace, the marks on the floor can be read as framing, in negative relief, the absolute absence of a specific object of desire – the art object itself.15 Why

13 Traces of Krasner's practice too can be found in the studio at Springs. Many of her more well-known works can be linked back to tell-tale paint marks which demarcate in negative relief the places where her work hung in the process of being painted: for instance, evidence of Krasner's painting of Gaea (1966) can be found in purple and pink marks on the north-east interior wall of the studio [Fig. 28]. 14 It is, perhaps, a measure of the studio material's fetishisation that it is included in the O'Connor and Thaw catalogue raissoné of Pollock's work (1978). 15 These material remains of Pollock's painting practice were uncovered in 1987 during renovations to the studio. Krasner and Pollock had laid (c. 1952) a fibreboard floor inadvertently conserving traces of paint (from c. 1947-52). With the removal of the later covering, these floorboards and their marks were uncovered. Because his technique involved the imprecise dripping and flinging of paint over canvas cut to size and laid out on the floor, where those drips have exceeded the edges of the canvas have formed fascinating reverse images. Oranges and blue splashes mark the spot where Blue Lines (1952) was painted. Recognising Krasner's partial elision in the presentation of the space, the House's current director, Helen A. Harrison, has done an equivalent job on the studio's walls. Tacked on a vertical rather than horizontal plane, Krasner's painting practices has similarly exceeded the canvas and its traces subsume the space.

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have these floorboards been preserved (and maintained at a considerable cost)? Various elements are missing from the studio exhibit: the valuable canvases whose absence is traced in drips and splashes on the floorboard, for instance. It could also be considered that the artist and the event of the artwork's painting that are irretrievably (and unrepeatably) lost. We might say that the floorboards (and lately, the walls) of the studio are fetishised, the repressed desire for these missing objects (the artwork, the artist and the act of painting) is diverted to precisely where they are not, marking the studio's materiality out as fetishistic. Where a Freudian account of fetishism might suggest this substitution to be a perversion of “normal” desire and that the preservation of the floorboards might be improper, Abraham and Torok's account, instead, offers a way to think through loss in more expansive and appropriate terms for this study without recourse to the sexual impropriety that Freud's version relies on.16 Reverence for the floorboards (and the entire site at Springs) might then be considered as a response to loss (and fear of loss, as in Freud's fetish) but one which is explained by Abraham and Torok in terms of “mourning or melancholia,” acknowledging that an object of desire has been denied for a subject and a substitute found. As I turn to now, these particular mechanisms are helpful in thinking through the materiality of this site (and preservation in general); Krasner's image as it was staged around Springs; and in defining the subject whose losses this incorporation points to. 16 In Freud's account, fetishism occurs when the (male) child notices the mother's lack of a penis and, suitably afraid at realising the potential of his own castration, he substitutes the female body for the penis. The development of sexuality – prohibition on child's maternal object for the boy and desire for the paternal penis in the girl child – is thus derived from the fear of loss. This taboo origin story – the Oedipus complex (a contextualised “story” the child tells itself) – is disavowed and veiled in the fetish as a perversion. See the chapter “Infantile Sexuality” in Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) (Perseus Books: London, 2000). Contrary to Freud, Abraham and Torok contend that fetishism is the result of the child's introjection (its first introjections) and, therefore, not necessarily about the taboo of “incest” but of “the excessive prolongation of mothering, the continuance beyond what is necessary of the mother-child circuit of the conservation instinct.” They continue, “the universality of the Oedipus complex finds its explanation in the equally universal fact that human beings come from a maternal Envelope and, by the introjection of the social order, constitute their own sexualised Envelope.” Importantly, where loss is too big for the subject to handle, the introjective mechanism is replaced by one of incorporation. “The Conceptual Renewal of Psychoanalysis” in Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel p.97

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“Preservative repression” A question of preservation links the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio with work on trauma and loss by Abraham and Torok insofar as preservation is considered a mechanism of failed mourning (and introjection) in their theory. As their terminology for the mechanism of this particular psychosis – “preservative repression” – would suggest, preservation itself is symptomatic of encryption as a response to loss. For Abraham and Torok, “preservation” is the subject's fantasy that the object it fears losing can be saved (and thus can save the subject from breakdown). As opposed to a more practical “reality” which it masks, Abraham and Torok argue that fantasy “can be defined as all those representations, beliefs, or bodily states that gravitate towards the opposite effect, that is, the preservation of the status quo.”17 The preservation of space and the preservation of the subject of psychoanalysis both suggest a type of protection or defence against changes: in psychoanalytic terms, a reaction-formation. In the example of the house at Springs, materials are treated, maintained or preserved in order to withstand the ravages of time. In this they undergo an surreptitious transformation as new materials are brought in to replace and shore up the structure. The studio-barn and house, for example, have been underpinned to prevent subsidence; their external walls have been insulated and re-clad – their skin replaced as in a reverse taxidermy; climatecontrolling apparatus ensure that air temperature and water content are maintained at a level perfectly detrimental to the multiplication of bacteria and fungal spores; and firesuppression systems further protect the House and Studio's materials from real or imagined losses that threaten. In psychoanalytic terms, the fantasy of preservation functions in the formation of a crypt: as a secret, the operations of fantasy are encrypted and hidden from the subject; as a space, the fantastically produced object exists in a

17 Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia,” p.125.

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separate realm within but kept apart from the subject's ego. Considering the status of the House and Studio within artistic discourse – as peripheral material, the remains of the practice of painting – is the crypt a comforting fantasy that the lost object of desire is still available?18 According to the cryptic functions of Abraham and Torok's theory, the House and Studio's very monumentality – its status as a memorial – is itself symptomatic of a (as yet undefined) subject's traumatic loss. Torok claims: Installed in place of the lost object, the incorporated object continues to recall the fact that something else was lost: the desires quelled by repression. Like a commemorative monument, the incorporated object betokens the place, the date and the circumstances in which desires were banished from introjection: they stand like tombs in the life of the ego.19

The Pollock-Krasner House and Studio is materialised (it has been made to matter) “in place of the lost object” that its presentation encourages the viewer to perceive as the deceased artists: though other losses – the art object, the event of art-making – are implicated, they are felt but hidden. This monumental preservation of the House and Studio functions through fantasy, as a fictional narrative of death, absence and mourning revolving around Krasner's life and death. Visiting the site, as I did in 2010, the House and Studio conspire to solicit an empathic response through a suggestive proximity to Krasner and her absence. The site accentuates solemnity in the manner in which this absence or loss of its former inhabitant is portrayed; it exudes, it could be said, a tomb-like stillness. Rooms are set up as if the occupants have just left and viewers are left to wander through the space as Pollock and Krasner would have. The kitchen is a working space. Krasner's ashtray sits next to her favourite armchair and in reaching distance of the phone – just how she like it [Fig. 29]. Her bedroom is made up as she left it, replete with ornaments, collected shells and photographs [Fig. 30]. In this way, within the House and Studio Krasner's 18 This designation may also relate to the idea of the maternal body. 19 Torok “The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse” in Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, p.114

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absence becomes a figure for other losses. Her absence, via death, becomes an alibi for other, more furtive, repressive preservations – for example, the loss of the event or product of painting practices. However, it is also Krasner's personal losses that the site sketches out in its narrative of melancholia. Krasner's lonely lifelong widowhood after Pollock's death in 1956 is part of the mythology espoused by the site. At the PollockKrasner House and Studio she becomes a figure of perpetual widowhood – an incomplete mourning that is resolutely melancholic.

Krasner's image Lee Krasner's position on the peripheries of the story of Abstract Expressionism form part of her personal legend.20 Despite her achievements, her fate was, perhaps, to be overshadowed by her more celebrated husband.21 However, while on her own terms she may have been overlooked, her marriage ensured she nevertheless remained at the centre of the art world. Krasner's melancholic widowhood (which takes the House and Studio as its backdrop and the studio-view as its form) makes her a perfect subject for analysis in terms of Abraham and Torok's cryptic incorporation and a surprising (and 20 Krasner could be bitter about how her work has been critically received. In 1977, on being asked whether it felt good to be recognised finally as one of the leading exponents of Abstract Expressionism, Krasner answered: “No, it doesn’t make me feel great. It’s thirty years late. Too bad it didn’t happen thirty years ago. It would have been of help then. But I have had obstacles and I have dealt with them. And I have come through.” Krasner in Eleanor C. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (Da Capo Press: New York, 2000) p.100. Similarly, Krasner stated in conversation: “Any woman artist who says there is no discrimination against women in the art world should have her face slapped.” Krasner quoted in Cindy Nemser, Forum: Women and Art (1971). 21 The “femininity” of Krasner's imagery was discussed during the sixties and seventies as feminist art critics attempted to reclaim the artist as a lost, overlooked icon. Nemser, for instance, notes Krasner's “matriarchal motifs” Nemser, “In Her Own Image.” Feminist Art Journal 3 #1 (spring 1974) 11-18] Krasner's “recuperation” as a feminist icon during the latter years of her life was met with ambivalence by the artist herself. For instance, in Miriam Schapiro's Art: A Woman's Sensibility (1975), Krasner states regarding her painting: “I try to merge the organic with the abstract – whether that means male and female, spirit and matter […] are questions I have not defined as yet.” Similarly: “Q: Do you think there is a shared female artistic sensibility in the work of female artists? And how would you describe it or dismiss it? Krasner: In short my answer is NO and I feel that I would dismiss the question because for me there is no difference.” Krasner in Schapiro, “Unskirting the Issue” Art-Rite 5 (Spring 1974) pp.6-7.

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potentially problematic) corollary to the preserving of the House and Studio. A specific image portrayed of Krasner, as widow, is perpetuated at the site and through photographs taken there in order to preserve Pollock's authority. Thus the supplementary role Krasner is forced to play out – as depicted in images, or in written accounts – in the House and Studio's proximity has a subversive agency. This occurs in terms of the equivocacy engendered when considering the construction of Krasner's widow-role as a cryptic incorporation of Pollock's authority and is played in the service of another, truly melancholic, subject – which, I will argue, is the “Art Establishment.” One feature of Krasner's mythology, repeatedly returned to, is her status as a wife and as a widow.22 Despite (somewhat unfairly) laying the blame with Krasner for public perceptions based on mass-media accounts of her marriage and her husband's fame, Anne Wagner provides an illuminating anecdote regarding an encounter with the press in turning to a report filed by Burton Roueché's as “Talk of the Town” in the The New Yorker (1950). The journalist writes of his visit to Springs: We improved on a shining weekend on Eastern Long Island by paying a call on Jackson Pollock… Pollock, a bald, rugged, somewhat puzzled-looking man of thirty-eight, received us in the kitchen, where he was breakfasting on a cigarette and cup of coffee and drowsily watching his wife, the former Lee Krasner, a slim, auburn-haired young woman who is also an artist as she bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly.23

Wagner participates in the construction of Krasner as Pollock's wife “obligingly bent over the stove, modernist anxieties on the back-burner” exemplifying this as the detrimental implications of her marriage on her career.24 For Wagner, Krasner's naïve faith in her own artistic practice's merits meant she was too willing to play the wife in this instance. Though Wagner's holding of Krasner as responsible for the misogyny of 22 For an example of this particular trope in Krasner's mythology, Françoise S. Puniello and Halina Rusak write: “Perhaps, her standing in the art world was undermined by the fact that she was a wife. A single woman is an entity, but a married woman becomes an appendix. Whatever the reason, Krasner made a conscious choice to support Pollock either out of her affection for the man, or out of her desire to nurture and artistic genius.” Puniello and Rusak, Abstract Expressionist Women Painters (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1996) p.232 23 Anne M. Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe (University of California Press: Berkeley and London, 1998) p.122. 24 Wagner, Three Artists, p.123.

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1950s culture is obviously problematic, she does pinpoint the violence done to Krasner's artistic credibility through containment in a domestic sphere (whether this was “ironised” by Krasner or not) or in the heterosexualised paradigm in which Krasner's and Pollock's image was circulated as exemplar at the time.25 In the retrospective accounts that construct this space as Krasner's tender memorial to her husband, she is responsible for another act of preserving: the preservation of the House and Studio as a whole. Both as wife and widow she began the process of preserving its materiality by refusing to throw out Pollock studio materials after his death; and this has continued posthumously according to the dictates of her will – including the conservation of her materials [Fig. 31].26 Like the image cooked-up in collaboration with the New Yorker journalist (who did not seem to share her “irony”), Krasner's implication in this preservation is part conscious, part accidental and with unintended consequences. The preserving of fruit for the notepads of the New Yorker journalists figures Krasner in a role palatable to its readership – that of a wife. In her tentative preservation of her husband's legacy post-1956, Krasner enacts (unwittingly?) the role of widow in photographs, on film and in written accounts; as such, she is continually framed by the site in terms of her marriage. These mechanisms reiterate and institutionalise a particular version of heterosexuality. The legibility of Krasner's figuring in the studio relies on this heterosexuality – as wife and widow, and one half of a male-female pairing. To what extent is this (sexualised) framing by the house and studio detrimental to her image? How exactly is her image gendered by/in this space? And is this domestic framing a type of violence?27 25 See also Pat Mainardi on “The Politics of Housework” (1970). Only ten years later, Martha Rosler's performance piece, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) was able to brilliantly satirise the violence of domestic containment: kitchen utensils are used one after another to puncture the lie of cosydomesticity. 26 The studio-barn, for instance, contains many items of Pollock's artist materials. The north-facing interior wall is given over to a display of paint tins and encrusted brushes in a long display-case. 27 The term “domestic violence” in regard to philosophy and architecture is Mark Wigley's from The Architecture of Deconstruction (1995). Wigley's sense of violence is based on Derridean

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deconstruction where, for instance, “to be excluded is to be subject to a certain domestic violence that is both organised and veiled by metaphysics.” Wigley, Derrida's Haunt, p.107.

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To answer these questions necessitates turning to the depiction of Krasner's marriage and mythic widowhood as it was crafted (for her and, to some extent, by her) on film. In photographs taken in and around Springs, this widowhood is authored in collaboration with photographers in studio-based portraits. Though she only used the studio-barn after his death, her relationship to this space is as important to her image as it is to Pollock's.28 However, the ambiguous connotations codified in these images are open to interpretation. Pre-1956, one facet of Krasner's image is the wifely-role that Wagner describes. For example, her domesticity is played on in the image of her making jam. This tame, matrimonial norm was also extended to her husband and photographs of the couple around Springs (by, for instance, Wilfred Zogbaum) codify what Gavin Butt has criticised as “a heterosexual dynamic of artist and wife.”29 Krasner's appearance in the studio, pre-1956, is as support or bystander to the all-action event of painting [Fig. 32]. However, running counter to these claims, Krasner was also pictured in her own studio [Fig. 33] – the north-facing bedroom of the Springs house – on the same day (note the dress, slippers and hair), in a similar pensive pose, but on her own terms. According to the familiar narrative, a bereaved and shell-shocked Krasner moved her studio into the barn after Pollock's violent death in the summer of 1956 after which interest in both artists began to rise. Constructions of the figure in studio imagery at this time begin to produce the artist as a widow. Taken together with the texts that they accompany, photographs of this period of bereavement accentuate Krasner's suffering – dispossession or studio-bound melancholia being, as Mark Gotlieb has pinpointed, a romanticised trope of studio-view imagery. Here, in Krasner's case, this sadness is given a new twist. Waintrub Budd's photograph [Fig. 34], from the year of

28 As I will turn to in the next chapter, the studio at Springs is fundamental to the Pollock's image or mythology. 29 Butt contends, among others, that this “representational logic” secures his masculinity in its insistence on its conventional gender polarities. Butt, Between Me and You, p.45.

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Pollock's accident, show Krasner surrounded (almost overwhelmed) by a mixture of her paintings and his, her face is drawn and weary, the epitome of melancholia: lost, mute and still. Two years later, in 1958 Namuth returned to the House and photographed an equally pensive and drawn Krasner. She is again dwarfed by the paintings which bear down on her [Fig. 35]. To a certain extent, Pollock haunts the frame of these photographs: in the familiarity of the studio she is pictured in; in the direct reference to his infamous drip technique – in paintings and in the splashed surroundings; and, in the case of the Berezov photograph, by the appearance of his (equally mournful-looking) dog, Gyp [Fig. 36]. This melancholic characterisation jars with a critical response to Krasner's paintings. Moving on, stylistically, from the formal tightness of her “little paintings” of the early 1950s (mimetically related, by some scholars, to the “claustrophobic” quarters of the bedroom in which she worked), the move to the studio has been claimed, similarly, to have spurred larger, more gestural work.30 According to Eleanor Munro, Krasner was “freed,” “impelled by emotional pressure and free to express it.”31 Munro ignores the large size of Krasner's bedroom-studio (and paintings produced there pre-1956) and its enviable north light and atmosphere (the studio-barn was always either freezing or stiflingly hot) in imagining the “freedom” afforded by the larger studio. Furthermore, while, on the one hand, Krasner may be liberated by her move into the studio and by the ending of her marriage, on the other hand, she is trapped by its framing of her in terms of her deceased husband. By the beginning of the sixties, Pollock's studio-barn has become a favoured 30 “After Pollock’s death, Krasner took over his studio. The physical space that she inherited made a difference, her gesture became uninhibited, her colors became vivid, and her paintings increased in size.” Puniello, Abstract Expressionist Women Painters, p.232 31 “Sometime in 1957, Lee Krasner, who until then had worked in a small upstairs bedroom of the house she had shared with Jackson Pollock, moved her paints out to the barn that had been his studio until his death the year before, and took it over. Those steps changed her life. Freed for the big gesture, impelled by emotional pressure and now on her own to express it, she set off upon a poignant cycle of enormous, colourful paintings on the theme of regeneration (“Earth”, “Green”, “Springbeat”, “The Seasons”...). And then, in that workspace still apparently full of ghosts, she turned back to confront their shadows, one could say, hand to hand.” Munro, “Krasner in the Sixties: Free for the Big Gesture.” Art/World (Feb 16-March16, 1979) p.1

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location for Krasner's widowhood. Studio-visits to Springs variously described Krasner, during this period, as adversarial: a characterisation that Paul de Vries photograph seems to convey [Fig. 37]. Visitors to the studio invariably found Krasner to be a combative interviewee and this annoyance is regularly repeated on film.32 Sympathetic accounts of Krasner's challenging demeanour tend to put this down to the adversity she faced in her personal life (Pollock's death) or in supposed indifference toward her work and career.33 Resplendent in full (saturated) colour, Namuth's imposing portrait of Krasner in the barn [Fig. 6] poses her, hand on hip, in stark contrast to her image in 1951. Rather than a passive observer, she is now central to the image – in terms of subject and composition. Caroline Jones (1994) finds a “triumphant” quality in Namuth's portrait since, she argues, Krasner is configured as a conquering heroine.34 However, in mastering the studio she was, supposedly, excluded from while her husband was alive, he is implicated in her triumph. Pollock, therefore, frames Krasner's liberation, overshadowing it. Thus it continues to be Pollock's fate to haunt the frame, encrypted in photographs located in the Springs studio. Away from the studio-barn Krasner is figured altogether differently. Returning to Namuth's image of 1951 [Fig. 33], though taken on the same day, Krasner takes a more confident pose in her own studio as opposed to his. Krasner eventually moved back to Manhattan, yet, she kept the Springs house on. On her own turf, Krasner is framed 32 See, for instance, the interviews listed in n.17 and 18. Video interviews of the artist similarly find her a stubborn and, at times, rancorous interviewee. See, for example, Krasner's cantankerous performance in interview with Barbara Rose, Lee Krasner: The Long View (1978). 33 The “overcoming of adversity” is another salient feature of this artist's mythology. See, Marc Gotlieb (2005) on this as a nineteenth century romantic trope. It is interesting to note that adversity when applied to Jackson Pollock takes on the character of heroism – a case, it would seem, where “genius is a mortal condition” – the myth of the melancholic genius dying an early violent death – whereas, for his wife and widow, adversity connotes victimhood. His glamorous “suicide” contrasts starkly with Krasner's career-suicide. 34 Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio p.38. Caroline Jones is a proponent of the theory that the preservation of the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio has conspired to diminish Krasner's place in the studio. The “balance of power” shifted after her death, according to this line, resulting in a “marginalisation of Krasner's presence in the history of the space.” Though Jones acknowledges Krasner's role in the preservation of the space, for reasons presumably of brevity, her enquiry ends there. Machine in the Studio, 1996: p.38; p.385 n.121.

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differently.35 The marriage that the studio-barn tended to connote ease their grip on her image, while not disappearing altogether. Hardly recognisable (suggesting perhaps the importance to her career and image of Pollock and Springs) Ray Eames's photographs of Krasner in her New York studio (1972) contrast strongly with earlier poses [Fig. 38]. Eames concentrates the camera's focus on a photographic subject engrossed in the processes of making. The camera lingers on her wonderfully fluid hands. These photographs are, nevertheless, seldom seen, perhaps because they contradict the mythic image of “Krasner” as the “Art Widow.”

The Art Widow The images above visualise Krasner's melancholic widowhood; elsewhere, written accounts began to take note of her role in the handling of Pollock's legacy. After his death, Krasner inherited legal responsibilities (and powers) with regard to her husband's estate, including managing his collected work and the public dissemination of it.36 Harold Rosenberg found Krasner's role too powerful and influential in terms that might be argued to conform to a misogyny of the time. Ignoring her status as an artist, Rosenberg wrote in 1965, for Esquire magazine a scathing piece on the “non-artist” element of the New York “art establishment,” in which he singles out for attention “Mrs. Jackson Pollock” or, as he re-names her, “The Art-Widow.”37 Wary of her powers, 35 Krasner recalls: “After Pollock’s death I came back to New York, rented an apartment and then abandoned it after two years. I couldn’t stand it. So I went back out to Springs. Then, at a point during that time, I took over the barn. There was no point in letting it stand empty. Meanwhile I had the difficulty of also trying to reestablish myself in New York. I couldn’t live in the country all the time alone. So I had to try also to get back into New YORK.” Eleanor C. Munro, Originals: American Women Artists (Da Capo Press: New York, 2000) p.116 36 For details of this legal role see Magda Salveson and Diane Cousineau (eds.) Artist's Estates: Reputations in Trust (Rutgers University Press: New Jersey, 2005). 37 When Rosenberg does mention her status as an artist “in her own right” it is made clear that this has no bearing on her importance in the art world. Rosenberg, Harold, “The Art Establishment.” Esquire 62 (January 1965): 43-46, 114. Krasner later articulated her general displeasure with Rosenberg: “I was put together with the wives, and when Rosenberg wrote his article many years ago, that the widow has become the most powerful influence, I don'e know, powerful something in the art word

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[sic]. To date, a lot of the widows are acting it out. He never acknowledged me as a painter, but as a widow, I was acknowledged. And, in fact, whenever he mentioned me at all following Pollock's death, he would always say Lee Krasner, the widow of Jackson Pollock, as if I needed that handle.” Krasner in Wagner, Three Artists, p.127

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Rosenberg claims: [The Art-Widow] is also in a position to authenticate or reject unsigned paintings or drawings in the hands of others. Finally, she is the official source of the artist's life story, as well as the private interpretation of that story. The result is that she is courted and her views heeded by dealers, collectors, curators, historians, publishers, to say nothing of lawyers and tax specialists. It is hard to think of anyone in the Establishment who exceeds the widow in the number of powers concentrated in the hands of a single person.38

Seemingly aggrieved with the power that she wielded, Rosenberg paints Krasner as an uppity imposter. She is castigated for increasing the prices of modern art across the board due to her shrewd business sense and canny dealership – which, for the establishment the article celebrates, is surely a good thing. By all accounts, Krasner did not enjoy her new role, as she felt her fate to divide her time between her own practice and, in her own words, “art-widow duties” which was to her detriment.39 These duties were expected of Krasner, as a widow and by an establishment that required the perpetuation of the artist's authority. This Art-Widow role is contextualised by the absent husband. In the photographs, he provides the context through which she becomes culturally visible – “Pollock” haunts the frame, his spectral presence is glimpsed in the Springs studio. Legally, his legacy is authorised in speaking through the Art-Widow. It is rare for women in western culture to be the object of mourning.40 Rather, the role of mourner (not mourned) has been, as Janet Wolff notes, one amongst a narrow set of options for women in modernity.41 While Krasner's legibility as an artist in the period's critical milieu was continually fraught, her status as a widow was readily visualised. As Wolff 38 Rosenberg, “The Art Establishment,” p.44 39 Krasner recalls only having time to paint after dark in the immediate years after Pollock's death, the daylight hours were taken up solely with “widow” duties. Gabor, Einstein's Wife, p.82. 40 Noting the rarity of women in western culture to be the object of mourning, Elisa Marder states: “the history of western culture is saturated, inundated, drenched with the tears of mourning women […] and, with very few exceptions […] the most famous mourning women are those who mourn for men.” Elissa Marder, “The Sex of Death in the Maternal Crypt” in The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (Fordham University Press, New York, 2012) 41 Janet Wolff, “The Feminine in Modern Art: Benjamin, Simmel and the Gender of Modernity” in Theory, Culture and Society, 2000, Vol. 17 (6) p.37.

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describes elsewhere, through the example of Charles Baudelaire's poetic response to a widow glimpsed briefly on the streets of Paris (Á une passante), the widow becomes an allegory of modernity and never a maker of allegories.42 This presents obvious problem for creative women in that it returns to a familiar role for women in art as muse to the act of creativity. The widow is always supplementary; she plays a supporting role (as mourner) to the absent husband's lead (as mourned or memorialised). Though Krasner was, by all accounts, devastated by her bereavement and mourned her partner's loss, the role of melancholic Art-Widow is something mapped onto the figure of Krasner from elsewhere. Anxiously-felt losses – of his authority, the key to the meaning of his paintings, his abstractly expressed thoughts – require a perpetual mourning. To give one example, the artworks' economic functioning requires this because to relinquish desire for the lost object (the artist) would be to admit that loss and, as per “normal” mourning, move on to a new object of desire. For the artist's legacy to survive, in economic terms, this is not an option. This melancholia – as an elongated, “pathological” version of mourning – is projected onto the figure of Krasner, materialised as a corporeal form of melancholia or “crypting” of the lost object in an attempt to preserve it in a process that Abraham and Torok describe as “incorporation.” Drawing on Abraham and Torok's terminology, we might consider the ArtWidow, that Krasner was characterised as, as representing a cryptic incorporation of “Pollock.” Projected onto the image of Krasner, the Art-Widow maintains (as a livingdead) the deceased husband. In a way similar to the preservation of the house and studio, this is only a fiction that time has been stilled; that the past is maintained as the past. The Art-Widow's incorporation is a fantasy or performance of the stilling of time 42 Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity” in Theory, Culture & Society, November 1985, Vol. 2 (3) pp. 37-46

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as the prevention of its loss. But it is not Krasner herself that incorporated Pollock in this way; that characterisation came from elsewhere. Krasner's image signifies the encrypted lost object – an image crafted in such a way as to presence the lost object that haunts the frame of the studio in images of her taken there. In this way, rather than thinking of the question of Krasner's occupation of the studio, we could think of the way the studio's significations are made to inhabit her. The Art-Widow is the crypt rather than the encryptor. And Krasner was forced to play this role by a subject, riven with loss, afraid to lose its loved object – the authorising artist, “Pollock.” The nature of these encrypted losses – covertly comforted by the image of the studio and the Art-Widow – both point to the subject of these losses being the institutions of art: the museum, the academy and the art market. Thus these cryptic entities both represent an institutionalised version of artistic practice. The preservation of the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio functions as a reaction-formation to maintain the material remains of ephemeral studio habits. In psychoanalytic terms, the ephemerality of art-making (an event of increasing importance post-1945) means that the subject is unable to cathect its desires (to introject them) before the object's loss. The impossibility of saving the event impels the subject to fantasise its preservation through diverting desire to another object, the site of the event. This is duly encrypted, hidden from both outside observer and the subject itself; yet, this encryption haunts the subject. Similarly, Krasner's ventriloquistic (or prosopopoeaic) enactment of “Pollock” via the image of her widowhood is undertaken, in Rosenberg's account, for the Establishment for whom she performs a legal function as substitute authority over Pollock's legacy.43 This was to prove a difficulty for the artist as her career after Pollock revolved around

43 Prosopopoeia is the literary attribution of a face or name to what is absent. It is, as Jonathan Flatley observes the “fiction of a voice beyond the grave.” Flatley, “Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia” in Doyle, Flatley and Muñoz (eds.) POP OUT: Queer Warhol (1996) p.106-7.

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her husband and her role as his mouth-piece. The repressive preservation of loss in the cryptic figure of the Art-Widow this time marks this “Establishment's” or art-world's anxious loss of the authorial artist “Pollock.” Does the preservation of the studio then also mark out an unspeakable desire (contra emergent theoretical in the latter half of the twentieth century) to perpetuate modernist versions of art-making? Secreting it inside “herself,” Krasner's corporeal form en-frames her deceased husband. This reading, based on Abraham and Torok's “cryptic incorporation” contrasts with the view that Pollock's presence haunts her image in the Springs studio. As the supposed agential authority that speaks through Krasner – configured as a conduit for his voice – this version of “Pollock” is brought into the realm of fantasy by the act of psychic incorporation which is the subject's fantasy of the loved object's preservation in its absence. The comforting fantasy that Pollock can still authorise post-mortem relies on his widow's ability to speak on his behalf. This authorial voice is ventriloquised from within Krasner, rather than, necessarily, framing her – as is suggested in a discourse of Krasner's eventual “triumphant” mastery of the studio and her overshadowing by her husband. Conversely, a suggestion that, in certain circumstances, Pollock's voice comes from Krasner is supported in reports of his legendary muteness; the co-mixing of each's authority is similarly corroborated by recorded instances where Krasner attributed her own paintings to him.44 “Pollock” – supposedly the agency who speaks through Krasner configured as a conduit – is brought into the realm of fantasy (incorporation is the subject's fantasy of the loved objects preservation in its absence). The fantasy that Pollock can still authorise post-mortem relies on his widow's speech, and thus we might argue that, the Art-Widow's ventriloquism of “Pollock's” voice of authority actually comes from within herself though it supposedly frames her. The strict “masculinity” of the voice that speaks through Krasner is called into question by its being spoken 44 See Wagner, Three Women, p.154

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through the Art-Widow – which also compromises her “femininity.” As a spatialised concept, Abraham and Torok's theory of melancholia and its symptomatic “cryptic incorporation” is seemingly queer. As Elizabeth Freeman notes in regard to the queerness of this pathological form of mourning: “it keeps the past as past, in a crypt imperfectly sealed off from the present, in a psyche with unpredictable leakages, in a body semiotically and sensually at productive odds with itself.”45 The cryptic body that Freeman describes is suggestive of the melancholic pathway that Butler describes in the incorporation of the child's same-sex love for the parent, disavowed, lost, mourned and introjected only to reappear as a result of its cryptic leakage in performances of gender.46 Enforced by external pressures, beyond Krasner's control, the Art-Widow (an image mapped onto the artist) is denied a complete mourning, she melancholically encrypts her “husband.” However, in Freeman's terms, the imperfection of the crypt's sealing – the queerness of the psyche and body it makes visible – is its undoing. The Art-Widow myth is similarly porous. If it were perfectly sealed (if that were at all possible) the fiction of the Art-Widow's ability to act as “Pollock's” mouth-piece would be unimpeachable; there would be no disjoint between the role Krasner was forced to play, and the way she wanted her career to go, away from her “duties.” But this “crypt” leaks: Krasner's mythology – as purported by this crypt – cannot be maintained. On closer inspection the image, crafted for Krasner in the studio's location, queers its privileging of a series of terms upon which the heterosexualised paradigm of the studio-view revolves; the distinctions it describes between encryptor/encrypted, framing/enframed, mourner/mourned, all begin to fail, and the gap between them becomes visible. Where the Art-Widow's is concerned, its mythic reliance on the normativity of its image of the Pollock-Krasner marriage is also challenged. 45 Freeman, Time Binds, p.119. 46 Butler, Gender Trouble, p.93-94

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Moreover, the “artist and wife” paradigm is similarly challenged. The queerness of the Art Widow narrative is underlined if we consider that the privileged masculinity of the deceased husband relies for its authority on the female body it encrypts and speaks through. Despite its insistence on a representational logic of heterosexuality, normative currents of desire, sex and gender do not line up in this male-female pairing. And yet, to a certain degree, the ill-fit of the Art-Widow narrative, its naturalisation in Krasner's image as a bereaved wife, smooth over the cracks in its construction. However, the gaps in this cryptic facade can indicate the source of the anxieties prompting its “preservative repression” of loss. Somewhat dramatically, earlier in this chapter, the question was posed: if the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio is a crypt, who, or what (if not Krasner or Pollock) has it interred? In tracing the symptoms of a “preservative repression” of unbearable loss, two (psychotic) cases of cryptic incorporation occur around Krasner's studio habits. Firstly, the preservation of the Springs site for a commemorative and monumental function bears relations to what David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (2003) consider to be one of the “numerous material practices by which loss is melancholically materialised in the social and cultural realms and the political and aesthetic domains.”47 The loss of the artists and the fantasy of their continued present at this site is a feature of its presentation of stilled time. Secondly, the Art-Widow role Krasner enacted after 1956 could be described, in one sense, as a melancholic incorporation of “Pollock.” This fantasy that his authority is preserved is offered up in photographs and written accounts as Krasner's role as the Art-Widow. Pollock is maintained, purposively as living-dead, under her control; she is licensed to speak for him (a situation confused by the conflation of “speaking for” and “spoken through”). 47 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California Press: Berkeley; London, 2003) p.5.

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Designating both the site's studio and Art-Widow as crypts, in this way, demands a determination of which objects the cryptic function can be claimed to anxiously preserve. Though we might, along Freudian lines, consider traumatic loss to refer to either bodies, spaces or ideals, the cryptic nature of the mechanisms of incorporation conspire to make this identification difficult.48 Back in the Pollock-Krasner Studio, the re-direction of desire onto a replacement object – the fetishised floorboards – belies an anxiety at the loss of the creative entity not the artists's bodies themselves. Thus the absences the site traces are the artist's art objects and the event of painting (and the impossibility of its replay). In our second cryptic case, the Art-Widow, like the Studio, relies on confusion in order to encrypt. Two entities – Krasner and the Art-Widow – map onto each other as two sides of the same subject; these diverge, however, in regard to their lost object: the husband, or the authority of the artist-husband. Krasner's mythology is based on this encryption of her image. Krasner's Art-Widow image is subsequently incorporated cryptically in the House and Studio's preservation after her death. The preservation of the site encrypts both “Pollock” and the Art-Widow (as already a melancholic encryption of him). Thus, representing a challenge to the analysis of losses at the site, “her” secret is, as encrypted twice over (in “herself” and then in the Studio), is harder to decrypt.49 And if the Art-Widow's secret thus becomes unspeakable, the silence within the object she encrypt is more deeply buried – unthinkably, 48 According to Freud, mourning represents “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty or an ideal.” Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory, trans. Joan Rivière, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books 1963) p.164-166. Eng and Kazanjian respond to Freud in dividing their book into “Bodily Remains,” “Spatial Remains,” and “Ideal Remains.” See Eng and Kazanjian, Loss (2003). 49 The House and Studio are crypts for the (already cryptic) Art-Widow and her cryptic incorporation of “Pollock.” This “trans-generational haunting” may explain the feeling that the emptiness felt at the site may not be just the deceased artists. In Abraham and Torok's work on the “phantom,” the passing on of cryptic silences are not the passing on of their secret. See Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom” in The Shell and the Kernel pp.166-171. So for the subject's encryption of “Pollock” in the Art Widow, the “psychic tear” the loss of authority represents for the institutions of art are only passed on as unthinkable (unknowable) absence in the cryptic incorporation the House and Studio's preservation represents.

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unknowably distant.

Unspeakable desire

Before moving on to the next chapter's subject of Pollock and the particular myths that frame him via visualisations of his studio-habits around Springs, I conclude in discussing what this chapter's definition of Springs and the Art-Widow as cryptic may indicate. Though Krasner and Pollock's occupations of the Springs site are irrevocably intertwined, their studio habits were infinitely disparate – both in terms of their inhabitation of the site and in the artistic personas they performed there. The unspeakable losses that produce a preservative repressive response demand some further definition. Whose loss might be implicated here? And how is this enforced and fantastical containment of loss – a distasteful secret disavowed by mechanisms of cryptic incorporation – connected to the insistence on a particular heteronormative image of Krasner's occupation of the Springs studio as either wife or widow? The Springs site is a space of loss and absence: it is nominated as a memorial, its former occupants are long deceased; the valuable art objects made here are gone too, available now only in their absence traced in the studio's floorboards and walls; and the unrepeatable acts through which they were made belong to the past. Yet, in order to maintain the functioning of the art market, the gallery system, and certain forms of modernist criticism, those entities most valued by these institutions must continue to circulate. The artist's death presents a problem; the production of new valuable objects ceases, the artist's authorial presence is placed in a precarious position. Thus, an anxious response results through which loss is repressed. Pollock's authority is fantastically preserved in his cryptic incorporation in the form of the Art-Widow. The preservation, at

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great expense, of the artist's home and studio, after her death, incorporates the material remains of her practice and his; not as “art” but as supplementary matter. Both these incorporations constitute a redrawing of shifting boundaries, designating matter as inside and outside of discourse, and this material's peripheral status (as supplementary) brings Abraham and Torok's discussion of psychic topography and the “intrapsychic crypt” into close conversation with Derrida's deconstruction of the frame in Truth in Painting (1987). In focussing on the frame (or parergon) as conceived in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), Derrida shows the institutionallyforced placing of parergonal “things” as extrinsic – designating material as peripheral, supportive and supplementary, as in a picture's frame – to be, paradoxically, an exercise in containment. By being placed “outside” what is properly understood to be the artwork, frames are, by the very act of making space for objects, bringing inside that which is extrinsic to proper discourse. In this sense, Kantian aesthetic's distinct framing of inside (ergon) and outside (parergon) functions to exclude and dictate what is proper to art. The relevance of Derrida's parergon to this argument is in the close conformity of its convoluted spatiality to the crypt; a point considered by him in his introduction to Abraham and Torok's The Wolf-Man's Magic Words: A Cryptonymy (1986).50 As encrypted objects, the preserved Springs site and the image of the Art-Widow could be considered, as Derrida does in his reading of preservative repression, as “built by violence.”51 This “violence” exists, for Derrida, in the enforced expulsion of material to a discursive outside that remains internal to the discourse, and so, a form of control or suppression; that is, to paraphrase him, “outcast outside inside the inside.”52 50 In reference, specifically, to Abraham and Torok's “crypt” as a framing-device, Derrida finds in it a space whose complex visuality, leaking boundaries, and inflected words mimic the alwayscompromised structural integrity of the parergonic frame. For a reference to the crypt see also “Cartouches,” a chapter in Derrida's The Truth in Painting (The University of Chicago Press: Chicago; London, 1987) 51 Jacques Derrida, “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok” in Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (1986) p.xv 52 Derrida, “Foreword: Fors,” p.xiv

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For an example of the effect the enforced movement across boundaries may have we could look to the damage done to Krasner's image and status by the New Yorker's domestication of her in imagining her as, solely, a wife and supplement to Pollock.53 But the same “violent” re-casting of Krasner the artist to a wifely role – forcing her outside as a frame – brings her, in Derrida's deconstructive account of the parergon and intrapsychic crypt, into the centre she supports; whose self-presence is, consequently, destabilised by the fact of her insertion (and the contingency this implies). The convoluted codes enframed in photographs of the Art-Widow similarly undermine the coherence of the artistic figure it depicts. Namuth's 1967 photograph of Krasner, for example, codify her as wife/widow (and artist) by framing her with both “Pollock” and her “mastery” of a studio that is, crucially, his studio. However, the logic of this characterisation fails when, as has been shown, the Art-Widow is framed then, by “Pollock” from within – by that which she, as a crypt herself, contains. This spatial confusion, of a position both marginal and central, externally framed from within, leads to a sense of dislocation. Krasner's mythic image is the result of certain unspeakable secret losses its form encrypts. According to Abraham and Torok, the difference between mourning and melancholia (introjection and incorporation) is to be found in the distinction between the “mouth work” of eating and speaking. The digestive work of introjection is counterposed to a traumatised subject's malign “incorporation” resulting from losses that cannot be acknowledged. Suggestive of the way in which the Pollock-Krasner's entire estate has been memorialised in situ, they claim: “everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects a tomb inside the subject.”54 In this way, it could be considered that the 53 In the context of Derrida's Truth in Painting, Mark Wigley calls Derridean spacing “domestic violence.” Wigley, Derrida's Haunt, p.146-147 54 Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia” p. 126.

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subject of art, or the art world, swallows whole the Springs site, bringing it inside, and subsequently erecting it as a mausoleum (purportedly, as a National Monument, to its heroised lost objects). As a strategy of preservation, “swallowing” is set up in opposition to digestion – as analogous to the day-to-day, bit-by-bit, cathecting of one's own desires from the lost object. The inability to speak – to admit losses otherwise mourned in language – thus entreats the melancholic's empty mouth to regress to its prelinguistic function, as, literally, an opening to the digestive system.55 The mouth reverts, in Abraham and Torok's version of melancholia, to a “food-craving mouth” and “failing to feed itself on words to be exchanged with others, the mouth absorbs in fantasy all or part of a person – the genuine repository of what is now nameless.”56 With the ArtWidow mythology, the traumatised subject fantasises that the object – whose loss cannot be named – is swallowed whole and kept alive, secret and separate (inside yet outside) inside the subject in a cryptic space. This lost object might be “Pollock” or his embodied performance; in which case, it might be said, paraphrasing Peggy Phelan's warning on the desire to save what is irrevocably lost in performance, that the studio stands in, like an “illustrated corpse,” for what the subject most desires, the return of its beloved object, the artist. The perpetuation of modernist versions of art-making that this entails furthers my argument that, in general, the studio-view – regardless of what studio habits it might visualise – is readily subsumed into its paradigm. In this regard, Krasner's practice away from Springs is handily ignored in her casting as Art Widow. Derrida’s deconstruction of the Kantian censure on parergonic material demonstrates the potential for the canon’s repressive (and secretive) incorporation 55 “The crucial move from introjection (clearly rendered impossible) to incorporation is made when words fail to fill the subject’s void and hence an imaginary thing is inserted into the mouth in their place. […] We may conclude that, in the face of both the urgency and the impossibility of performing one type of mouth-work – speaking to someone about what we have lost – another type of mouthwork is utilised, one that is imaginary and equipped to deny the very existence of the problem.” Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia, p.129 56 Abraham and Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia, p.128

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within the subject as an outside (inside). Moreover, this institutional repression of desire for what it purportedly abhors – an intimate interest in its objects, rather than modernist disinterest – concurs with Derrida's statement that “the crypt is a vault of desire.”57 As with the violence of the parergon's “spacing,” the subject “contains” (forcibly) that which is disgusting to it but keeps it secret/separate in a cryptic space.58 The melancholic subject, dumbstruck by its confrontation with acute loss, finds this secret distasteful.59 Whilst mourning belongs to the realm of words, melancholia is unspeakable. To put this another way: mourning is aesthetic, melancholia anti-aesthetic. The anxiety of bereavement seems an unlikely place to find aesthetic pleasure; yet, mourning is considered as “negative pleasure” by both Kant and Derrida bringing it – while not quite into the category of beauty – into the purview of aesthetics.60 As Barthes Lover's Discourse describes, desire and anxiety are two sides of the same coin; the “amorous subject” is “swept away by the fear of danger, and injury, an abandonment, a revulsion – a sentiment he expresses under the name of anxiety.”61 The art world's anxious incorporative response to loss reveals it to be a subject riven with hidden desire. 57 Derrida, “Foreword: Fors,” p.xvii 58 Mark Wigley observes of incorporation: “Unable to simply expel the object, “the fantasy involves eating the object (through the mouth or otherwise) in order not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, in to the inside, into the pocket of a cyst.” [Derrida] The forbidden object is thrown up into some folds in the body’s limit, hidden in a space that is neither inside nor outside.” Wigley, Derrida’s Haunt, p.144 59 The material it swallows, as Derrida argues, is actually “thrown up” into some other fold of the body: “Let it be understood in all senses that what the word disgusting de-nominates is what one cannot resign oneself to mourn.” Derrida, “Economimesis”, Diacritics, Vol. 11, No.2, (Summer 1981) p.23 Derrida argues, implying in his phrase “de-nominates” what cannot be named. The disgusting is “insensible and un-intelligible, irrepresentable and unnameable, the absolute other of the system [of Kant’s aesthetics]” and thus art. 60 According to Kant there is an aesthetic dimension to a widow’s mourning, a “negative pleasure.” He states: “As we have often shown, an essential distinction lies between what pleases simply in the estimate formed of it and what gratifies (pleases in sensation). The latter is something which, unlike the former, we cannot demand from every one. […] it is readily explicable how even the gratification a person feels is capable of displeasing him (as the joy of a necessitous but good-natured individual on being made the heir of an affectionate but penurious father), or how deep pain may still give pleasure to the sufferer (as the sorrow of a widow over the death of her deserving husband) […].” Kant, The Critique of Judgement (Forgotten Books: London, 1969) §54 p. 149. In response to this Derrida notes: “In all these cases, whether or not they amount to the same thing, there is a negative pleasure or a negative of pleasure but still pleasure, and the work of mourning is consequently not absolutely blocked, impossible, excluded.” Derrida, “Economimesis”, p.22. 61 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (London: Vintage, 2002) p.29

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Reading Torok's later work on melancholia, Freeman suggests: the melancholic's entombed secret is not a loss at all; rather it is “an erotic effusion” repressed and mnemonically preserved […] In their later essay, Abraham and Torok claim that melancholic incorporation itself 'perpetuate[s] a clandestine pleasure,” a long-ago interrupted idyll of erotic contact with the lost object.62

Freeman's queer reading of Torok notes that part of melancholia is a manic revisitation of an inappropriate sexualised response from the past. This prompts me to consider, with reference to this chapter's melancholic subjects and their cryptic objects, that if a disavowed erotic encounter with the lost-loved object is suggested rather than an actual loss it is, perhaps, the disavowal of a desire, felt as a loss. Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990) that the “prohibition” of desire, where gender formation is concerned, is projected on the body's surface. Where the Art-Widow image is concerned this projection – of a desire “not abolished but preserved” – occurs on Krasner's body as it appears to master the Springs studio.63 If the subject whose melancholic response visualises the Art-Widow's image is taken to be the art-world (which I take to mean the art market, the gallery and modernist critical approaches), this would imply a cryptically-disavowed encounter has occurred. While this contention will form the argument of the next chapter – specifically in regard to the anxious response to (or desire for) Pollock's “dumb” body by modernist critical formations – it is enough to say, for now, that the shifting discourses of the latter twentieth century, particularly the (re)emergence of the body, entailed a response of a radical disavowal by modernist critics of the potential homoeroticism of an interest in the artist's body that strongly suggests Freeman's astute reading of Torok. This opens up the possibility, expanded on in the next chapter, that it is not particularly the artists' deaths that impel the 62 Freeman, Time Binds, p.119 63 Butler explain the melancholic encryption of “taboo” desire in mother-daughter relationships as fundamental for the formation of sexuality and gender. She argues: “[G]ender identity would be established through a refusal of loss that encrypts itself on the body […] As an antimetaphorical activity, incorporation literalises the loss on or in the body and so appears as the facticity of the body, the means by which the body comes to bear 'sex' as its literal truth.” Butler, Gender Trouble, p.68. Butler's use of cryptic incorporation is not as a response to actual loss but on the prohibition of desire.

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construction of the Pollock-Krasner's former home and studio as a memorial; rather it might be threats experienced by those institutional bodies as they react to theoretical or philosophical losses in the latter twentieth-century. Moreover, the increased visibility of the practicing artist and the responsive censure on the potential for same-sex desires to circulate in these may prompt mechanisms by which subjects seek to preserve themselves.

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3. Jackson Pollock Where does the frame take place. Does it take place. Where does it begin. Where does it end. What is its internal limit. Its external limit. – Jacques Derrida1

Shown here [Figs. 39-41] are three views of the same painting on glass made by Jackson Pollock in the autumn of 1950. In each photograph the artist's habitual method of mark-making distinguishes it – the dribbling of globs of paint from brushes or sticks flourished above the surface of the painting, gesticulation traced on this horizontal plane as those licks hit home. Unusually for the artist, the painting's support is glass rather than unprimed canvas. Unexpected too are the small objects glued into place by the enamel, oil or aluminium paint's pooled blotches. Nevertheless, Number 29 (1950) – as 1 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, p.63

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this painting became known on its accession into Pollock's body of work – is recognisably “a Pollock,” part of the corpus left behind after his accidental death, drunk behind the wheel, in a car accident in 1956. The first version of Number 29 [Fig. 39] is taken from the O'Connor and Thaw Catalogue Raisonné (1978). It appears as No. 1036 in Volume 4 of the catalogue, under “Other Works” and the sub-section “Collage.” O'Connor and Thaw's commentary notes that: The creation of this work is recorded in the second half of a 16mm color film produced by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg in 1950-1. The film Jackson Pollock, is narrated by the artist, with music by Morton Feldman, and was released in 1951 (running time 10 minutes.)

The second photographic appearance of the painting frames Number 29 differently [Fig. 40]. Here, it is seen in a still from the Namuth-Falkenberg film – or rather in out-takes from the film – propped up on the concrete footings on which it was painted in the back yard of the Pollock-Krasner place in Springs. Though framed by the filmic aspect through which it is seen, the glass itself is unframed, unceremoniously held by, on the left, Pollock and another anonymous hand on the right: probably Falkenberg, or maybe Krasner. More than unframed this view of Number 29 never made it into the final cut of the Naumth-Falkenberg film. It is extrinsic to the film, off-frame. This appearance contrasts with the third view of the same painting [Fig. 41]. Here Number 29 has acquired a frame of its own – a marker, perhaps, of its value. Moreover, the artwork now rests on another traditional support, an easel. The photographic frame also places the painting back in the context that it was created, the rear of the artist's house with Accabonnac Creek visible in the background. A reason to linger on three iterations of the same unusual addition to Pollock's oeuvre is that these different framings of Number 29 illustrate a shifting critical perception for it. Seen through time, this seems to imply an inward movement where the framework of art criticism is concerned. According to O'Connor and Thaw, it is the 141

“creation of the work” that is recorded by the Namuth-Falkenberg film – a depiction of the artist at work and, thus, a version of the studio-view genre. The film's making, they suggest, is incidental to this work's painting; the film's purpose is to document this act. However, Hans Namuth recalls things differently. Pollock painting on glass was, according to Namuth, a stylistic device concocted in order for Pollock's novel technique (which was, by now, a popular element of the artist's celebrity) to be made visible at the same time as with the artist's equally novel (and celebrated) appearance.2 The artist's habits, both artistic and in terms of comportment and appearance, were already famous. The glass allowed Namuth the conceit of visualising the artist at work from the point of view of the canvas.3 After filming was completed, the glass was abandoned. Namuth recalls in 1979: “Our prop for the film, the painting on glass stood outside for weeks. Rain fell on it, leaves collected on top of it, ocean winds weathered it. Then one day Jackson decided to take it inside. It is now in the National Gallery in Ottawa, Canada, Number 29, 1950.”4 This statement suggests a deliberate abandonment of the unwanted, unvalued glass prop. This section of the film was filmed in close proximity to the studio-barn where Pollock worked, in addition to three or four other usable outhouses on the Pollock-Krasner farmstead; thus, lack of storage space does not seem to have been an issue. Furthermore, in Namuth's version of events, the glass only became “work,” becomes valued, once it is taken inside. Accepted into the artist's oeuvre, as “work,” the painting's movement from the shelter of the studio to the institutional space of the gallery is a well-established pathway. The support and shelter provided by the 2 See Hans Namuth's account of “Photographing Pollock” from 1979. Published in Barbara Rose's Pollock Painting (1980) (no page numbers) and Helen A Harrison's, Such Desperate Joy (2000) pp.260-272. Namuth states: “One evening it came to me: the painting would have to be on glass and I would film from underneath. When I broached the idea he liked it and replied that yes, he had often thought about working on glass […] After many unsuccessful attempts, I finally figured out how to lie on my back with the camera on my chest and photograph him from below.” Harrison, Such Desperate Joy, p.267. 3 Amelia Jones reads this sequence as an erotic encounter between Namuth and Pollock. Body Art/Performing the Subject p.63. 4 Namuth, Pollock Painting p.266

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studio's material frame also constitutes the glass props re-framing discursively as art. Namuth's statement – albeit his historical recollection of 1950 – indicates an interesting (though, perhaps, not conscious) conflict with the institutional conservation, or production, of Pollock's corpus. It would seem that by the time O'Connor and Thaw collate their catalogue in 1978, Number 29's status in relation to the film can no longer be thought of as incidental or supplementary. Between 1950 and 1979, the boundaries through which art is defined were redrawn irrevocably. Studio habits, their documentation, the products of that documentation, the body itself, have all been contested, fought over, anxiously in terms of value, in the intervening years. Noting these mobile peripheries and, particularly, their historical land-grab of the studio and the artist's body, this chapter asks what has been at stake in this movement? What does it mean to be taken inside? What does it mean to be left outside? Returning to this thesis's central theme, this chapter asks how visualisations of Pollock's working method were articulated in ways that allow still-dominant modernist versions of art-making to persist. It considers the spatial somersaults required in order for modernism's rhetoric of mastery (and, thus, masculinity and heterosexuality) to continue to signify despite the increased attention paid to studio-bound artistic bodies (and, thus, their potential femininity) from the 1950s onward. Springs and its infamous studio-barn have provided a backdrop to the changing critical contexts by which art and art production have been understood in the latter half of the twentieth century. How, therefore, have these shifting boundaries (or frames) effected the relevance and meaning of the studio at Springs? What effect has this had on the gendering of the bodies, particularly Pollock's, as they are staged at this site?

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Shifting frames In the years between 1950 and 1979 Number 29 is framed as a work of art. No longer a prop or device through which Namuth might film the artist at work, the glass painting was re-contextualised as an artwork in its own right. In this way the remains of Pollock's painting on film (traces of his actions) are institutionalised. Defining precisely how (and indeed when) these values altered is difficult to ascertain and not the purpose of this chapter; however, analysing why the status of material has been modified in these years is. Part of the processes by which this artwork has been subsumed into Pollock's body of work is the physical placing of Number 29 in the studio-barn at Springs, after its time at the mercy of the elements. At some moment, therefore, the glass painting was taken back to, what we might call, the traditional scene of production from where its journey to the exhibitionary space of the gallery (or market) could commence; thus restoring, it might be claimed, its place in the natural order of art-making. The studio is, in multiple senses, a type of frame. As an architectural framework, it provides support and shelter. Being brought inside the studio-barn, after its abandonment when filming ceased, protected Number 29 from damage; as a support, or in terms of the protection it affords, the studio shares similarities with the picture frame.5 However, in bringing material inside the artist's studio, this instance of framing is also a discursive framing. The work is contextualised, as an artwork, by what surrounds it, supports it and protects its value. In the case of Pollock's art, it could be claimed that the studio's visibility constitutes a framework of supporting material which protects the artist's work from obscurity. One could begin to wonder what we would know of the artist, the place in history, without Namuth's contextualising documents; would Pollock be, like Janet Sobel (arguably, the “original” dripper), a footnoted 5 Ranjana Khanna notes in Algeria Cuts (2010) that, etymologically, the frame is both support and protection in her discussion of Jacques Derrida's parergon.

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“influence” in another artist's text?6 There is both a material and discursive edge to the meaning of this “internalisation” that is exemplified by Number 29 where 'bringing inside' refers to a physical shift (wherein a decision is made that a sheet of glass dripped with household paint is a worthwhile object and should be afforded a certain status) and also an internal movement, or conveyance, of the object toward the art market and the gallery. This institutionalisation (which is also an incorporation) amends the sheet of glass's value. The visibility of studios, like the one at Springs, is a frame of reference, or context, through which we approach acts of painting performed there and their products. The studio's visibility frames the sign of the artist at work.7 The idea of the working artist is contextualised by an image of the studio. However, neither the frame (or context) nor what it supports or protects is static; contextual framing is negotiated by, what Jonathan Culler terms, “interpretative strategies.” Material and contextual frames are mutually constructive and both constitute an architecture: one physical, the other discursive.8 As much as the discursive frame of reference moulds interpretation of any given act or statement, the material framing of a film's prop, say, alters its semantic value. Framing material produces new discourse as much as discourses produce new material, literally making things matter. Returning to the example of the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio: because the Springs site, its architecture, now constitutes an archive (as a study centre), these two 6 As Anna C. Chave has pointed out, Clement Greenberg, Pollock and, presumably, Krasner “admired” Janet Sobel's (1894-1965) work, albeit “furtively.” Chave goes on to say: “When Pollock is mentioned at all in discussions of Pollock's development, however, she is generally described as a “housewife,” or amateur, a stratagem that preserves the status of Pollock as the legitimate and unique progenitor [...]” Anna C. Chave “Pollock and Krasner: Script and Postscript,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 24 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 95-111 7 Context is, as Jonathan Culler notes, a “framing of the sign.” Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, OK, 1988) p.ix. Similarly, the visibility of the studio has been discussed as a contextualisation of the artist as “symbol of art” in Griselda Pollock, “Killing Men and Dying Women” in Pollock and Orton, Avant Gardes and Partisans, p.241. 8 For a discussion of philosophical discourse as architecture see Mark Wigley's Derrida's Haunt (1994).

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senses of framing are drawn ever closer. As an archive the studio contextualises, supports dissemination, supplements knowledge and protects its materials from loss or damage – all functions of the frame (though the manner in which this is done may be stultifying as I claimed in regards to the archiving Francis Bacon's studio). In parallel, this archival framework produces ever more statements regarding practice; conversely, statements on this practice, its proper place and habits, produce new material or, at least, designate material as proper or appropriate. A prime example of this is the timely identification and dissemination of material traces of Krasner's occupation of the studio at Springs in response to feminist discourse. Where concerns have been raised over her perceived erasure in the studio's preservation and its emphasis on Pollock's paintspattered floorboards, new archival material has been produced [Figs. 42 and 43].9 The studio's Masonite flooring removed in uncovering the floorboards, and traces of Krasner's practice on the walls of the studio, as new material sites for research by this feminist discursive framework and strategy of recovery. The frame, therefore, provides context through which we read or produce material. The period during which Number 29's was accessioned into Pollock's body of work also marks shifting boundaries of art-criticism. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, in particular, a contestation of art's precise borders was undertaken through critical debates concerning artistic acts, their position, status and relationship to/as the “work of art.” Turning away, to some extent, from the products of art-making to the processes of making was, in part, a political struggle. Mapping these shifting criteria, Lucy R. Lippard, for example, articulated, in her book Six Years: dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972[...] (1973), a collective hope (retrospectively dashed) 9 The masonite flooring, removed in revealing the floorboards of the studio-barn, are stored (or archived) in the attic of the Pollock-Krasner House. Other material traces of Pollock and Krasner's occupation of the site are to be found on the concrete footings where the Namuth-Falkenberg film was shot. These have also been documented photographically and these photographs archived in the study centre.

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that performance could offer political liberation and that art would be “forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and market-orientation” by the seeming worthlessness of performance’s documents to the market.10 As Lippard's work makes clear, a politics of framing, with regard to art practices, emerged in the period dictating what is inside and outside of art's purview. Images of Pollock's occupation of Springs during the early 1950s posed a challenge to the period's conventional view of the studio, art-making and, in particular easel painting (the artist's destruction of painting lay, in part, in his wilful ignorance of the edges of the painting, claimed Allan Kaprow, “in favour of a continuum going in all directions simultaneously, beyond the literal dimensions of any work”).11 The artist's unusual working practices unsettle the framing of art as a particular kind of studiobound activity. The location of his work – in a rickety barn or staged outside in the open-air – was a break with tradition; the industrial and household paints he used were unorthodox; his manner of applying paint was, famously, freakish. The potential for the studio-view to connote directly a “romance of the studio,” as Caroline Jones calls images of this period, is thus limited to a degree. In addition, the ability of this image to be read as the mastering of a practice should also be curtailed. However, as Amelia Jones notes, Pollock's image is situated directly on the fissure in competing art historical narratives; Pollock painting has been taken to be both the epitome of formalist theory and as the origin of performance art.12 The image of Pollock's studio is crucial to both 10 Lippard: “The frame was there to be broken out of. Anti-establishment fervour in the 1960s focused on the de-mythologisation and de-commodification of art, on the need for an independent (or “alternative”) art that could not be bought and sold by the greedy sector that owned everything [...]” Lippard, Six Years, p.xiv. 11 Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” p.5. In reference to Pollock's importance to performance, Kaprow states: “We were a piece of him: he was perhaps, the embodiment of our ambition for complete freedom.” Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958) in The Blurring of Art and Life p.1. 12 Noting equivocacy in this debate, Jones described the position of Pollock's acts of painting as both “pivotal” and “ambivalent” where art history is concerned. “[The] posing of Pollock (as exemplary of formalist modernism) as antipodal to the performance lineage, and to the resurgence of performance and body art in the 1960s, is already complicated discursively by Rosenberg's articulation of Pollock as performative in 1952 (not to mention Kaprow's citation of Pollock as inspirational for the

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and has been interpreted as central to both. What is unequivocal, therefore, is that these critical responses revolve around Springs.13 Increasing attention on the processes of making (and, thus, away from the products of artistic practice) produced new material sites in the performing artist's body and a focus on the site of art's production or the performance of space. The documentation, circulation and dissemination of images of the artist's body at work in performed spaces in which these acts are staged played their part in a re-definition of terms such as “artist” and “artwork.” But, where it was hoped – by critics like Lippard – that critical shifts of the 1960s (where art was concerned) might provide a politically liberating space within art-historical discourse in which artists other than those typically privileged would be able to flourish, as it turned out these hopes would prove, as Jane Blocker has discussed, to be somewhat naïve.14 While Lippard's set of artists dreamt of a body that would prove resistant to the art market's “greed” for valuable products, this potentially revolutionary feminist body (with its ability to challenge the phallocentric order of modernism) is far from the hyper-masculine body constructed for Pollock in Namuth's imagery. This body (and space) has been read according to the traditions of the studio-view – a genre which tends, as previously argued, to present a romanticised version of art-making that is particularly appealing to certain forms of modernist criticism. In this way, the image of the artist is prone also to being brought back to the studio. Inasmuch as it produces context, framing is never neutral: a “semantic value” of

Happenings). Pollock, then, is an ambivalent figure – both quintessential modernist, formalist genius, and origin of the performativity of postmodernism [...]” Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, p.61. 13 It should be noted too that Greenberg and Rosenberg were also both visitors to Easthampton and Springs. Greenberg is photographed on the Springs site. Rosenberg is buried, in Green River cemetery, within site of both Pollock and Krasner's plots. 14 For this view see Blocker, What the Body Cost p.6.

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the frame noted by Meyer Schapiro.15 In deconstructing the frame's supposed neutrality, Derrida points out what is purportedly surrounds a work of art (the ergon) is, in fact, neither simply an outside: “parerga have a thickness.”16 The artwork's frame stands out from both the work of art it surrounds and the wall it is hung on. Its semantic value effects both. This also applies to the framing effect of the studio.17 Particularly, where work – either Number 29 or the space in which it was made, or the bodies foregrounded in that process – is contextualised according to, in Jones terms, a “romance of the studio.” This thesis has, thus far, noted that bodies are shaped by the spaces they habitually occupy. Specifically, as Ahmed argues with regard to the masculine space of the study, spaces “extend the shape of bodies that 'tend' to inhabit them.”18 Moreover, “bodies are shaped by histories, which they perform in their comportment, their posture and their gesture.” Images of art practices are always potentially gendered according to traditional scenarios of art-making (exemplified historically by the studio-view). Considering studio habits – though they may in themselves run counter to a “traditions” of making – within the frame of the studio implicates sexuality. As the body is reframed by the studio it becomes subject to its gendering “loop.” For Pollock, contextualising him according to modernist conventions of art-making de-sexualises his image. Specifically, the artist's image is masculinised as it is subjected to the rhetorics of mastery that accrete to the studio's historical framing. As private study space, the studio has, historically, been associated with the closeting of sexuality (especially when 15 In addition to providing support and protection to the work of art in a literal sense, the picture frame – “historically developed, highly variable forms” according to Meyer Schapiro (1969) – supplements the work through its “semantic value,” contextualising it as “work.” Though often overlooked, the frame – conceived by Schapiro as the very sign of value – contributes meaning to the artwork. 16 Derrida, Truth in Painting, p.61. 17 In the last chapter, I argued, Krasner's casting as the Art-Widow served to perpetuate Pollock's legacy in the years after his death though a fantasy by which his authority was spoken through Krasner; this was considered as cryptic according to Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic theory of “cryptic incorporation” and, in Derrida's terms, parergonic in that, the crypt's leaking boundaries, the studio's stage-management of internal and external space, make it a framing device or “enclosure.” Jacques Derrida compares the parergon and Abraham and Torok's crypt in “Foreword: Fors” p.xiv 18 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology p.58

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sexuality is aligned with femininity).19 Where Beatriz Colomina notes that “the politics of space are always sexual, even if space is central to the mechanisms of the erasure of sexuality,” it should be noted that, in Pollock's case, the elision of sexuality is precisely the point where his masculinity is a requirement (and, thus, no issue) to his occupation of the studio.20 Thus the shifting frames of twentieth century art – competing narrative of studio “romance” and post-studio formations – are political inasmuch as they are sexualised. Pollock's image, therefore, is one instance in which the image of studio habits is made to re-affirm modernist versions of art-making. However, making this framing visible – indicating its non-neutrality – also damages its ability to frame. And, therefore, for the a romance of the studio to frame artistic habits so readily.

The Namuth-Falkenberg Film The Namuth-Falkenberg film (1950-51) exemplifies how the artist's body and the performance of painting were reconfigured according to rhetorics of mastery (and, thus, masculinity and heterosexuality). Despite this portrayal of studio habits foregrounding a radical overturning of what art-making might be considered to look like, in specific ways it can also be read as a convincing portrayal of mastery. The film provides exemplifies the role the image of Springs plays in constructing a mythological figure of the artist. In part, the voice-over – a narration in place of a narrative in documentary film – is implicit in this mystification. This provides an aural supplement 19 For Mark Wigley, the problem lies, in part, with spatial confusion itself which has been, since the early modern era, “explicitly understood as sexual and identified with femininity.” Femininity acts as a disturbing property when applied to either men or women in regard to their positioning in space: in that men occupying interior space (the studio/study is Wigley's example) are feminised, and women in exterior space are dangerously feminine. Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender” p. 332 For more on femininity and space see: Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City (1991); Janet Wolff, “The Invisible Flâneuse”; Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity” in Pollock, Vision and Difference (1988) 20 Beatriz Colomina, Introduction to Sexuality & Space: Volume 1 of Princeton Papers on Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press: Princeton, NJ, 1992) no page number.

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– in addition to the image of the artist at work – that is not present in other studio-view imagery. Occurring off-frame, done in post-production, the voice-over adds to the film; but the need for this supplementarity also points to something lacking in its images.21 In dialogue with the moving images on screen, this voice-over actually points out instances of Pollock's framing. Pollock's poetic narration (a poetry at odds, perhaps, with his characterisation as uncultivated) supplements the action on screen through a series of staccato sentences. Stamping his authority on the piece, the film begins with the artist's name and a date: “Jackson Pollock '51.” [Fig. 44] Namuth's camera pans north to east across the Springs homestead, from the ramshackle (soon-to-be legendary) studio-barn to another outbuilding and onto a concrete footing where the artist – dressed head to toe in black – prepares for painting by changing into his paint-encrusted work shoes from a handsome pair of brown loafers. All the while we can hear the stuttering of the film. Pollock's voiceover sets the scene: My home is in Springs, East Hampton, Long Island.

The voice-over explains the film's surprisingly pastoral location as Pollock's home. Exerting pressure slightly on the mainstream image of where art-making happens, they frame the urbane artist in a rural setting. On screen, the artist now sits in front of a painting, already begun (later destroyed/lost), of brown unprimed canvas edged by paint cans and splashes. More background places the artist's practice, played out on screen, in dialogue with his predecessors, contextualising it with pedagogic lineages of master and pupil. I was born in Cody, Wyoming, 39 years ago. In New York I spent two years at the Art Student League with Thomas Hart Benton. He was a strong personality to react against. This was in 1929.

21 As Khanna argues in Algeria Cuts, pp.36-43

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The artist, we are told, is a rebel. In a close-up Pollock draws on a cigarette which has been dangling from his lip in earlier shots. Giving more evidence of his radical practice, Pollock continues: I don't work from drawings or colour sketches. My painting is direct.

And as we pan over the canvas, the artist reiterates this: I usually paint on the floor.

The large canvas is laid out in a north-south shot looking across the bottom of the grounds of the artist's house. [Fig. 45] The commentary brings two expansive spaces together; the canvas is as much a space to occupy as the open, natural world around him. Furthermore, the voice is used to explain that what we are seeing is indeed painting. I enjoy working on a large canvas. I feel more at home, more at ease in a big area. Having the canvas on the floor, I feel nearer, more a … a part of the painting. This way I can walk around it, work from all four sides and be in the painting; similar to the Indian sand painters of the west.

Because Pollock's methods are radically different – their location disturbing to the conventions of the making art – the narration continues to define his acts as artistic. Over shots of paint pouring, the artist explains his method, carefully contrasting his unconventional studio habits to historical techniques. Sometimes I use a brush but often prefer using a stick. Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can. I like to use a dripping, fluid paint.

Although (by all accounts) he didn't use these much before or after, he continues: I also use sand, broken glass, pebbles, string, nails or other foreign matter.

Off-frame the artist begins to assert his credo of art-making. A method of painting is a natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

And as he is painting the canvas: 154

When I am painting I have a general notion of what I am about. I can control the flow of the paint. There is no accident; just as there is no beginning and no end. Sometimes I lose a painting. But I have no fear of changes, of destroying the image. Because a painting has a life of its own, I prefer to let it live.

Music starts up again – its plucked strings suggestive of the drips and splashes performed on screen. The film cuts to a figure (not Pollock) miming the act of painting. The film cuts again to extreme close up of paintings on Masonite squares laid out on grass.22 The film continues with more panning shots, zooms and focus-ins. It jumps to a shot of Pollock pinning a canvas to the wall of an exhibition space. As it pans to the other end of the same painting, we also see Lee Krasner (from the back) sitting in the corner of the room between three paintings. The film cuts back to Springs and the glass painting sequence in which Number 29 is used as a prop to film the artist from the viewpoint of the horizontal canvas. In this way, the film produces a perspective rarely seen in the studio-view imagery: the interface between artist and canvas. We see Pollock looking as he paints. He waves his hand mystically over the bare “canvas” (once more with obligatory dangling cigarette). With Namuth positioned beneath the artist, under this slightly dirty glass, Pollock begins the process of drips as if onto the camera's lens. The music begins again and webs of paint, and other materials, begin to obscure painter from photographer (Pollock is depicted now “in” his painting). [Fig. 46]. The film jumps again to Pollock wiping off the signature where we began. Portentously he informs the viewer: I lost contact with my first painting on glass. And I started another one.

Painting begins again with new materials – string, red shards of glass, wire mesh – fixed to glass with more poured paint, this time delicately from a can. Then white paint applied with a brush. Then more dark paint. The film ends with a return to the signature 22 The artist made use of Masonite squares (a brand of fibreboard) which his brother Sande, a Masonite salesman, had given him.

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which the artist finishes with a date: “51.” The credits roll over more close-ups of the artist's paintings. The artist figure this film constructs is a modernist subject in so much as it configures him as a presence behind (and, in the case of the glass section, within) the artwork. In this way, the film, its performance, and specifically its spoken element, are an exercise in mystification. The narration, applied over the film's imagery, confers truth in its connotation of documentary. Added in a recording studio after the fact, this narration confers on the film, by cultural convention, the status of fact rather than fiction. The viewer is, therefore, encouraged to read as “truth” the particular statements asserted by it: that the artist loses himself in his painting, for example, or that there is a discernible difference between “expression” and “illustration” of feelings. This studioview film is framed as a true picture of art-making; the artistic figure it proposes is, as Griselda Pollock noted, “a mythic subject that is posited as the meaning of the work.”23 Though the commentary may puncture the film's framing of the artist, underlining its fictions by placing image (frame) in dialogue with voice (off-frame), where the film frames – in word and image – the artist's radicality, at the same time, artistic traditions are also flagged-up in, for instance, his hanging work in the gallery. This propensity to refer back to historical studio-view imagery suggests a conventional version of art-making, despite the differences entailed in Pollock's acts on film. This brings the artist's radically different practices back to the studio. The glass painting sequence, amongst others, reiterates the supposed isolation of the painter at work. Pollock's studio, albeit outdoors, is depicted, customarily, as a solitary domain; there are no other bodies in the documentary's spectacle of production with the canvas being the only point-of-view offered the viewer.24 The film cites the historical trope of 23 Griselda Pollock, “Jackson Pollock, Painting and the Myth of Photography” in Avant Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, p.170. 24 Caroline Jones discusses this aspect of Pollock filmed studio in Machine in the Studio, p.75.

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the studio but with modifications. As I argued earlier, this impersonation of the historical studio-artist may offer a challenge to conventional readings of the studioview. The particular manner – a kind of artistic campery – with which Bacon re-enacted the “dandified” artistic figure of his Pre-Raphaelite precursor in occupying the Millais House studio, for instance, produces a dialogue between distinct performances of masculinities – one of artistic mastery, the other, a camp version of masculinity. Images of Bacon's inhabitation of the studio, I argued, puts the historical model they cite, and its ability to secure the masculinity (and mastery) it lays claim to, under stress. However, this potential to unsettle originary masculinity is predicated on the failure of Bacon's image to convince a critical audience of his occupation of the role of the masterful artist. This line of enquiry is, therefore, not applicable to Pollock whose performance of the studio-artist – and masculinity – is quite believable. The rugged workman-like performance Pollock gives in the Namuth-Falkenberg film has been given as an example of post-war American male hyper-masculinity.25 Despite deviations from the historical model of the studio-view, the film produces artmaking in ways that readily connote the traditions of the studio artist and thus gather onto it that trope's codifications. So while attention to disjoint between the voice-over and image in the film might unsettle the “truths” laid out on screen, Pollock's is a convincing portrayal of artistic mastery. Contesting a reading of mastery in Pollock's studio-view imagery therefore necessitates a different approach; but one that draws on the image of the artist's body as it is visualised in the Namuth-Falkenberg film, amongst other images. A particular version of the body emerged in post-war criticism – particularly in sections of this era's critical forms. Crucially, these required the disappearance of the artist's body as an aesthetic demand; and thus, its return repeatedly generated forms of disavowal. It is, therefore, in these repudiations of the body that we 25 As Jones (1998), Pollock (1985) and Butt (2004) have all claimed.

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can begin to analyse constructions masculinity around Pollock's image and the ways in which this is constructed as a requisite of creativity in modernist discourse.

The body and the studio-view In the expanding critical field that opened up through the discourse of process during the 1960s, the artist's body, as well as the space of art's production, is increasingly made to matter in its greater visibility. However, this body, particularly its masculinity, is orientated by the spaces in which it appears. The problem with the studio – and its historically repeated connotations – is that it moulds or shapes the body to its contours. The studio and the male body are caught in a naturalising loop in which it tends to be constructed as inhabiting studio spaces in certain ways and other gendered bodies in other ways.26 Modernist criticism requires and shapes a male body for the artist. According to Christine Battersby in Gender and Genius (1989), in the returning of the period's criticism to gendered and exclusionary Romantic logics, “Genius required a penis,” no matter who the subject of genius was, no matter how “feminine” their actions or products might have been: “the more psychically feminine genius appeared, the louder the shout went up; 'it's a boy!'”27 This presents a problem, of course, for Krasner; for example, as Pollock explained: “Lee is different: she is a wife, then an artist. […] She's talented, plenty, but great art needs a pecker. Not even Lee's got that.”28 However, as I turn to now, Pollock's body – though visibly male – also presented a problem for modernist forms of criticism inasmuch as it was increasingly implicated in the interpretation of his work. 26 For a description of this “naturalising” of gender through spatial orientation see Sara Ahmed's discussion of the philosopher's study in Queer Phenomenology, p.51-63. 27 Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius (The Women's Press: London, 1989) p.3. 28 Jeffrey Potter, “Jackson Pollock: Fragments of Conversations and Statements,” in Helen Harrison (ed.), Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000) p.91

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Mid twentieth-century modernist criticism – particularly the formalism practiced by Greenberg and his followers – rely on a rhetorical “disinterest” on the part of the critic; in this, a refusal of the sensual, and potentially, erotic body is fundamental. In Body Art (1997), Jones reasons that behind this refusal is the denial of potentially homoerotic interest in the artist's body. The logic behind this, therefore, relies on a heteronormative account of sexuality in which same sex desire – the critic's desire for the artist's body (rather than his mind and its genius) – is defined as improper, a point where correct procedures of criticism fail.29 The necessary disavowal of cross-currents of desire, of course, proves problematic to either a queer or female critic or artist – whose desires, sex and genders would not correctly align with the dictates of this model. With the body's (re)emergence as a locus of critical engagement in the period, it presented an increasing problem for conventional critical engagement. This newly visible male body was required, paradoxically Jones claims, to be both present (great art requires a pecker) and absent (veiled, un-erotic and disinteresting).30 If the male body becomes visible – as, Jones puts it, unveiled in “the act of making” – so, potentially, the (necessarily unacknowledged) open secret of the homoeroticism of the critic's desire for the artist is brought to the fore and the critical response tainted.31 Homoerotic interest could be denied either through a radical (and obsessional) denial of interestedness (the response of Greenberg and his followers) or through the (re)construction of the artist's body as a rhetorical body (Rosenberg) – as a conduit for the mind of the action painting genius. This disembodied entity is described as mastering or conducting the body's 29 This is Jones's claim in “The 'Pollockian Performative'” in Body Art/Performing the Subject, pp.53102. 30 For Jones, Pollock's disembodiment and de-sexualisation exemplifies this paradox. “The artist must be embodied as male in order to be considered an artist – placed within a (patri)lineage as originary and divinely inspired – but his embodiment (his particularity as a gendered, and otherwise vulnerable, immanent subject) must be hidden to ensure his transcendence as disembodied and divinely inspired.” Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject p.62. 31 Clement Greenberg's obvious interest in his close friend Pollock is implicated here which must be veiled for his brand of Kantian criticism to function. This contrasts with statements described in chapter one by the critic David Sylvester in which he makes clear that his “crush” on Francis Bacon inflects his critical response to his work in the 1950s.

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action and controlling its tracing on canvas. The requisite veiling of Pollock's body in modernist criticism is problematic. Like Jones, Butt claims that the production of a hyper-masculine figure of the artist through Namuth's images, and its concomitant heterosexuality, is phobically-charged. Stating an interest less in the “patriarchal representational schema” codified through these images, than in what they “disavow and displace,” Butt looks to the queer meanings that historically accrued with the figure of the male artist in mid-twentieth century representations: claiming that in “the absence of any reliable signifiers of homosexual difference, and given the widespread rumours about the large numbers of gays in the arts [...] artistic identity itself becomes phobically charged with queerness in the cultural contexts of the 1950s art world.”32 Accordingly, the repudiation of homoeroticism, that Jones reports, requires veiling because the figure of the artist had become associated in the period with queerness. Thus, we could consider Greenberg and Rosenberg's responses to Pollock's body (and later general responses to theatricality) are regulatory in their homophobia (rather than the incidental homophobia of Jones's argument). As Judith Butler has argued, repression of homosexuality (repressed, precisely, because the identification has already been made) is at the core of a culturally naturalised heterosexuality. In mid-twentieth century, the figure of the Abstract Expressionist artist exemplifies this cultural trope; Pollock's studio habits are one of its key images. This opens up the possibility that the enforced abjection of artistic queerness (or even its potential) is part of the make up of the conventional (or normative, even) version of art production. Conventional views of art-making are thus reiterated in this mid-twentieth century version: as a figuration of the artist and the defined limits of the spaces of art-making, as privatised and requiring of the total 32 Butt, Between You and Me, p.44

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elision, or closeting, of sexuality. Where apparent, the homoerotic tendencies of criticism – in hero-worship, for example, or affectionate same-sex bonds – are veiled (or closeted) in order to keep them separate (or outside conventional discourse). This, therefore, bears comparison to strategies of incorporation – a repressive preservation as a melancholic response to a loss felt but disavowed – and the previous chapter's discussion of Krasner's occupation of the Springs site. The abjection of potential homoeroticism is a response undertaken along spatial lines. Pollock was no stranger to rumours about his supposed queer tendencies.33 Both Namuth's photography and Pollock's notorious, drunken homophobic outbursts can, therefore, be read as a disavowal and abjection of homosexuality – personally, for Pollock, and, more generally, as a performative re-inscription of the supposed heterosexuality of the abstract expressionist artist and studio situation.34 33 An example expounding rumours of Pollock's homosexuality is Steven Naifeh's Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, (C.N. Potter: New York, 1989). See also John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (Grove Press: New York, 1997): “Frequently, during the summer, Pollock would appear at the cottage shared by Julian [Beck] and Bill Simmons in a semi-drunken state. Part of the cottage was redolent of homosexuality, mostly because Simmons was self-consciously gay and eager to proselytise. Every night, a group of six to eight men would gather there to drink and talk. The balcony was reserved for sexual encounters. In August, as the weather grew warmer, Pollock would appear at any time of day or night. He had been struggling to repress homosexual inclinations for years, but on various occasions that August, whenever he felt sufficiently enraged at his wife or drunk enough to lose himself, he participated in what Julian would subsequently categorize as drunken sexual idylls. According to Julian, the sex was usually disappointing, and Pollock was too drunk to perform adequately. Several times, Lee Krasner came searching for him, and either Julian or Simmons would pretend that he was not there. For Julian, these meetings were unsatisfactory because of the sordid, forced nature and because Pollock was so evidently wrestling with obsessive problems that caused him so much pain he had to drink himself to the precipice of oblivion. Furthermore, the act they had consummated was a sort of blind groping, more lurchingly desperate than loving.” (23) See also Jonathan Weinberg, “Urination and its Discontents” in Journal of Homosexuality, Volume 27, Issue 12, 1994. Where Andy Warhol's piss paintings are considered as “homosexual competition” with Pollock's paintings as a re-enactment of an oedipal scenario with his father. This account appears as gossip on the Artnet website: GAY ARTIST OUTS POLLOCK: Erotic artist Harold Stevenson (b. 1929), currently the subject of a mini-retrospective at the new Chelsea digs of Mitchell Algus Gallery, Apr. 13-May 25, 2002, outs famed Ab Ex avatar Jackson Pollock in an interview with Adrian Dannatt in the April issue of the Art Newspaper. Stevenson, famous for The New Adam, his room-sized 1962 painting of a nude Sal Mineo, says that he knew Pollock "in the biblical sense" and that the two of them would booze it up and "participate with one another" at Alfonso Ossorio's cottage in Springs, L.I. "I didn't mind going to bed with him," Stevenson says, "I just didn't want to paint like him." http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/news/artnetnews/artnetnews4-16-02.asp Accessed on 25 March 2012. 34 Butt, Between You and Me, p.48. Butt claims that while homosexual community viewed favourably the link circulating in the 1950s between artistic practices and queer practices, for Pollock this was an anxiety. (p.51)

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As a reminder of modernism's abhorrence for the body that re-emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century, critical responses to Pollock's image at Springs display an anxiety towards the artist's body as it appears in the vicinity of the studio. Greenberg and his followers, notably Michael Fried in “Art and Objecthood” (1967), attempted to adhere to a version of Abstract Expressionism (which Pollock was often taken to exemplify) that suppressed the artist's body in order to preserve disinterestedness.35 In what became a debate over the pre-eminence of product or process, the term theatricality proved here to be acutely divisive. Something to be feared (Fried) or hoped-for (as it was by Lippard's generation of artists and critics, feminist or otherwise), theatricality was aligned, surreptitiously, with femininity.36 The body then presents a problem for criticism which would seek to deny (and draw a veil on) the feminine as debased. As such, the body's propriety, the distinction between what could be considered as in or out of the bounds of discourse, split along lines of sexual difference. In What the Body Cost (2004) Jane Blocker argues that “the success of performance in the two decades between 1955 and 1975 must be regarded as a consequence of the discursive desire for, appropriation of, and distancing from the feminine.”37 Disputing claims – by Jones, for example – that the performing body in art is, by nature, politically liberating, Blocker details the feminisation of bodies produced in artworks from the 1950s onward.38 Rosenberg's statements on the “event” of Pollock painting could be seen in this light. Rosenberg – often characterised as the flip-side of Greenbergian formalism's transcendental version of art – would seem to turn attention to 35 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum, June, 1967. 36 Jones argues that, for certain post war critics, theatricality was the “feminising debasement of the virility of “pure” modernism.” Body Art/ Performing the Subject, p.112. See also Blocker, What the Body Cost, p.6 37 Blocker, What the Body Cost, p.14. Blocker's book is about what she terms “postmodern love” – the hotly pursued but unrequited desire for something beyond commodity in Late Capitalist culture – and the hoped-for and doubted bodies produced in performance in the second half of the twentieth century. 38 With regard to Pollock, and referencing Allan Kaprow's statements on the artist (1958), Blocker claims his “destruction of painting” pits it against performance. In this, performance is contrasted to theatricality and its deception or falsity. Painting, Blocker claims convincingly, is linked to both the somatic and theatricality – both feminine attributes. Blocker, What the Body Cost, p.91.

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the physically active male body, allowing a potential homoerotic response.39 But the artist is embodied only abstractly, a “rhetorical” body which functions in Rosenberg's formulation as a “transparent vessel” for his genius and intentionality. The artist's body is seen as mastered by a coherent subject behind it, materialised in its corporeality. The interlaced repression of homosexuality and disavowal of homoeroticism are at the core of the figure of the artist that modernist criticism requires and the studioview tends to re-produce. Though feminised – in its corporeal materiality – the artist's body is attributed with masculine qualities, notably genius via its containment of, as a vehicle for, the mind. This abstract body is suitably emptied of sexual connotations. It is this splitting that forms part of Pollock's mythology; the significance of his body is emptied out as a sign of his genius (though, specifically, his genius mind). The functional necessity for modernist criticism for a particularly gendered body (as masculine and masterful) presents obvious problems for women artists who tend to appear, within the studio's boundaries, as either support or material. Mastery in, or of, the studio suggests a relationship of active agency and passivity – generating what Eve Sedgwick has called, with regard to her own visual practice, “a doer and done-to” and thus avoiding the middle ranges of agency “the field in which most of consciousness, perception and relationality happen.”40 Moreover, the privileged term in this duality tends toward the masculine, as opposed to feminised passivity. Feminist interventions in art history have underscored irrevocably that the male artist is staged in the abstract expressionist studio as a normatively masculine figure whose 'potency and virility' is secured against a foil of the feminine other.41 However, 39 Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, p.72-74 40 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness” in The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). p.79. 41 Butt, Between You and Me, p.47. On the staging of male and female bodies, Jones argues: “There is a place here [in the studio] for [Krasner and Elaine de Kooning], but that place (in these spaces) is subordinate, background, other, apart. They exhibit a kind of glazed apathetic stare, like props or models.” Jones, Machine in the Studio, p.38-39

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the same artistically-figured body must also negotiate its own feminisation – its status as “other.” The male artist is better positioned to deliver and secure the masculinity which modernism requires; his disembodied genius mind can control the body's “otherness.” A diminished ability to secure masculinity would, therefore, be problematic.42 Furthermore, as a precondition of their legibility, the image of the abstract expressionist studio relies on polarised gender positions – “the heterosexual dynamic of artist and wife.”43 In Namuth's infamous photograph from 1951 [Fig. 47] Krasner is placed, literally, on a pedestal. She is posed as the supportive and compliant wife. Without a 'pecker,' as Pollock indelicately put it, her lack secures her place within the image's patriarchally defined logics. But this disjoint between mind and body can also be made to undermine that heteronormative mythology – and romantic readings of the studioview, more generally. Seeing the artist's body as a passive conduit for the actions of the mind is a typical reading of studio-view imagery. Accordingly, the body and the studio are aligned in their designation as materials to be moulded or mobilised in the service of artistic genius: a mind-body duality which allows for the artist's body's feminisation. In Killing Men and Dying Women (1985), Griselda Pollock is obviously critical of the “vue d'atelier's” gendered hierarchies; yet, the paradigm she describes, I find, allows a return to rhetorics of mastery to the detriment of her argument's politics.44 It is this genre's visual juxtaposition of two bodies (the artist and the studio) which, she claims, produces a “sexual hierarchy” between the painter's body (which “stands for” the act of creation 42 See Marcia Brennan, Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, The New York School and PostPainterly Abstraction (MIT Press: Mass., 2004). Female collaboration is a necessity for studio images, Brennan claims. In Chapter Three “Pollock and Krasner: Touching and Transcending the Boundaries of Abstract Expressionism.” pp.76-115. Pollock's persona could overcome the paradox of masculinity and femininity but Krasner had to “other herself” damagingly. (p.93). 43 Butt, Between Me and You, p.45 44 Pollock's short book, Killing Men and Dying Women (1985) concerns the construction of sexuality in vue d'atelier imagery of the 1950s. While Jones (1997: pp.53-102) argues that modernist criticism attempts to make the (actual) male body disappear, Griselda Pollock claims that, in this historical context, it is the female body which becomes invisible where the studio is concerned.

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or art) and a sublimated female body. In 1950s abstract painting, where the traditional reference material of female model (art's other: nature) is made redundant, this body, Pollock argues, is sublimated as the studio materials (e.g. canvas) which the artist's body duly masters. Thus these two bodies are configured in a paradigm where “one stands for the very act of creation, the other a mass in a chain that moves from materiality or nature to art without subjective contribution.”45 While the privileging of the masculine within the studio-view's depiction of the studio situation is undeniable, Pollock's feminist intervention is undermined by its rhetoric of mastery. In Pollock's argument, the artist's body is also feminised by its mass-mediation (as American painting's No.1 pin-up, she notes).46 Additionally, contemporary critical approaches to the artist also feminised Pollock's body – in its designation as theatrical (by Greenberg et al) and in its abstraction as a rhetorical body (Rosenberg). Thus, it is not clear that the artist's body that exists in a polarity with the studio's materiality (a sublimated version of the absent female model) is itself masterful (or masculine). Taken to its logical extreme, the painter's body, Pollock claims, masters the studio's feminine body but is itself a mere body mastered, or piloted, by a disembodied subjectivity (or disinterested mind) for whom the body and its material surroundings are merely dumb tools. Modifying Pollock's statement above, the conventional paradigm she describes is more likely the juxtaposition of a non-spatial disembodied mind and a spatialised material body – the painter's mind (art) and the feminised body (its other: nature) in which “one moves from materiality or nature to art without subjective contribution.” Mastery, therefore, is the crucial problem. In order to get past the potentially damaging dualities in this version of art-making – its exclusions and assumptions – it is necessary to get past the rhetoric of

45 Pollock, Killing Men, p.241 46 Pollock, Killing Men, p.239. Amelia Jones also claims that “Pollock's reiterated masculinity which was displayed in pages of popular magazines serves to feminise him.” Body Art/Performing the Subject p.82. This argument rests on the artist being considered as an object of a desiring gaze.

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mastery, its depiction of the artist's habitat as a Master's studio and an interpretation of studio habits as mastering of art practice.

Dumb Genius The critical framework which emerged during the 1960s, in which the processes of art making were reconsidered as either alternative or supplement to the products of acts of painting, challenged the definitional bounds of “art work.” Pollock's canvases, for example, by themselves could no longer be considered without context. Consequently, certain contextual sites – the studio and the artist's body, for instance – were photographed, filmed or otherwise documented and, in turn, produced their own critical responses. Discussion of these visualisations of art-making tended to comport to traditional connotations, drawing on the conventions of the studio-view genre – a framing effect in which images of making are taken back to the studio. In order to make sense within that paradigm (in adhering to readings of mastery and mirroring of the artist-studio relationship in studio-view imagery), Pollock's body's legibility is dictated within a particular framework: the body disassociates from “his” genius. Thus figured as a tool and aligned with other studio materials – the potential femininity of Pollock's body (as read, say, in “its” theatricality, its alignment with nature or mass-mediation) is severed from, and controlled by, the genius of his mind. According to the conventions of the period's modes of modernist criticism, the artist's genius requires the critic's facility to recognise it, to see through the taint of the artist's corporeally enacted (and visualised) practice of painting. A condition of his being orientated in the studio, “Pollock” undergoes a process of purification in his disembodiment – that is, his mind (or his subjectivity) is required to be distanced from

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the body (the material condition of that subjectivity).47 Critical attention to Pollock is itself made proper through its elision of the potential eroticism of his body. In this way (requiring such radical contortions) it seems clear the the radically different image of post-war art-making that Namuth's images of Pollock show presented a serious problem to modernist criticism. And in order to accommodate this disturbing vision of creative practice – its foregrounding of the body with all its feminising taint – a mythology emerged to explain away the visible queerness of images of Pollock's body in the act of making; queer, that is, in its potential for same sex desire to circulate. As with many depictions of the artist, the biographic narrative – his humble origins, the pastoral mise-en-scene – of the Namuth-Falkenberg film, for example, works to promote the Pollock myth of his “dumb genius.” Stumbling, monotonously, over words in the film's narration, a lack of education or sophistication is implied. Away from the camera Namuth found the artist to be taciturn and withdrawn: “My lasting impression of Pollock was his silence. He was perhaps too shy to speak; he could not express personal feelings in conversation.”48 Though, at times, a great communicator – his famous statement for the Guggenheim, for instance – Pollock's muteness is legendary. In all, he was considered (despite evidence to the contrary) as quiet and unwitty. “It is a myth that he wasn't verbal. He could be hideously verbal when he wanted to be,” Krasner would later counter; “There is so much stupid myth about Pollock, I can't stand it!”49 Pollock was often characterised, quite openly, as thickheaded, lacking in cultivation or intelligence. The artist himself added to this mythos; even though his pronouncements that “you don't got to read all the time to know books” is somewhat at odds with Krasner's claims that he hid a large library. Dumb, ignorant, 47 Elizabeth Grosz sees the body in this way as a “sociocultural artefact” or the body as “the material condition of subjectivity.” See “Bodies-Cities” p.241. 48 Namuth “Photographing Pollock” in Rose, Pollock Painting, p.260 49 Krasner quoted in “Lee Krasner Pollock: Statement. Typescript in the Lee Krasner Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Reel 3048” in Harrison, Such Desperate Joy, p.68.

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and wilfully unintelligent, stories of his drunken and boorish behaviour were used to titillate audiences. A diagnosed “acute alcoholic,” he overturned tables at dinner parties, pissed in Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace, punched-out rivals in art, and love.50 “He was like a trapped animal who never should have left Wyoming, where he was born,” Peggy Guggenheim later claimed.51 The mythology of dumb genius paints Pollock as idiot savant (or knowledgable idiot); that is, his lack of mental faculty is mismatched with one exceptional ability – to paint, according to the legend, with a mythic and indefinable faculty of genius. Within this mythology, Pollock's genius mind is trapped in his dumb body (and, it should be noted, dumb also means brainless or mindless). Genius, an insubstantial quality, is embodied or materialised, anchored in substance in order to become legible.52 When configured in Cartesian terms as a tool for a disembodied and actively agential artistic subjectivity, this performed corporeality finds its counterpart in the Springs studio. It is his body – as workman-like and/or pastoral – that mirrors the agricoindustrial surrounding of the barn. Pollock's genius is aided by its support, the Springs studio. And, in this situation, the body's dumbness is accentuated also. Thus imagined, the studio becomes a mechanism by which this aspect of Pollock's mythology; his dumb genius is framed by conventional readings of the studio-view. In adhering to convention, where the studio's visibility is concerned, certain forms of criticism attempt to bridge the disjoint necessarily opened up in distancing the mind from the body's potential taint. This disconnection is a kind of body-dysmorphia in that the body and mind produced here seem such an ill-fit.53 The figure of the artist is 50 The diagnosis of “acute alcoholism” comes in a “Letter to the Examining Medical Officer, Selective Service System, 1941” (Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute) as reprinted in Harrison, Such Desperate Joy, p.18. 51 Peggy Guggenheim, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (Universe Publishing: New York, 1979) p.73. 52 This is, partly, Agamben's argument on “Special Being” (2007). 53 The word is derived from the Latin, Dys – bad, difficult (OED) Morphia – form (OED). Bodydysmorphia Disorder (BDD) occurs when the patient's body image fails to match the patient's mental

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configured in a way that the mind and body fail to align in normative terms of sex, gender and desire. A masculinised genius mind masters a feminised (hetero-eroticised) innocent body that is without intentions of its own and is aligned with the rest of the studio's dumb materiality. Moreover, this disjoint is diagnosed (or can only be diagnosed) by the art critic – with his distinguished faculty of judgment which enables him to see through the body's materiality, its dumb-show, to the genius beneath. In this way, modernist criticism constructs the myth of Pollock as genius-despite-his-dumbness or, more precisely, genius-in-his-dumbness.54 A further reason to analogise the mismatching body constructed for Pollock with a psychoanalytic terminology of body-dysmorphia is its diagnosis of a potential loss of control over the body, that itself requires mastering. This is not then to suggest that “Pollock” actually lacks control over his body – in fact, in the Namuth-Falkenberg film, even when Pollock loses control over his painting in the film he recognises this and regains control by destroying the painting and starting again. Rather, it is to suggest that adherence to the rhetoric of a masterful artist necessitates a mystification of the artist's studio habits as a special mode of being. However, though this dysmorphia is a mythology spun out in order to cover over the (emergent) body's potential homoeroticism, it is itself potentially queer – as a mismatch between gender as experienced internal and projected externally; and in the potential it enables for homosexual desires to circulate. Mythic narratives read into the studio-view and Pollock's dumb genius are mobilised to cover-over potential homo-erotic interest in the artist-critical relationship. image; the actual self differs from its ideal. Dysmorphia, or dysmorphophobia, is a condition described by Freud. Sergei Pankejeff – Freud's “Wolf Man” – suffered from dysmorphophobia in regards to his nose. Abraham and Torok spend much of their time in The Wolf Man's Cryptic Words: A Cryptonymy discussing Pankejeff's cryptic fetishism of his nose which, for the patient, seemed to have a life of its own. 54 And dumbness of course relates to femininity – the dumb blonde. Pollock's “Killing Men and Dying Women” relates Jackson Pollock's masculinity and the femininity of “Dying Women” (as in, women who dye their hair) like Marilyn Monroe.

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The two are uncoupled in bringing these alibis to the fore and their critical hegemony falters. In calling this strangeness out, the mechanisms of the framing of signs – either “Pollock” or, more generally, “the artist” – is made visible. A “romance of the studio,” as Caroline Jones claimed, frames the signs “artist” or “art-making” during this period and, in this, artistic practice is depicted as a mastering of studio materials, setting up a causal relationship of activity and passivity. However, this paradigm comes unstuck when considering that the artist's body – which now signifies as artistic practice – is itself mastered (and naturalised, and feminised) by the same mechanism. This queerness – the potential for same-sex desires to circulate – is provisionally overcome in modernist criticism by the Cartesian splitting of mind and body which preserve the mind as masculine, distancing it from potential eroticism. Consequently, the framing of “Pollock” as dumb-genius, within a discourse of modernist criticism, attempts to overcome potential impropriety with a dysmorphic body that is, nevertheless, itself a point where sex, gender and desire misalign. Like the Art-Widow body that is crafted, and mapped onto Krasner's body as it appears at the Springs site, the construction of Pollock's dumb-genius fails to align and confirm the heterosexualised normativity it is mobilised to secure. The modernist currents that shape the studio-view and the specifics of Pollock's mythic dumb-genius are mutually imbricated in this failure; dumb-genius queers the studio-view and the studio-view queers dumb-genius when attention is turned to queer aspects of Pollock's performance. This occurs where the performance of the artist's body misalign, in terms of sex, gender and desire (of intentions) with a mind that struggles, and fails, to control its material surroundings.

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Back to the studio This chapter examines changing critical contexts through which work – specifically the glass painting, Number 29 – has been conferred the status of art in a period often characterised as shifting between modernism and post-modernism. In this case, a film prop, or filmic device, used to stage Pollock's unusual artistic practices became a valuable piece of work in its own right. Number 29's physical journey, from its abandonment to the protection of the studio-barn (joining the artist's other studio work), can be seen as a metaphor for mid-twentieth century interpretative frames as these responded to the image of Pollock's body. Despite the post-modernist, “poststudio” framework that the artist's act of painting points towards, the desire, in some quarters, to continue to conceive of the artist as a meaningful origin or valuable works of art constituted a re-framing according to a conventional understanding of studiopractices: bringing that image, in a sense, back to the studio. Pollock's image is framed (up) by interpretative strategies that craft a desexualising myth of dumb-genius as an attempt to explain renewed interest in the artist's body in disinterested ways. In the 1950s, making Pollock's studio habits visible – via the performing body and performed studio – threatened conventional framing of art as art. What is, in modernist criticism, safely installed “off-frame” or outside the traditional bounds of art is allowed to infect the centre, to move into view. In this instance, what is brought to attention, via the theatricality of the performance of painting, is the body. Bringing eroticism with it, into the purified and de-sexualised realm of modernist criticism, the body perverts this paradigm (this is what Fried was really bothered about, claims Jane Blocker).55 This “repudiation of the body” goes hand in hand with the 55 Therefore, for Blocker, much critical discourse concerning the shift from product to process is a continuation of “old aesthetic habits, chiefly, a repudiation of the body.” Blocker, What the Body Cost, p.25

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privileging of the artist's mind as in control of the material world – including the body and the studio. This mystification and masculinisation is undertaken, in part, via the staging of the artist in the “romance of the studio” and the residual contexts of mastery, autonomy and solitude that this signifies: as codified in the Namuth-Falkenberg film, for instance. Accordingly, the artist's mind is considered as controlling, or mastering, the potentially feminine aspects of the body's materiality. The body's re-framing is phobically-charged as it is re-interpreted according to a modernist view of art-making. This lends weight to this thesis's central claim that the studio-view tends to enable modernist versions of the artist and art-making to perpetuate. The phobic response to the body, in this case, is a reaction to the re-framing of art in the period from products (their origin in the studio and the authority this offers) to the processes of art-making. Conventional readings of the studio-view protects the privileged heterosexuality and masculinity on which it relies. Sexuality is veiled (or closeted) in this version of artistic practice. What is forced into the open (or unveiled) in the analysis above is this framing. The studio mythologies visualised by modernist criticism around Pollock's image function to hide unconventional studio habits in plain sight: bringing all artmaking back to the studio. If Pollock's myth protects (in its framing effect) the value of art objects associated with his practice it is by means of the splitting of mind and body that is entailed, allows the body in as a sign for disembodied genius, as a guarantee of quality and value (conferred on it by the modernist critic). In considering the re-framing of artistic practices since the 1960s, and the subsequent re-contextualisation of the body, what becomes visible is the stage-managing undertaken by those critical protocols. However, challenging this mythology damages it as a frame and, in addition, its ability

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to confer, or protect, the values attributed to its cherished objects.56 As I argued earlier, with regard to a reactive “preservative repression” at the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, the loss of authority (mapped, mythically, onto a husband's death) elicits an anxious response on behalf of the art world, and specifically, to forms of modernist criticism. The stage-managing of Pollock's practice in order for images of it to comport to a “romance of the studio” is similarly reactive. The mythification of his image is, like the preservation of his home, a fantasy that loss is evaded. Here it is the potential loss of belief in modernist explanations of art-making and the valuable objects this protects.

56 Important for this chapter's discussion of Pollock's myth: Culler notes: “The expression framing the sign has several advantages over context: it reminds us that framing is something we do; it hints of the frame-up ('falsifying evidence beforehand in order to make someone appear guilty'), a major use of context; and it eludes to the incipient positivism of 'context' by alluding to the semiotic function framing in art, where the frame is determining, setting off the object or event as art, and yet the frame itself may be nothing tangible, pure articulation.” Culler, Framing of the Sign, p. ix. Khanna discusses how the loss of a frame can be damaging: “loss of a frame around a painting or collage may cause it to disintegrate.” Algeria Cuts, p.36.

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4. Agnes Martin Any verb, aside from the verb “to be,” generates a doer and done-to. And by this simple, built-in grammatical feature it thus makes it almost impossible for any language user to maintain a steady sense of the crucial middle ranges of agency: the field in which most of consciousness, perception and relationality really happen. – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick1

Agnes Martin's Tree (1965) [Fig. 48] was her first grid painting. Given to MOMA in 1965 by the artist and, remarkably, on display ever since, Tree's simple graphic lines on barely primed canvas is sparse and empty. Despite Martin's claims for her work as having more in common with the Abstract Expressionists, her painting (not displayed with those artists) seems relatively empty of gesture. Pared down to the bare bones of form it lacks any extraneous adornment. The faint gridded pattern on its white background gives us nothing much to see. Emptied of expression it is seemingly unable to provoke interest or emotion. As such it might appear boring or affectively flat. Martin's paintings have a tendency to shift optically depending on distance; we see the painting as solid – close up and from a few feet away – and watch as it dematerialises, into a space beyond, at a mid point between those positions. This propensity to shift reading with distance impels the viewer to lean in to take a closer look.2 The procedures by which the limited vision offered by this painting directs attention to how it was made will be the starting point for this chapter. In ways that I shall describe below, Martin's paintings refer us back to their making – evoking the space and time of the studio. Given that no material archive of Martin's studio now exists (in contrast to Bacon, Krasner and Pollock) the imaginative return to the artist's studio offered in her paintings, or in photographs and on film, is all we have left. Months before her death in 2004, at the age of 92, Martin, reportedly, packed up and retired from her studio, and 1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness” in The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011) p. 79. 2 See Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” October, 9 (Summer 1979). p.51-64

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from painting. Her preferred scale of painting – a size “you could walk into” – became too unwieldy for the increasingly frail artist. Rather than change her (remarkably consistent) practice, she decided her work as an artist was done and the studio habit she had developed over 60 years ended abruptly. The location of her final studio in Taos, New Mexico, was closed and later sold on; it is now a toyshop. In stark contrast to the studios of Bacon, Krasner and Pollock, Martin's studio materials were dispersed (seemingly unsentimentally, with no eye on her legacy). Despite the absence of an archive of Martin's studio materials, there are numerous accounts both, visual and written, of her studio space. Turning to these other materials, this chapter challenges conventional readings of the studio-view through an examination of Martin's myth – as a celebrated recluse. Both the artist's sexuality and her Buddhism are drawn together here, sometimes incongruously. The artist's flight from New York just as her career was taking off is part of the artist's mythology. Whether this was the result of a failed love affair (with the textile artist, Lenore Tawney (1907-2007), according to gossip) or as respite from the effects of a nervous breakdown, or from the homophobia of the New York establishment, is not my concern here.3 Some of the more interesting takes on Martin's painting in recent years have dwelt on the feminist political potential of the emptiness of her paintings and studio practice with particular emphasis on Zen Buddhism; “egolessness set Martin apart from her male peers,” claims Anna C. Chave (1992), her blank painting is a riposte to the “phallic marking” of Abstract Expressionism.4 Jaleh Mansoor has claimed that Martin's “quietism” is a strong political statement, She describes convincingly how Martin's painting could be considered as an enactment of 3 Jonathan D. Katz sums up Martin's flight from New York to Taos in “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction” in (ed.) Lynne Cooke et al, Agnes Martin (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2012) 4 Chave makes her case despite her claim that Martin was more or less “invisible” to the feminist art movement. Anna Chave, “Agnes Martin: 'Humility, the Beautiful Daughter... All her Ways Are Empty,'” in Barbara Haskell, Agnes Martin (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1992).

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her (Buddhist) beliefs – of the self and egolessness – as a “viable model of being that drove Martin's life and that is insistently raised by her practice.”5 Bringing together sexuality and “quietism,” Katz offers an explanation for Martin's Buddhism that assumes her closeting: “For closeted homosexuals such as Martin […] Zen offered a distinctly different and far more salutary relation to a proscribed identity than did any of the dominant Western traditions.”6 Silence is, for Katz, turned from suppression to a “healthy and productive” mechanism by the fashion for Zen in the 1950s US art world.7 As Katz notes Martin's adherence to a rhetoric of expressionism in her writing is in tension with the non-authorial and the “egolessness” of Buddhist practice; “The great paradox is that absence, abandonment, and renunciation are her chosen forms of selfexpression” he states.8 In regard to studio habits, it should also be noted that in drawing on her Buddhist beliefs and its practices of meditation, the artist's disciplined daily painting practices might place her in the masculine realm of autonomy, control and selfcontainment; yet, these same practices can be read in ways other than mastering the studio. In particular, this chapter turns to her image's coding as masculine; however, the “butch lesbian” that Butt identifies as Martin's 1950s identity and her Buddhist-inflected ascetic practices – which connote a paradoxical mastery – will be discussed not as beneficial or a hinderance, but as a challenge as they work against the conventional masculine values which accreted around images of the studio.9 Specifically, this will entail looking at Martin's image on film. In Mary Lance's monographic documentary, With My Back to the World (2003), 5 Jaleh Mansoor, “Self-Effacement, Self-inscription: Agnes Martin's Singular Quietude” in (ed.) Lynne Cooke et al, Agnes Martin (2012). p.157. 6 Katz, The Sexuality of Abstraction, p.178. 7 For more on mid-twentieth century art and Buddhism see Jacquelyn Baas, Smile of the Buddha: Eastern Philosophy and Western Art from Monet to Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 207-219 and Thomas McEvilley, “Grey Geese Descending,” Artforum, 25, No. 10 (Summer 1987). 8 Katz, The Sexuality of Abstraction, p.174. 9 With reference to Krasner's sexually-ambivalent self-styling as “Lee” (not Lenore), Ann Gibson has commented on the benefits for women artists in the “strictly defined limits of identity” imposed by Abstract Expressionism. Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, p.155-165.

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the camera follows Martin as she paints, with some difficulty, in her New Mexico studio. Her laboured breathing and the aching slowness of her movements demonstrate the sheer physical effort exerted by her elderly body as she struggles to continue making artwork. Challenging the conventional notion of artistic practice as something to be mastered, I read in Lance's film a frustrating confrontation in which materials don't always do what the artist wants them to. With regard to her own creative practice, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has stressed the importance of the middle ranges of agency – where “relationality happens” – entailed when artworks “press back” to touch us. This chapter analyses Lance's documentary film of Martin's studio habits as a candid portrayal of the not-always-triumphant trials of art making, reading it through Sedgwick’s equally frank version of artistic practice. This focus seeks to disrupt the sense of the artist as masterful (and thus, her space and practice as mastered) and, in doing so, challenge the naturalised heterosexuality and gendered traditions of the studio-view genre. In addition to asking what kind of subject emerges from the processes that come to light (from our seeing her making) in studio-based imagery, it will be argued that the artist's various performance of her studio habits constructs the studio as a particular kind of space. This spatial realm – installed in the gap left by the dispersal of Martin's materials – is an altogether different space than the archived remains raked over in previous chapters. Moreover, it is one that disturbs the exclusionary hierarchies of the mythical studio-view and, specifically, its rhetoric of mastery.

Limited vision The desire to see how something is made is at play in the perennial interest in the artist's studio. With regard to Martin's studio, this desire to see how her paintings are made may be more urgently felt because her studio has been dispersed. A face to face 179

encounter with the studio – a physical immersion in its materiality – is no longer possible. But throughout her career, Martin's studio was, like so many others, documented in photographs, films and written accounts. Iterations, like these, afford us valuable insight in the historical practices and techniques of the studio painter. Martin's studio habits begins to crystallise in documentation of her sparse studio spaces: her habit of hanging canvases in the same spot on the studio wall at a height centred on her outstretched hands; her repetitive practice in which, as she admitted herself, (almost) the same (virtually identical) painting was painted day after day (“some kind of record”), containing endlessly repeated lines; and the ascetic neatness of her working space. Photographs of Martin's studio tend to register a sense of stillness and calm that reiterates her studio practice of pre-meditation, the quiet wait for inspiration, and careful production. Alexander Liberman's photograph of Martin [Fig. 8] frustrates in this regard. The artist and photographer have contrived a pose which correlates with her claim to make painting with her “back to the world” – suggesting a practice that refuses reference to the world around it. Posed in front of her canvas (either a work in progress, perhaps, or the finished article), Martin's body eclipses a portion of that painting. She is pressed up, almost embracing the canvas, and we are denied a full view of the artwork. She seems to be in touching distance of the canvas. If she had her eyes open, her vision would be taken up fully by the canvas. But with her back to us, neither her eyes nor hands, the painter's primary bodily tools, are visible; we are left to wonder what it is she is doing to the canvas. Is she painting or just looking? The photograph promises a sense of the artist's private space by featuring the artist in close proximity to her painting, but it simultaneously refuses it by positioning the camera in such a way that crucial details remain hidden. As we are shown only the artist's back, we even have to take it on trust

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that this is an image of Martin at all.10 This lack of clarity in Liberman's photograph holds my attention; I am fascinated by its obfuscation as it slowly, and affectively, works on me – piquing my desire to confirm whether this photograph does indeed corroborate the artist's statements about her working methods. I want (or need) to know what is going on in the eclipsed portion of the photograph. I feel a strong urge to know, for instance, what Martin is doing in the screened-off part of the image, the area between artist and canvas. My attention is drawn to the angle of head, which suggests concentration, cocked to one side and accentuated by the curve of her ponytail. What is she looking at so intently? It is hard to tell, at a distance, at what stage of production this painting is in. It may be simply gessoed, primed ready for the painting to begin. Martin may be in some process of premeditation. Or is her intense attention focussed on the process of painting? Her hands cannot be seen, but they could easily be positioned so as to apply the graphic lines of a grid (the date of the photograph allows me to surmise that Martin's painting is a grid, rather than stripe, painting and also that she may be applying such a line with a pencil or pencil crayon). Or, according to accounts of her working method the artist may be in the process of editing out of failed paintings.11 Studio-view imagery has been purported to visualise what is hidden from view in the privacy of the studio. But, more often than not, this gesture toward disclosure – a publicising of privacy – constructs new hidden realms. Liberman's photograph of Martin bears comparison, in this regard, with Johannes Vermeer's Art of Painting (1666). Seemingly, this studio-view painting draws back the curtain to reveal the innersanctum of the private studio. In doing so, it produces further intrigue; the painter's back 10 Liberman's stated intention, in regard to his studio-view photographs, is to document the artist's space “to reveal the core of the creative act.” Liberman, The Artist in the Studio p.9 11 She overproduced paintings, one a day, as a matter of course, destroying those she deemed failures. For accounts of her studio practice see Griselda Pollock, “Agnes Dreaming Agnes” in de Zegner and Teicher (eds.), 3x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing - Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2005)

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we see revealed provides a puzzle: who is the mysterious painter and who is painting him?12 Furthermore, the curious lacuna that Liberman's camera angle creates resembles an experience of visiting studio spaces which, in part at least, is an interest in inhabiting the space between artist and work and, for curator/archivist, of preserving what cannot be seen but is felt to be there – the artist's presence. As I suggested in the chapter on Lee Krasner, preserved and exhibited spaces like the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio are also adept in their suggestion that their former occupants have just left the scene. This tenuously sensed artist we give life to in the unshakable and impossible feeling that the absent artist (however long deceased) is somehow present and exists somewhere just out of our line of sight. This is the very space that is now eclipsed and evoked in the Liberman photograph; “high modernist reportage,” as Bergstein characterises his photography, Liberman's image works to make the artist present by conflating the artist's mind (or intentions) with the studio environment wrapped in a language of documentary veracity.13 Made just before her retirement and death, the film Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World (dir. Mary Lance; 2003) speaks to some of the desires to witness the artist's working practices. Following the elderly artist around her studio, the camera affords us an intimate portrait. This short documentary (57 minutes) was shot over four years (between 1998 and 2002). Its interviews are intercut with scenes of Martin at work in her sparse Taos studio, archival footage, and still photography from her long career.14 We are able to linger close up on the artist's still-agile hand as she paints [Fig. 49].

12 H. Perry Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer” in Cole and Pardo (eds.), The Invention of the Studio (2005) 13 Bergstein, “The Artist in his Studio,” p.45. 14 It is interesting that, in keeping with the studio-view's version of art-making, the film's explanatory blurb claims that: “in keeping with Martin's chosen life of solitude, she alone appears in the documentary.” Though this gives an explanation of its depiction of the solitary artist in private space as other than a nod to tradition; however, regardless of this, it still comports to standards of vue d'atelier imagery and, significantly, to Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg's film of Jackson Pollock (c.1951).

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Elsewhere we catch her eye as it follows her hand and brush moving down the canvas. Sometimes the camera is poised at a lateral angle between artist and canvas allowing the viewpoint denied by the Liberman photograph. Martin's voice-over stitches these shots together providing a smooth transition between them and, through suturing the sound of her voice with image to produce a narrative and point of view that positions the spectator to see as Martin sees (or seeing as she makes).15 This off-frame voice, supplementing the artist's hand or eye, allows the artist to appear to “live” – as a presence – beyond the film's frames. As with Pollock's voice as it supplements the images of the Namuth-Falkenberg film, discussed in the last chapter, this presence offframe suggests something lacking on screen. Drawing on André Bazin's claim that the film characters are able to “live” beyond the screen, Barthes argues that this is not always the case with the photograph: Now, confronting millions of photographs, including those which have a good studium, I sense no blind-field: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutely one this frame is passed beyond. When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represent do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anaesthetised and fastened down, like butterflies. Yet once there is punctum, a blind field is created (is divined).16

For Barthes, the average photograph is unable to allow its subjects a life beyond the boundary of its edges, for them to inhabit a space off-frame; however, the subjective punctum – the affective or interesting point to the photograph – installs a narrative element to the photograph. Affected by an interesting photograph, we tend to expand upon it. While the seductive (hypnotic) movement on the cinema (or video) screen means we have neither the time nor need to add anything, the static photograph allows us to linger on it (somewhat fetishistically).17 This point is made by Barthes, in Camera 15 This may have been the rationale behind the Namuth-Pollock conceit of painting onto glass with the camera placed below the glass in order to see the artist as he makes – to see what he is looking at. 16 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.55 This blind-field is translated from the French “champs aveugle” and so could be translated as “blind area.” Barthes refers to Bazin's What is Cinema? (University of California Press, Berkeley and LA, 1967). 17 Barthes, Camera Lucida: “Do I add images in movies? I don't think so; I don't have time: in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes.” (p.55) If we are interested enough to linger we add to the image and for Barthes this means “in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close

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Lucida, as part of a larger project in which the role of the reader in textual production is developed (to which I will return later). Barthes famously differentiates between a photograph in which everything is contained (all good studium) and one in which, on encountering it, we find things continue to happen (just out of sight). The punctum of these photographs has the potential to, literally, move, or “animate” the viewer; as he puts it: “I animate it, and it animates me.”18 Once there is interest in the photographic image “a blind field is created” and its subjects are animated (cinematically), free to emerge, or transgress the frame. While the punctum might be defined for the subject aroused by it, it is sometimes “unfathomable.” And this has something to do with my interest in the aforementioned eclipsed area of Liberman's image. My desire to see more is animated by the image, and, in turn, I animate it. The withholding of some element – perhaps, in being denied the ability to see everything we want to see – is, for Barthes, the key to finding oneself desiring something in the photograph.19 Moreover, like pornography's closed system, in which satisfaction of desire and curiosity lead to a strangely dull experience, the interest I find in the blind area of space activated within Liberman's photograph is of a different quality to the exuberance of material, and the availability, of Francis Bacon's Studio as our eyes.” (p.53) For fetishism and photography see Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish” in October, Vol. 34, (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90. 18 Animation is, according to the OED, to “bring to life” or to “give inspiration, encouragement or renewed vigour.” Barthes refers to animation in Camera Lucida. He claims, “the attraction certain photographs exerted upon me was advenience or even adventure. This picture advenes, that one doesn’t.” (p.19) “The principle of adventure allows me to make Photography exist,” he continues (p.19) In this, the existence of the photograph itself depends, therefore, on subjective experience. “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated… but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure.” (p.20) Interest in a photograph is, thus, determined by the viewer's animation which, in turn, creates “the adventure.” Therefore, Barthes concepts of studium and punctum connect existence and adventure of photo: “its existence (its “adventure”) derived from the co-presence of two discontinuous elements, heterogeneous in that they did not belong to the same world [...]” (p.23). According to Barthes, subjective attraction to particular photographs leave its photographic existence and the animation of its subject matter in the eye of the beholder. 19 Barthes turns to the differences between eroticism and pornography to make this point: “The presence (the dynamics) of this blind field is, I believe, what distinguishes the erotic photograph from the pornographic photograph.” Camera Lucida, p.57.

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it has been preserved and exhibited. It has been arranged carefully and archived meticulously, it gives the correct cultural connotations about studio practice; to use Barthes's photographic terminology about that space, its studium is “good,” the image satisfies. But it is airless and self-contained. It conforms to Barthes description of the subject's of the punctum-lacking photograph: “anaesthetised and pinned down.” The glass of that exhibit may allow for a slight sense of distancing and we are forced to crane our necks in order to see everything, but, there is no mysterious portion to grab our attention. I struggle to see the concealed portion between artist and canvas in Liberman's photograph. In this blind spot, I speculate about the “life” in which Martin practices. I imagine Martin is in the act of painting – a process in which seeing and making occur simultaneously; or, I infer, she may be simply looking at what she has made. I want to see what she is making and seeing as part of an interest in studio habits. Gauging the various ways in which artists have made work in the studio and how they have chosen to show this can be indicative of what her approach to the canvas is; however, that is as one voice amongst many in the act of reception, not because her intentions (and their shaping of the environment) are privileged. My interest is in process and reception (in acts of seeing and making) as studio habits. The lacuna in Liberman's photograph, formed by the artist's silhouette is where, I surmise, Martin's acts of seeing and making happened. The blind-field – “which I animate and animates me” – is where the image expands, the spot in which I want to add to what is already there. As Martin's studio materials have not been archived, the view we have of her studio processes is limited. After Martin's death, these were dispersed and, like various earlier studio locations (at Coenties Slip and South Street in Manhattan, New York and Cuba, Galisteo and Taos in New Mexico), the artist's final studio was abandoned. Her

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studio will now only ever exist in the documentation of her practice. Incomplete, lost or missing, any archive of knowledge of the artist's practice must rely on fragments, such as Liberman's photographs, Lance's film or written accounts of the studio (either Martin's or those of others) and the paintings themselves. Like the interest sparked by the photograph, a desire-to-see is generated around the limited vision offered by Martin's archive. It emanates from anxiety in being denied (intimate) access to the object of desire (which, for me, is the desired object of my research – knowledge regarding Martin's practice). Martin's studio can only be considered in its immateriality. The relative abundance of studio material archived in the studios of Bacon, or Krasner and Pollock, is denied to the research interested in Martin's studio time. Left with only these scant traces, does this relative paucity of archival material place limits on our understanding of her practice?20 There is something very satisfactory about inhabiting studio spaces – treading the floorboards upon which Jackson Pollock flung his paints at the Pollock-Krasner House, for instance. The absent artist can seem, though always out of sight, very close at hand. “True respect” of an archival subject, Derrida contends, is impossible in an archive: “the structure of the archive is spectral […] a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met.”21 The archive's traces – both the Pollock's splashed floorboards and the “blind field” of Liberman's photograph – should take us elsewhere. As Derrida points out, these cannot refer meaningfully to an origin; the archive only constructs what it purports to record. Perhaps the pleasures of looking – the places this takes us – is a route to something approaching the respectful portrayal of practice we long to find in studio-view imagery and spaces themselves. Can Martin's immaterial archive provide a satisfactory image of 20 As Derrida contends in Memoirs of the Blind, with reference to the act of portraying, truly respecting (really seeing) the other must always stem from a momentary blindness. Sketching the other, for example, forces the sketcher to momentarily divert the eyes from the object of study. The subject of a portrait is always rendered from ruinous fragments drawn from memory. As such, for Derrida, blindness is a precondition of seeing. 21 Derrida, Archive Fever, p.84

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her practice? What would this look like? How would it compare with the archived studio? How does the “life” that emerges through interest in a photograph, say, differ from the sense of the absent artist felt in the inhabitation of physical studio space or as felt in a painting? Apart from their aesthetic qualities, an encounter with an abstract painting can be a demanding experience. Tree's bare grids, for example, register a lack of visual reference; between the gesso-ed background (primed lightly, in two coats, in order to preserve the canvas's texture) and the red ruled graphic lines there would seem to be little or nothing to hold our attention. Made, according to the artist, without reference to the visual world (save the incongruous title), we might strain to experience them as art. We might perceive something hidden or barely shown – a condition similar to the experience of the “blind field” in Liberman's portrait – as we struggle to see their surface pattern, which, according to distance, shift in and out of sight. Like the photograph, this suggestion of concealment activates a curiosity – a desire to see – that animates the paintings. Either physically, or mentally (to use an analogy) the visual impairment they induce impels us to lean in towards the paintings.22 Brendan Prendeville has noted, with reference to phenomenology, that moving back and forth in this way in front of the painting re-orientates the viewer between “seeing the painting and seeing what the painter has done.” Prendeville claims that, in this act of looking, the painting has “become a world” one which “induces us to consider [Martin] as a historical agent, acting in and out of a world her acts themselves helped to constitute.”23 In agreement with Prendeville, I would say a sense of touch is fielded to fill the void left by diminished sight. The blind alleys that Martin's painting 22 Chave makes a point of the propensity of Martin's painting to induce us to lean in. Chave, “Humility” p.138. Brendan Prendeville (2010) calls on the “dissonance” of “moving back and forth” in front of a painting “seeing the painting and seeing what the painter has done.” Although this is a leaning-in, it is also a moving away. Prendeville relates this to “perceptual doubt” and phenomenology. 23 Brendan Prendeville, “The Meaning of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans” in Oxford Art Journal, 31:1 2008. p.64.

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takes us down forces our attention to temporality itself. More specifically, we are taken back in time to the act of painting (or making): to the time of the studio. In not being given to see either Martin's hand or eye, her acts of making and looking are recreated, precisely, by straining to see what is concealed from us. Martin's acts are given a narrative life – a history. The artist is thus produced as an historical agent, suggesting the possibility that, though materially dispersed rather than conventionally archived, a version of “Agnes Martin” still tends to materialise (or manifest) despite the immateriality of her studio space. As an entity bound up with the emergence of a “world,” to paraphrase Prendeville, what kind of space does this creative agent inhabit? An immaterial space emerges through this encounter, one which has the contours, creative potential and affective resonance of a material studio. This performed space matters to the degree that it is interpreted as inhabitable spatial realm and maps onto a cultural reference point of of the architectural interior. Both the sense of a psychic interiority (of “Agnes Martin”) and architectural interiority that are produced in an imaginative encounter with the historical studio habits have the potential to be placed in a mirrored duality of artist and studio and, therefore, read in modernist terms as the mastery of practice. However, as simultaneously material and immaterial, a tension produces an open sense of the time of studio habits, of past artistic practices that are re-performed in our looking. Thus the encounter with an historic artistic agency brings it into the present rather than taking us back in time. As I will turn to now, this immaterial materiality works to unsettle the exclusionary rhetoric of mastery that has been regularly mobilised as an explanation of the studio-view.

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Studio and Gallery The institutional separation of studio and gallery has been the subject of critique since the early 1970s. Despite these inroads, a standard view of those spaces might still run as follows: the making of artworks occurs in the artist's studio in the past; the viewing of artworks happens in the gallery or museum, belonging in the present. The artwork is made and seen in separate spatial (and temporal) domains; the studio, in this model, is a “unique” space of production, the place of art's processing where raw materials become great art.24 Diametrically opposed in this relationship, the gallery is, uniquely, a space of exhibition. Art is completed always before leaving the studio and its re-situation on the gallery wall. Spaces attached, in this way, to a linear temporality can prove to be problematic for all but the most traditional views of the process and reception of art; and for all but the privileged few who have managed to occupy private spaces of this kind. Situating practices in a linear progression of past making and present looking fail to account for important and nuanced aspects of Martin's studio habits. During the time of Martin's early grid works, prevailing modernist critical and, particularly, formalist theories of art relied on such a separation of spheres of making and seeing. If the completion of all processes of production is considered to occur in the studio before a painting's re-situation to the gallery wall, this would advocate that the resulting axiomatic artwork has a “presentness,” to paraphrase Michael Fried: a meaningfulness

24 The artist, Daniel Büren (1971), claims that “the studio as the unique space of production and the museum as the unique space of exposition” and both are “ossifying customs of art.” Along with the site specificity of the Minimalists, the institutional critique of the artist Büren sought to undermine what he saw as the spurious “neutrality” of the gallery. Arguing for a site specificity to all artwork, Büren argued that the “stationary” studio is the only place where the “portable” artwork truly belongs. This put the artwork in a bind: moving it, or changing its setting, would remove it from “its own reality” whilst allowing it to stay put, no-one would see it. The “neutrality” of the gallery system bridges this gap providing a neutral setting for artworks. Büren's work sought to critique that neutrality by highlighting the gallery setting by painting stripes. Büren, “The Function of the Studio (1971)” in October, Vol. 10 (Autumn 1979) pp. 51-58

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trans-historically present concurrently, and identical, to all its viewers.25 Should she/he be able to appreciate its evident values, the viewer's only role, in this contentious theory of art, is to judge the inherent quality or value of the masterwork (and acknowledge the competence of the artistic master). As many feminist theorists have pointed out, both the ability to “master” artistic practices (in a studio) and the licence to judge quality have themselves been subject to the exclusionary dictates of a privileged group.26 Moreover, the suggestion, in this teleological paradigm, of both a definable origin and end product separates studio and gallery into an equally exclusionary economy of production and consumption. Furthermore, aligning, exclusively, studio and production privileges a form of active agency in the studio (as I will turn to later) as a place where raw material (nature) is processed by that active agent into art (or culture). As this thesis has sought to define, this alignment (splitting, as these binary alignments tends to do, along gender lines) reverts to a heterosexist economy in which masculinity is a required element of artistic creativity making it doubly difficult, for all but modernism's privileged subject, to take up the position of the artist.27 However, Martin's practice does not match the contours of this linear model of the creative process. The co-performance of the artist and studio space that might be referred to by Martin's painting produces a convoluted temporality in which her past acts are dependent on the reading of them in

25 Michael Fried (1969) polemically described “presentness” as the measure of quality in modern artworks. Presentness is placed in opposition to presence which has a durational (or, according to Fried, a theatrical) element which is improper to Fried's rigid distinction of various artistic disciplines. Where presence implies a temporal situation, presentness is atemporal or timeless. Fried's version of modernist art – as one of form and presentness – clearly runs counter to have a problem with my view of the process of receiving a painting like Martin's as one in which we are returned to her handiwork or her “constitutive acts.”A truncated version of Fried's formalist dictum can be found is his statement: “The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Artforum, June, 1967 26 See, for example, Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Pandora: London, 1995). 27 Modernity's “social organisation of time” – rigidly defined as past, present and future – is one which hegemonic structures (capitalism, nationality, the family) to the exclusion of all other forms of temporality. See Caroline Dinshaw (et al), “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion” in GLQ 13:2-3, 2007. p.188.

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the present. As such, the spatio-temporal splitting of spheres of making and seeing, though culturally agreed upon, are unsustainable if we consider the transgression of their boundaries in Martin's studio habits. In terms of the painter, the specious distinction between studio and gallery is also one that defines privacy and publicity. But in making the studio visible, innumerable views of artistic space have purported to publicise privacy in such a way as to undermine those distinctions; Liberman's photograph, for example, visualises Martin's private world and provides a glimpse of work-in-progress, prior to its proper exhibition. But Martin is posing for Liberman and for her public. Choices have been made about what to show (the carefully positioned canvas, framed centrally by the photograph's edges, Martin's padded work clothes whose grid-patterning neatly pay homage to her artwork) and what to hide. With privacy publicly performed, or production as exhibited, the distinct edges are blurred between putatively inviolable territories. Similarly, claims for Martin's asceticism – growing up around her supposed flight from New York at the start of the 1970s – is, paradoxically, evidenced by the widely disseminated image of her alone. That is not to say that there is something duplicitous about Martin's purported enjoyment of solitude. But it must be noted that privacy and publicity are not quite the antonyms they are made out to be; instead this opposition is a culturally agreed upon construction. The poststructuralist critique of the author further collapses a distinction between studio and gallery if we consider the role of exhibitionary space and its audience in textual production. Martin's statement to Lucy Lippard (1967) that “the responsibility for the response to art is not with the artist,” professed a personal view that the production of a work's meaning rested, in part, with its observers.28 The 28 Martin quoted in Dieter Schwarz, Agnes Martin: Writings (Schriften) (Ostfildern: Cantz-Verlag, 1991) p.18 The full quote reads: “When we go to museums we do not just look, we make a definite response to the work. A we look at it we are happier or more sad, more at peace or more depressed. A work may

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encounter with painting in exhibition space is, in part, one in which personal meaning may be produced, in which the work's viewer makes an authoritative stance or “a definitive response.” A lived practice of Buddhism inflected Martin's theoretical approach to art. The Buddhist framework by which Martin claimed to have worked found its critical corollary, almost at the same historical moment, in the author critique of the late 1960s taken up in texts by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.29 Though initially Barthes's theories concerned the reading of literary texts (and applied, in subsequent years to art theory), shifting the locus of meaningful production from the author to the reader reconfigures the space of a painting's exhibition (a place in which we see, or “read,” a visual text) as a space of production (of writing, re-writing or making). Barthes distinguishes between the reading of a work of art as an act of “consumption” that can only invoke appreciations of quality or taste – markers of modernist criticism; however, reading work as a text is an act of “play, production and activity” – activities we could associate with the processes of art-making and studio habits. The text, as an aspect of language, invites its viewer into an “active collaboration” or conversation requiring the reader to actively perform rather than passively consume the work. Bringing deconstruction and Buddhism into alignment, Jay Prosser claims that Barthes's “text” and the Buddhist koan share similarities – in ways that are suggestive for reading the cognitive dissonance that could be said to characterise Martin's painting.30 The content of neither the Barthesian text nor the Buddhist koan is as stimulate yearning, helplessness, belligerence or remorse. The cause of the response is not traceable in the work. An artist cannot and does not prepare for a certain response. He does not consider the response but simply follows his inspiration. Works of art are not purposively conceived. The response depends on the condition of the observer.” First printed: Lucy R. Lippard, “Homage to the Square,” Art in America, vol.55, n.4 (July/Aug 1967). p55. 29 “Death of the Author” (1968) and “From Work to Text” (1971) – and Michel Foucault's “What is an Author?” (1969-70). Jay Prosser contends that Barthes's critical project is one in which Buddhism themes emerge. See Jay Prosser, “Buddha Barthes: What Barthes Saw in Photography (That He Didn't in Literature)” Literature and Theology, Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2004, pp.211-222. 30 A koan is a puzzle consisting of absurd or contradictory statements which produce extreme cognitive dissonance in the mind of the one faced with the koan. The content is not as important as the mental

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important as the mental state they produce in the viewer's (or reader's) encounter (or meditation) with them. There is no discernible “truth” in either a koan or Barthes's “text.” Both are dialectical, a process of realisation rather than revelation. In this collaborative process, the artist's role as sole producer of meaning is undermined. The “biographical” agent behind the work – the one who writes/paints – (her expression) is free to emerge but only as a fragile “guest” within the text.31 This would seem to match with Martin's Buddhism and its aim to empty out ego. It also proposes, as do Martin's paintings, a shared responsibility for meaning and a two step process of production (part in the studio and partly in the gallery) as a dialectical relationship. Thus it also challenges the modernist subject as a coherent subject behind the work; a subject which the studio-view has excelled at promoting. Martin's written accounts of her practice acknowledge the audience's part in the production of her artworks. This sharing of responsibility for textual production set her apart from her historical contemporaries as Martin did not cede all claim on the production of painting. Though exhibiting, early in her career, with many artists who would later be associated with it as a movement, Martin carefully distinguished herself from Minimalism.32 Similarly negating the modernist role for the artist as securing the work's authority and meaning, certain Minimalist work differentiates from Martin's painting in its site-specificity. Inasmuch as meaning did not exist outside the specifics of the encounter between work and audience, the meaning of Minimalist work could be state of satori they produce. The koan is “designed less to explain the truth than provoke an awakening to truth that words conventionally cover over. The truth of a koan 'cannot be understood by logic; it cannot be transmitted by words; it cannot be explained in writing; it cannot be measured by reason.'” Prosser, “Buddha Barthes” p.211. 31 The author comes back as “one of his characters,” as a “guest,” in the Text. But not “privileged and paternal” but a “paper author.” “There is a reversal, and it is the work which affects the life, not the life that affects the work [...] The word 'bio-graphy' resumes its strong meaning, in accordance with its etymology. At the same time, the enunciation's sincerity, which has been the veritable 'cross' of literary morality, becomes a false problem: The I that writes the text is never more than a paper I.” Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text” in Josue V. Harari, ed., Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979), p. 272 32 Prendeville, “Agnes Martin,” p.56

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said to only exist in the gallery situation. For Martin's painting practice, on the other hand, the studio was of crucial importance. Not only was it the place in which, she claimed, her “inspiration” instigated the production of each painting, it was also a space in which she exhibited her painting to herself in the editing stage that formed an important part of her practice. For Martin, the painting's production of meaning has two steps; the first involves her production of the physical canvas, the second step involves the observer in a space outside the studio. Martin's paintings undermine the idea of the studio as, in Büren's words, the “unique place of production” through their openness to the processes of reception.33 The total abandonment of the studio, or the radical gesture of negating all responsibility for the work, are strategies opposed by Martin who chose to share or build communities of equal importance between making in the past and seeing in the present. Like studio-based images, the author-critique disturbs simplistic, linear or clear-cut models of temporality. Spheres of seeing and making (exhibition and production, present and past) are first separated in order to bring them together in a productive tension. A sense of the artist's hand emerges in Martin's paintings. Like the minimalists pared-down forms, Martin's aesthetic is visually simple; the primed surface's basic division by bare graphic lines uses equally bare materials: gesso and pencil. As thought experiments (or Buddhist koans) their emptiness activates the viewer through cognitive dissonance – we don't know what we are looking at, so we lean in. The grids are laid out precisely and logically according to Martin's (infinitely complex and unfathomably esoteric) working out [Fig. 50]. We can either see this in the film, or we perceive it in the geometric grids. As mathematically precise they suggest a beginning, middle and end to the process of their drawing – like the words on a page start at the top left and make their way down. Whether Martin's grids begin top or bottom, left or right, their 33 Büren, “The Function of the Studio” p.51

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linear precision encourages us to “read” the painting as it was made.34 Tracing the methodically drawn graphic lines of Martin's grids, looking, becomes a form of (re)writing bringing us to the present moment. As opposed to the formalist reading of the art object's supposed “presentness,” the viewer performs this present durationally. We act it out. But, on leaning in, the rigid precision of the grid-lines are shown to have a hand-made quality [Fig. 51]. What passes for a geometric logic allows us to imagine a start and finish to their making, their manual rendering recalls the hand that made them. The legibility of the grids, which we read as pre-meditation, allows us to re-trace a historical agent's hand – for which we imagine an interiority and name as Agnes Martin – in its movement across the canvas. This hand closely resembles Barthes's “guest” author constructed within the collaborative text: “The hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not expression), traces a field without origins... language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.”35 The studio (origin) it refers to cannot be claimed as the “true” one. But, like the koans which the paintings resemble the truth is not on offer in Martin's abstract painting. The collaborative conversation they proffer is one of dissonance between distancing (machine-like quality) and intimacy (touching – across time with the artist in the past). Tension between the present moment and the historical present of the artist's “hand.” Viewing Martin's paintings “as they were made” brings incongruent presents together into a productive tension: one that challenges the traditional idea of a studio and, more specifically, its suggestions of singular origins. With linear temporality put out-of-synch – or as “two presents playing at once” which Anne-Marie Jagose names as temporally queer – this provides an alternative to the mutual exclusion (and exclusivity)

34 Prendeville's close reading of Martin's grids involves counting lines, claiming that “in counting, I retrace her steps.” Prendeville contrasts the “reiterative” production of these paintings with the “cumulative” work of Jackson Pollock. “Agnes Martin” p.66-68 35 Barthes, “Death of the Author” p.146

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of separate spatio-temporal spheres on the studio-gallery production line.36 Through “reading” Martin's grids the viewer is brought to the present moment and into close conversation with a historical present – a narrative device designed to draw the reader into the action – in which a historical agent, “Agnes Martin,” is performed.37 In their reference to studio time in the time (and space) of their reception, Martin's paintings are temporally out-of-joint; we see their past (their making) after the fact, in the present. Prendeville neatly sums up this propensity to bring us to the possibility of multiple presents, underscoring our inability to know Martin's intentions: Our own orientation, in looking, does not need to recapitulate [Martin's], and indeed cannot: the irreversible acts of painting and illimitable acts of looking comprise incongruent histories whose only common term is the given work. What cannot be gainsaid, though, is that works propose an elective move towards the field away from the frame. It is precisely on these terms that we may find our way to them. The most historical line of approach might also be the most personal.38

For Prendeville, Martin's “irreversible acts” are registered by the painted surface and its graphic lines, in a past that is seen in a historical present. Our “illimitable” readings of that surface occur in a present that is already passing. Mapping onto one another, these “incongruent histories,” Prendeville claims, move us (or animate us) away from Martin's acts of painting – that is, away from the “frame” – and more towards a textual field of collaborative exchange. A sharing of responsibility with the viewer for meaning by emphasising studio-time and bringing this “history” to the paintings reception, our “illimitable” act of looking at Martin's paintings give us a freedom to make that mimics her making – our re-tracing of her traces. Prendeville notes that the most historical (or academic) approach here may also be the least conventionally academic or pleasurable. The tension between these competing temporal presents engenders, for our 36 Anne-Marie Jagose in Dinshaw (et al), “Theorizing Queer Temporalities” p.182. 37 The historical present is a convention we use to talk about painting in general; it is one that brings the creation of painted works (conventionally, an aspect of the past) and our encounter with them (conventionally, in the present) together. We see (or speak of seeing) paintings as if they were being made in front of us; we say, for example, Martin's grids are drawn across her canvases, rather than the temporally correct were. Using the historical present, the present moment (of seeing) becomes an effect of the past (of making). 38 Prendeville, “Agnes Martin” p.71

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encounter with the paintings, a space apart, a peripheral or threshold space outside of normative temporality. The linear temporality of an artificially separated studio/gallery relationship point to the studio as an origin and, hence, the archivisation of studio space seems imperative, its loss unbearable. While the abundant materiality of the archived studio may be satisfying, it may also be stultifying. The visitor to these spaces is orientated very much in the present moment, in the staged fantasy of time being stilled. Returning to Prendeville account of artistic practices, the “irreversible” traces of the artist – as read in the studio's materiality – are very much congruent with limited acts of looking that the abundance of material might promote. In contrast, the asynchronous time and nowhere space of Martin's immaterial studio free us to re-imagine studio histories and what it is to practice painting on alternative lines to the gendering binaries and heterosexist economies that run on them. The sense of studio that emerges is neither production nor exhibition but a threshold space between these points. Neither in the past nor the present. Neither here and now, there and then. Part irreversible fact, part illimitable response. This sense of studio is something immaterial and open, dynamic and collaborative.

Painting Difficulties (Not Mastering the Studio) The critique of the author promotes a sense that we actively respond to and engage with images (or texts) put before us. The reception of Martin's paintings gives a sense of intimacy with an historical agency whose “hand” we see in the lines that stretch across the canvases. The idea of distinct time and space for process and reception begins to fail in considering the viewer's encounter with art in terms of the poststructuralist critique of authority. In this, the practising artist (a scriptor, in Barthes' terminology) is performed in the text. Approached in this way, the reception of paintings, or 199

photographs, becomes a matter of production in the sense we, the readers, somehow add to, or complete the work. Martin's graphic paintings promote active textual production in their reception through their propensity to get us to actively read them – through, for example, the premeditation we read into the grid's logic as a form of writing. This brings the reader (in the present) into close contact with an imagined agency in an historical present.39 A feature of language, we tend to consider that the lines are stretched across the canvas in a historical present; rather than that they were stretched in a historical past. Where Freeman has claimed that this alignment of bodies across time is a potentially erotic experience, if not erotic, it is at least, suggestive of intersubjective exchange.40 Moreover, this emerging agency is comparable to the “life” expanded by my desire to see more in the “blind field” of the photograph. Readings of the studio-view tends to represent a form of artistic subjectivity that is attributed a resolutely active agency. This carefully worded mythology dictates that the modernist artistic subject is supported in creative endeavour by passive and malleable studio materials including, as noted in the previous chapter's example, the artist's body. Jane Blocker has claimed that the active/passive dynamic implicit in conventional mid-twentieth century criticism invokes, what she calls, a “stray male principle.”41 Consequently, creativity is dramatised in such a way that the studio-view requires a masculine lead. Furthermore, this paradigm relies on sexual difference rather than sameness for its dramatic effect – wherein the masculinised, active agent of culture relies on its “other” as a foil against which it the subject is constructed in relief. As Blocker notes: these dramas are not written in the language (or, in any way, for the benefit of) female or queer pleasure; the desires “patterned upon a naturalised 39 Lauren Berlant argues that linking thinking to being in the “now” or the ongoing present is a disturbed sense of the historical present which is emotionally moving. Lauren Berlant, “Thinking About Feeling Historical” in Emotion, Space and Society 1 (2008) pp.4-9. She takes this up again in Cruel Optimism (2011) where the historical present is a permanent state of crisis in which we all live. 40 See Freeman on “erotohistography” in Time Binds (2010). 41 Blocker, What the Body Cost, pp.69-82.

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heterosexuality” that circulate in this model are ones in which “the male subject longs for a feminised object” as the impulse to create.42 Clearly, this version of the studio poses problems for Martin; or to put this another way, Martin's studio habits calls into question the conventional readings of the studio-view. Clear-cut distinctions between the active and passive voice falter with Martin's practice. As described above, in written texts, Martin claimed to relinquish full responsibility her acts of painting, preferring to place emphasis on the “definitive” response of an active observer. Her claim is, I argued, corroborated by the active form of looking her painting demand of its viewer, in which an historical agency emerges (or is produced) from our re-tracing (or re-writing) of her gridded lines. In addition, there is the importance Martin placed in the processes of editing of the fruits of her prodigious daily output.43 This disciplined daily practice place her within the masculine realm of autonomy, control and self containment; however, these same studio habits are undertaken according to her Buddhist belief in principles of egolessness – placing mastery over the material world in tension with its letting go. Although Martin reputedly produced a painting per day, not all of these emerged from the studio. In editing, a form of active, authoritative and productive looking finishes the processes of making. In addition to the active forms of looking provoked by Martin's work (and advocated in the post-structuralist critique of authority), Martin's paintings speak to potential moments of passivity in making. Performing herself in the studio, taking us through her painting process in the film, With My Back to the World, Martin enacts the struggle to externalise the “mental image” she finds after time spent waiting and meditating in the studio: “I just sit there 42 Blocker, What the Body Cost, p.62. 43 The final part of her role in the process was one of editing. Though recognising her inability to render “perfection” Martin claimed her eye was more attuned to recognise it: “In our minds there is an awareness of perfection and when we look with our eyes we see it.” Martin quoted in Dieter Schwarz, Agnes Martin: Writings (Schriften) (Ostfildern: Cantz-Verlag, 1991) p18.

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and wait for inspiration. It comes, and I see the entire painting, every colour – everything – and I just paint it the way I've seen it.”44 Referring to the Buddhist teachings she attested to live by, the practice she describes, later in the film, involved time spent meditating in the studio, waiting for “inspiration” – a method that constructs her more as a pliable conduit than assertive voice in her work. In what follows on screen, we see a struggle to externalise this small scaleable mental image onto canvas. We are shown Martin puzzling over the tortuously convoluted sums she uses to work out the exact width “according to the image”; and the sheer physical effort exerted by her elderly body. This struggle to paint is heart-wrenchingly affirmed in her laboured breathing and the aching slowness of her movements. The endeavour to match the “perfection” of an inspired mental image is a cause of frustration; the artist's materials do not always do what she wants them to do.45 The inability of her hand to faithfully render the exactitude of the precisely-measured geometric lines can be seen, at close quarters, in Tree (1964); we see the texture of the lightly gessoed canvas as it refuses to yield to the pencil tip that Martin's hand wields. [Fig. 52] The line is dotted and in some areas the line is diverted by the raised bumps of the canvas. Martin's rendering of her perfect mental image in paint and pencil is confounded by the material's concerted resistance, its refusal to be agreeably malleable. Moments that fail to register as fully active are hidden or re-worded (hidden in plain sight) in the exclusionary rhetoric of genius and mastery dramatised in the mythology of the studio-view. Losing control in the studio is told in such a way to suggest a nihilistic active rejection of authority. In contrast, more measured terms of shared responsibility see Martin cling on to whatever control she can seriously claim.

44 Martin (aged 91) quoted in Dana Newman et al, New Mexico Artists at Work (Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2005) p.93. 45 Martin claimed: “The work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but [...] the paintings are very far from being perfect.” See Martin's note in Schwarz, Agnes Martin: Writings, p.15

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Similarly, in distinction to the radical and blinding lightning strike of illumination that, we could imagine, characterises the spark of genius, inspiration, in Martin's case, seems to imply an internal-thought process: waiting for inspiration as quietly taking place in complaisant solitude. Ceding control and waiting, therefore, are written into mythic versions of studio practice, not as passive moments, but as existential (action-packed) dramas. Where the studio (and process) comes into view, like in Rosenberg's description of Pollock's “arena,” it is as a public stage in the guise of a private arena for very public performances of the artist's interiority. Moreover, failure, as Gotlieb describes, is romanticised in such performances as debilitating interiority – the fine line between madness and genius – and dramatised as a cause for melancholy, depression or studiobound suicide.46 Against these readings, Martin's voice emerges through (auto)biographical studio documents: in the “life” that emerges from the photograph, the voice off-frame in the film, in her statements, and in the historical agency we divine as we imagine the artist's “hand” in the graphic traces of her paintings. These tangible, yet flimsy, versions of Martin's authority fluctuate in their register, from active to passive, at differing moments, across different iterations – from textual utterances, the artist we see on film and in photographs, and the one that makes its appearance through our reception of her process in painting – in such a way as to complicate whatever knowledge we feel we can glean from this biography. Taken together as a constellated image of her studio habits (or, in some cases, on their own) the performed subjectivities that are materialised in images of Martin's studio resist the conventional reading of that space as one of mastery. This version of the artiststudio relationship reiterate not a subject-object dyad in which the artist's “other” is the 46 Gotlieb, “Creation and Death in the Romantic Studio” in Cole and Pardo, Inventions of the Studio (2005).

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feminised object (the painting) but construct a subject whose object is the creation of that subject itself. As with the other case-studies of this thesis, this may be indicated in (still or moving) images where she is both the active artist and passive material, model or object. More specifically to Martin, in these moments of struggle with materials, difficulty, and failure, the definition of active agency as a sole property of the artist's body is disturbed by studio-view imagery in which the artist's will is only one determinant and materials “press back” in practice. Furthermore, in the split between our perception of the artist that performs in the text, film or photograph and the performing artist – one appearing as the other disappears – differing registers of agency are held by this split subject in the same moment; Martin, paradoxically, succeeds to portray artistic failure, for instance. Inventing herself as an artist on screen, the “other” that Martin performs is not installed, in a conventional way, as a foil against which the artistic subject (and his masculinity) is defined.

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Agnes Practising With regard to the “construction of an identity in artistic practice,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick refers to the importance of attending to the middle ranges of agency.47 This, she claims, is a means to acknowledge the space and time in which the artist meets material world (what I have been calling studio habits) as a method of avoiding (“often misconceived”) binaries of active and passive. Referring to agency as it applies to the language of visual practice, she states: Any verb, aside from the verb “to be,” generates a doer and done-to. And by this simple, built-in grammatical feature it thus makes it almost impossible for any language user to maintain a steady sense of the crucial middle ranges of agency: the field in which most of consciousness, perception and relationality really happen.48

We might consider, according to Sedgwick's logic, that reading Martin's image according to the conventions of the studio-view, the verb “to paint” generates, in that case, an active “painter” (or “doer”) and passive “painting” (or “done-to”). These designations deny both the middle ranges of agency and, therefore, the realm of studio habits. Fluctuating between active and passive registers, Martin's practice (as it is visualised in Lance's film, for example) could be compared to the ways in which Sedgwick describes artistic practice.49 An aim of Buddhist meditation – as practiced by Martin and Sedgwick – is the realisation of a suspension of agency. Sedgwick discusses the practices of making things as ones in which active and passive registers of agency are suspended. She describes producing art as an enjoyable struggle in which materials “press back.” Though Martin's painting practice differs completely from Sedgwick's – in terms of its form, content and professionalism (Sedgwick's visual art practice was a 47 Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness,” p.69. The essay was originally written for a conference, “The Construction of an Identity in Artistic Practice” at Goldsmith's College, London in 2007. 48 Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness,” p.79. 49 Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness,” pp.79-83.

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“hobby”) – the former's studio habits resonate with the latter's theory of the difficulties of practice: where Martin's struggles to render her mind's ideal in paint; her editing of failed paintings; and in terms of studio time spent waiting for inspiration. We are left with the constellated suggestion of artistic practice as something for which a definitive doer or done-to makes no sense. Practice, as it is made visible in Martin's studio-view film, registers the middle ranges of suspended agency where, Sedgwick contends, “relationality” occurs. It is the space (as in a mentally produced space) in which we imagine the artist practices. Touch is important to Sedgwick's version of artistic practice and its construction of “an artistic identity.” Referring to texture and making, Sedgwick claims: even more than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondle, to heft, to tap or enfold, and always to understand other people or natural forces as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.50

A relation to the past – to understand the prior actions of others – is opened up, for Sedgwick, by touch. Previously, a sense of haptic looking is where Martin has seemed most “live” in viewing her image. Lance's film offers a perspective in which we are given to see Martin's touch, the actions of her hands upon the canvas. Through these touching instances, the sense of the time (and space) of Martin's painting is brought to the fore. Touch is also an important element in still studio-view imagery. My struggle with the Liberman photograph [Fig. 8], the limited vision it offers, causes me to lean in – here I am faced with the materials texture and in touching distance (either metaphorically or literally). The paintings also re-orientate me, in this way, and leaning in to touching distance brings me to a particular understanding of Martin's practice. These instances of studio-view imagery bring a sense of artistic practice as a coproduction: more the suspended agency of “agnes practicing painting” than the dualistic

50 Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness” p.90

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“agnes paints a picture.”51 Reading the traces that remain of her life as a painter, Martin's straightforward account of her practice, attuned to Sedgwick's equally frank version – both attuned to their respective Buddhist beliefs – is disruptive to the idea of mastery. The ascetic habits that occupied Martin's time in the studio can seem to place her in a masculine realm of self-control and autonomy. Taken together with the artist's butch image – an androgynous quality still evident in Lance's documentary – this performance of masculinity contrasts with and undermines the conventional masculine values of mastery as read in studio-view imagery. If the studio artist always treads a line, sometimes negotiating with seemingly wilful materials, there can be no sense that the artist is in full control. Martin's practice recalls the contented struggle Sedgwick characterises her practice as: as “second-by-second negotiations […] and the questions “What will it let me do?” and “What does it want me to do?” are in constant, three-way conversation with “What is it that I want to do?.” This suspension of agency, Sedgwick claims, is both a more realistic proposition and a relief.52 In Lance's documentary, Martin recounts: “somebody asked me what was my happiest moment in painting. I told 'em: when they go out of the door, go out into the world.” Like Sedgwick, Martin finds relief in the moment at which she loses control over her work, in which her active role in her practice is complete. To admit the practice of painting as, sometimes, a struggle between two agencies – the artist and her materials – make a nonsense of any claim for 51 As a verb, “practise” registers (diathetically) as a middle voice: neither active nor passive, where the subject of the sentence cannot be defined. In relation to the Author-critique of the late 1960s, Barthes claims “to write” as a verb within the middle ranges of agency. This designation has important consequences: “In the case of the middle voice […] the subject affects himself in acting; he always remains inside the action, even if an object is involved.” Barthes (trans. Richard Howard), “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” in The Rustle of Language (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1987) 52 Sedgwick, “Making Things, Practicing Emptiness,” p.83. Sedgwick notes: “Melanie Klein argues that it can be a relief and relaxation, rather than a big tragedy the way it is in Freud, when one manages to get disabused of the fantasy of omnipotence, together with the reflex fantasy of utter omnipotence. One has at last the reassuring sense of grounding in reality.” The suspension of agency is also something that Buddhist meditation seeks to realise. Just as the first person in Sedgwick's art practice is one that decomposes materially leads to her enjoyment, the Buddhist Mantra (spoken by no-one to no-one) refuses both subject/object and agent/acted upon.

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mastery of a studio – as a place or as a practice.

In conclusion, the conventional myth of mastery in the studio re-inscribes, as much as it depends on, rigid structures of temporality and agency. Studio remains are considered as historical texts with a linear teleology (written in the past, read in the present, saved for the future); the studio artist is always active, materials are always passive and compliant. The commodification of studio materials, and their archivisation and preservation, are conducive to this, seemingly logical, structure. In preserved studio spaces – the Pollock-Krasner House or Bacon's Hugh Lane archive, for example – the loss and absence of the studio subject is affectively felt to be missing. What remains is stilled and inert. Creative action (or its potential) – the very purpose of the studio – is equated with what is missing: the artist. The studio passively awaits this return (of the absent object of desire) which, of course, can never come. Martin's studio habits challenge this paradigm. Taken individually or contrasted with each other, the artist's various performance of herself as a studio subject defy and exceed its bounds. Martin's studio time overturns normative temporalities: her sharing of responsibility extends production (belatedly) to its exhibition and reception; the practice of waiting in the studio for inspiration relieves that space of its productive function re-appropriating it for wasted time and contemplation. Ambiguous registers of agency are voiced in documentation of Martin's practice where active and passive agency are not exclusively wielded by either the artist or her materials, from one moment to the next, or in concurrent presents. Martin's performance of the studio constructs a certain kind of space for her practice: one that exists between competing presents, dislocated from any material boundaries. This space apart is one in which ambivalent agencies clash in a way that makes a nonsense of claims of mastery for the

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studio artist. Comparatively empty of objects when the artist was alive, the dispersal of Martin's objects leaves a vacuum. It has been the aim of this chapter to compare the material emptiness (nowhere-ness) of Martin's studio with the fullness of this thesis's other artists. Beyond claims as to whether this relative immateriality provides a richer or poorer understanding of her practice, I wish to show that practice – as traced in studiobased imagery – emerges as a crucial term. This suggests that to understand practice as something live and ephemeral is to understand it as already lost and unknowable. Like Martin's studio materials, dispersed and lost, perhaps letting go is the most respectful thing we can do if we want to approach the reality of a practice. Accepting the loss of an artist should be our aim, letting go a strategy. In this sense, the dispersal of Martin's studio may actually be a relief not its destruction.

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Conclusion There is no innocent room.1 – Thomas Demand

Fig. 53:

Thomas Demand, Barn (Scheune) (1997) 183.5 x 254 cm, C-Print Diasec, Grothe Collection, Kunstmuseum, Bonn.

Thomas Demand's Barn (1997) appears on first inspection to be a large photograph of the interior corner of an anonymous and empty barn [Fig. 53]. It is a highly contrasting study: the two windows on adjacent walls cut the edges of the photograph creating a central dark polygonal shape. The barn’s clapboard construction striates the walls with streaks of light providing the only visual interest other than the pool of light from the windows which puddles on the floor providing a modicum of 1 Demand quoted in Francesco Bonami, Thomas Demand (Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain), (Thames & Hudson: London, 2001) p.53.

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depth. It is almost banal in its ordinariness (its artlessness even); yet, there is something odd in the immaculately precise angle of the window frames (bereft of cobwebs and dust); the pristine window panes (free from smears and streaks); and the floor which is unusually, beautifully flat. Flatness inflects both form and content in Demand’s unchanging practice in which interiors, like Barn are meticulously staged, full-scale, out of precisely modelled pieces of coloured paper and cardboard. Its photographic surface is familiarly “flat and platitudinous,” swept smoothly with the eye.2 At roughly 1:1 scale, the large-scale exhibition of the work draws the viewer in, encouraging close inspection to discover, at close hand, the artifice of the artist’s paperies. Barn was created according to a standard practice (from which Demand hardly ever deviates): beginning with the extrapolation of a 3-dimensional paper set from a 2-dimensional mass-media image carefully chosen with consideration of its unique intersection between public history and the artist’s personal history/memory.3 Painstakingly built at near enough full-scale in the artist’s Berlin studio, this architecturally precise model is carefully lit and photographed. When satisfied that a suitable image is recorded, Demand destroys the sculpture, only ever exhibiting the photographs. Demand’s “hybrid” work – his photographic-objects – present affective interiors that disorientate the viewer in their shift between two dimensions and three.4 It is the subtle perception of the flatness of paper as modelling material – its ineffectiveness in quite replicating three-dimensional organic shapes, subtle curves, billowing forms – that give the game away, so to speak, as to the 2 “I must therefore submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the photograph I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous, in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge.” Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.164. 3 Thomas Demand’s practice of paper modelling has been a consistent element of his artistic output. Demand explains his process as intersecting personal memory and public history. Bonami, Thomas Demand, p.62 4 Speaking about his practice, Demand has stated: “I make a sculpture, then it becomes a photograph. At this point, the sculpture is no longer that important, but nor is the photograph. The work is in two dimensions, but the memory of the shape that it describes remains present. It’s a hybrid work, in between painting and sculpture, using different media in conjunction with a narrative element.” Bonami, Thomas Demand, p.46

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artificiality of this architectural space. After a few minutes, the structure’s smooth sharpness and telltale areas of blankness register as faked paper form and the viewer may be overcome with a giddy response. Similar to vertigo, one feels on the edge of a precipice as the solid world gives way beneath the feet to a yielding world of paper. This flatness is both form and subject matter; the hyper-banality of seemingly ordinary, everyday locations with no overt indication of drama or event prompt questions as to the reason for their presentation. In Demand’s work we are given so much (such intricacies) at an overwhelmingly large scale; yet, at the same time given so little. We are overwhelmed with paper: a paradoxical fullness of flatness. One could say, a fullness of feeling comes from the shock of realisation of their papery artifice prompted by their “hyperreality.”5 Feet back on the ground, flatness registers as boredom: boredom in Demand’s ubiquitous use of paper; of his unchanging practice (he is, we could say, a one-trick pony); and in recognition of the dulling laborious effort entailed in each paper-set. Working against each other these two feelings (fullness and flatness) are disorientating, felt as a positive up and negative down – shock tempered by boredom and boredom enervated by shock. This sense of hyper-banality is both produced by the object and is a response of the viewer. Altogether, this confusion leads to a general affect of interest; Demand’s surprisingly-boring reconstructions become the starting point of intellectual enquiry.6

“There is no innocent room,” Demand has said with regard to the paper locations he recreates. Although Demand might be said to “purify” the photographs he chooses and recreates, to cleanse them of their figures, of all textual information, their guilty association with past events (and inhabitations) endures. Yet moving toward innocence, 5 The “hyperreality” of Demand’s photographic objects can be experienced negatively as “a chilly inhumane quality.” Jenni Sorkin, “Thomas Demand”, Frieze, Vol. 60, 2001, p.118. 6 Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2007). p.14

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Demand empties the room of meaning in order for it to be filled with an anxious desire to know more.7 One focus of my critique of the studio-view in this thesis has been the tendency to correlate the artist's psychic interiority and studio, as an architectural interior. 'Whose room is this?' and (its temporal corollary) 'what went on here?' are questions that studio-view imagery may illicit in their audiences; whether those rooms are imaginary, like Barn, or otherwise. Rooms are related to real or imagined inhabitants, or presences, via a cultural convention in which, as Susan Stewart notes, we “people” scenes with meaning.8 Any desire to know what (or who) a scene represents is not easily extricated from a desire to inhabit, if only imaginatively, those other spaces – either psychic or architectural. That we might culturally be pre-programmed to read into interior spaces for clues as to their occupants characteristics might, then, be understandable. As Stewart argues, perhaps the intimately human scale of architectural interiors enhances their capacity to move us.9 This affectivity extends to artworks: inhabitable installation art or other representational interiors, like Demand's; to more particularised spaces like the studio – in all its guises that this project has looked at; and to its inhabitant, the artist. It has been one of the great insights of psychoanalytic enquiry that our own interior life is affected by (and affects) the interiors of others, either psychic or architectural, in day-to-day experience. According to psychoanalytic theories (Abraham 7 Regarding innocence, desire and emptiness, James Kincaid suggests that “the constructions of modern “woman” and modern “child” are largely evacuations […] correspondingly, the instructions we receive on what to regard as sexually arousing tell us to look for (and often create) this emptiness, to discover the erotic in that which is most susceptible to inscription, the blank page.” James Russell Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Duke University Press: Durham, N.C., 1998) p.15. Kincaid also suggests desire is elicited by smoothness: “flatness is innately more titillating than texture […] because flatness signifies nothing at all and thus doesn't interfere with out projections.” p.17. 8 Stewart, The Open Studio, p.82 9 “Face-to-face forms have a capacity to change or move us, perhaps because of their propinquity and because of the incipient tactility such close conditions imply […] We can separate ourselves conceptually and sensually from monumental and spectacular works of art, but the intimacy and affect of face-to-face works stems from our human scale and biological experience.” Stewart, The Open Studio, p.18.

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and Torok, for example) our bodies exist in the world as projections and introjections of other objects and this sense of existence entails internalising and exteriorising movements which occur across the body's boundaries, via its senses and along its surfaces. Crossing these peripheral borders (via the senses) is one way in which we interact with the world. Other fantastical processes, introjection and incorporation for instance, also mould our sense of self. This desiring self (and certain aspects of disavowed desire, as Butler's gender theory has argued) may be projected outward onto the body's surface, shaping and classifying it. In these ways, the body's immediate habitual surrounding would seem to be closely entwined within the very processes by which we gain our sense of self. This entails perceiving ourselves as objects amongst the things that surround us including other people and art-objects, as well as interior spaces. However, as I have claimed, it is also arguable that certain spaces tends toward some bodies more than others: the studio's historic privileging of the male body being a case in point. Yet, if bodies are shaped by histories, as Ahmed, for instance, has claimed, then the studio-bound bodies I have looked at here also reveal, in their re-performances of traditional habits of occupation, the tenuous nature of these repetitions and the unsettling backwards affect they can have on the studio habits they re-enact. With regard to the artist-studio relationship, this thesis has argued that the gap between the body and its immediate exterior constitutes a set of spatio-temporal practices that we call artwork, creativity, artistic practice or studio habits. Occurring along the surface that demarcates the inside (or outside) of both the embodied self and the interior space it inhabits, these studio habits are constitutive of both an artistic persona and a space of practice. Making artistic practice visible is a long-established tradition – as my short history of the studio-view suggests. As noted in the introduction, these artistic statements propose the artist as central to meaning and the studio as a

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significant origin. However, to some extent, these depictions of studio habits also foreground the materialisation of both the studio and the artist as they produce each other in performances of interiority. Yet, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, the space and subjectivities enacted in studio imagery are susceptible to being remobilised in ways that support modernist (and masculinist) readings of mastery. Barn, I suggest, manages to avoid its evocation of the studio being read in modernist terms if attention is paid to Demand's studio habits. The artist’s unchanging practice (his spatial extrapolation of paper sculpture from mass-media imagery) turns our attention to his source material, and thus Barn bears comparison to the Hans Namuth photograph of Krasner and Pollock in their studio-barn (or, in Demand's native German, Scheune) [Fig. 47]. The affective capacity of Demand's Barn also invites comparison to the spaces discussed in previous chapters: the Bacon Studio Exhibit, for example, or the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center. Like these studio-exhibits, Demand's artwork facilitates (but does not insist upon) viewings that directly relate the interiors presented to absent or retrospective inhabitants. Krasner and Pollock's specific biographical mythologies are framed by the Springs site as much as their narrativised presence soaks its fabric. Pollock's image is indelibly linked to acts of painting performed in its dusty, paint-fume choked interior, linking its “universe of pure paint” with the artist's mind, and his expressive capability; Krasner's supposed “mastering” of the studio after her husband's death has tainted her biography, enclosing it in a constrictive, yet satisfying, narrative.10 Namuth's photograph or a visit to the Pollock-Krasner House refers us back to those historical frames, narratives based on a particular modernist version of art-making, and of the relationship between subject and space, that have been conventionally read into the image of the 10 With regard to Pollock's practice, Bellony-Rewald and Peppiatt claim: “Cut off from tradition as well as contact with the contemporary world, [the studio] became a world unto itself, a universe of pure paint.” Imagination's Chamber, p.189.

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studio. However, Demand's photographic object does not re-enact historic events at the barn without serious modification. Where the connection between artist and studio has is eased by the appearance of artistic bodies in Namuth's photograph (as with other objects that this thesis has focussed on) the figures of Krasner and Pollock are missing from Barn. Moreover, the contentious, heterosexualised paradigm that these artists' bodies play out in Namuth's photograph – the “artist and wife” paradigm – is also hidden from view. In Barn, one side of the equation (the artist) is erased, the other side (the studio space) is turned to paper. The interrelationship of artist and studio here, in Demand's re-enactment of the studio-barn, disturbs the edges of both in a way that reiterates another thread of this thesis's argument: both entities are constructed by the studio habits that occur between them. Thus, Barn dramatises my argument that the artist and studio are, in certain senses, not pre-existing, independent and autonomous things and, subsequently, neither are able to participate in the types of causal or mimetic relationships that modernist readings of the studio-view have often attempted. As discussed in my introduction to this thesis, the artist-studio pairing has all too often been considered in modernist terms as either one of mastery or mirroring (and often both, as they are mutually supportive).11 Leading to a set of assumptions, exclusions and mythic propositions, this patterning is based on a history of making the studio visible in paintings of painting. Contrary to seeing the generation of individual privacy and private space in modernity as entwined co-productions, this reading of mastery in the studio-view historicises the studio's privatising as effected by an alreadyprivatised artist, according to which studio space has been produced as private, as a cultural artefact and architectural space, by the need for privacy of an a priori 11 As discussed in the introduction, the formulation of these models are based on Elizabeth Grosz's work on sexuality and space in her essay “Bodies: Cities” published in Beatriz Colomina's Sexuality and Space (1992) and in Grosz's own book, Architecture from the Outside (1999).

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autonomous and solitary artist. Adherence to this causal model (even when pointing out instances of alienation engendered by these spaces) inevitably re-inscribes the status quo in its prioritising of an active artistic agent to its passive tools: the studio and the artist's body subordinated to the artistic mind. The artist's body that emerges links the non-spatial, disembodied and disinterested mind and the material world of the studio. Thus, the artist-studio association articulated here is one where mastery and genius make sense. A mimetic version of the artist-studio relationship sees the studio and artist as counterparts: the features, characteristics and organisation of one defined in the other. Linked to mastery, this view conceives the studio as, to quote Bellony-Rewald and Peppiatt's succinct phrasing, “imagination's chamber.”12 But it is the artist's body (as one form of “imagination's chamber” or the materiality of subjectivity) that is compared to the studio in this formulation. Again, the body – as a passive tool of a disembodied subjectivity – provides the indexical link between artist and studio. The biographical artist, his presence and/as the origin of meaning for artwork, as a phantasmic object of desire, is seen to be mirrored in the studio's materiality. Artistic myths, where my case-studies are concerned, have been based on these types of neat isomorphisms between studio and artist: Bacon's chaotic and violently disordered mind as indexed by his ruinous surroundings; Krasner's exclusion from the Abstract Expressionist studio and canon; Pollock's working-class credentials, his nononsense approach and his industrial barn; Martin's hermetic studio and her perceived withdrawal from the art-world. Yet, these interpretations are too neatly drawn. In the case of Bacon's studio, for example, this myth cannot account for (or ignores) the suggestion that its disassembling chaos may reflect back, instead, an incoherent and incomplete artist. This type of reversal is also performed by Demand's Barn. It disabuses the fantasy of a coherent, prior subject behind the work and suggesting 12 Bellony Rewald and Peppiatt, Imagination's Chamber, p.3

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instead a different vector of subject/space interaction. Disturbing the foundations of studio space can, in this sense, be seen to participate in a corollary displacement of “selfhood” constituted by studio remains.13 Where these spaces are consciously fictional (or analogised in paper, perhaps) the artistic body bio-graphically produced in the studio, as Roland Barthes' critique of the author makes clear, is “never more than a paper-I” (and thus, in this way, Demand's reduction of artistic authority to a paper facsimile is also suggestive of the philosophical and art-theoretical critiques of authority and objecthood that emerged in the 1960s).14 The preceding chapters have challenged interpretations of mastery in studio imagery, finding these to be a historically repeated trope in which a heterosexualised paradigm of masculine privilege is perpetuated and by which a modernist idea of artmaking is returned. This has been done through case-studies that approach the studioview as a visual (and, sometimes, more than visual) manifestation of intimate interactions which occur between artist and studio: sets of spatial practices, described here as studio habits, in which the artist and studio are mutually defining. To suggest otherwise – to imagine, as a priori, the artist as the sole agency or as taking part in a one-way mimetic relationship – returns, I have argued, to a binary of feminised studio materiality awaiting the masculinised active (and seminal) agency of the artist's mind. Approached from a different angle, the studios and practices, considered in this thesis show a constant struggle between the determined artist and materials that obstinately “press back” and thwart painting rather than a relationship of mastery.15 This, I suggest, allows a theoretical and political space in which art-making by artists other than 13 Andrew Quick, The Wooster Group Work Book (Routledge: New York and London, 2007) p.270. Quick refers here to Heidegger's essay “Poetically Man Dwells” (1938) in which he muses that, as a building and dwelling are acts of creation aimed at furthering understanding of being, they are poetic or fictional. 14 Barthes, “Work to Text”, p.161 15 In this regard, it could also be noted that each of these artists – not only Martin, as I have argued – were in the habit of destroying work that, in one way or another, failed.

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modernism privileged subject – namely, a straight white male – do not appear incongruous or ill-suited to the role. A method employed in challenging the modernist studio-view has been to look to the specific ways in which case-studies have drawn on historical models of artmaking. I have argued that, as painters, each artist adhered to traditional modes of practice and, as such, these have been citations of historical artists and studio habits. Like this thesis's case-studies, embodied, material and spatial practices are re-performed in Barn where Demand's enactment of Pollock painting and Krasner looking is re-traced in his object's sculptural space along the surfaces he recreates. Similarly (and working with this same source material) my re-tracing of Krasner and Pollock's footprints around the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio also re-inscribes studio habits (of one kind or other) as, indeed, they are enacted by the hundreds of visitors who make the pilgrimage to Springs each year to re-tread Pollock's acts of painting around the barn. Crucially, these re-enactments repeat their source material with a difference. This critical difference between “original” model and its citation can be made to undermine the sense of an origin by showing (or, at least, suggesting) the model itself to be a repetition. These allegorical retelling of old stories – a retreading of Pollock painting, for instance – bring two presents (an historical present and lived present) together in ways that underline the past's reliance on the present for its shape. Another concern of this thesis has been to establish how a reading of queerness in the visibility (and visitability) of the artistic practices that I have imaginatively inhabited here might enable us to read the studio-view in ways that avoid the reinscription of modernist values, mastery and the conventional (and constrictive) masculinities and sexual norms these require and promote. I have argued that these reperformed acts of painting dislocate and de-centre any idea of a conventional artist

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subject. Many of the performances I have looked at are queer in that same-sex desires are readily able to circulate in ways that are anathema to modernist critical frameworks that rely, customarily, on distance, disembodiment and disinterest and, in turn, assume and re-inscribe a male critic and artist. Reading Bacon's queerly-inflected performances of a camp masculinity in his studio-view imagery, for instance, calls to mind the historical studio-views that he draws on and, in this, a comparison (allegorical not symbolic) is proposed between the two. The past model's mattering to the present is put on display in such a way that challenges the masculinities read in that image which, now, depends on Bacon's queer re-appropriation. At the Springs studio, Krasner's enactment of Pollock's authority – as the Art-Widow – complicates the origin of the hyper-masculinity her control of her husband's legacy relies on and generates. Pollock's body itself, as it appears in the studio is split according to the dictates of disinterested modernism which disavows homoerotic interest in his masculine body – a disavowal which, as I argued, belies a queer connection already made. Elsewhere, Martin's performance of masculinity in the studio comes with its own challenge to the mastery of practice: with active and passive registers in her acts of painting that are impossible to attribute to either artist or her materials. In addition to unsettling the conventional masculine values as read in studio-view imagery, these queer moments have tended to produce multiple presents. Martin's studio habits, for example, upend (or turn insideout) conventional temporality of making and exhibiting artworks. In doing so, Martin's working method is also suggestive of “post-studio” formations – lines demarcating the “unique” spaces of production and exhibition, to paraphrase Büren (1971), are also blurred. Her paintings encourage us to imagine her hand in making them. This historical present and our own present collide. The contingency of the past on what we make of it in the present undermines the authority of the absent artistic agent.

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It has been noted that a particular problem for any project which seeks to make use of the studio's image or studio materials that whichever way the studio-view is imagined or interpreted, it always risks falling back on models of mastery, of neat dualisms, in which a modernist version of art-making is free to return. Interpreting the artist-studio relationship as an interface in which both are co-produced we are left with two entities which are ripe for reinsertion into those models: if we consider the artist as performed in being occupied by studio habits, we may be left with an entity approximating a psychic interiority; similarly, if space is a practiced place (as Michel de Certeau, claims) then, as any studio shares the outward appearance of the historical studio-view, this interior is itself readily taken up and placed in opposition to its psychic corollary. This thesis has sought ways to disrupt this re-appropriation (or incorporation); yet, whenever studio habits are visualised – in the Bacon Studio Exhibit, for example, the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, or in Lance's documentary take on Martin's practice – modernist versions of art-making are prone to being repeated. Unsettling the boundary between subject and space is one way to question artistic presence and origins of meanings that the visualisation of the studio can sometimes seem to corroborate. If, as in Demand's Barn, the boundary between artist and studio breaks down as it materialises, this then shakes the foundations of space (the studio), dislocating it, unsettles the selfhood (the artist) we long to find there. The boundary between artist and studio (the point at which the artistic body meets the external world) materialises as paper in Demand's re-working of the Pollock-Krasner studio. Since it is the body's corporeal boundaries, the material membranes of the senses (and the gut), through which the introjecting/projecting mechanisms of intersubjectivity occur, the sculptural material, placed where body meet world, analogise the contested and definitional threshold between what is interior and exterior to selfhood.16 In Barn 16 In this I disagree with Tamara Trodd, who states that the largest “organ” missing in Demand’s

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this threshold also separates past and present, memory and history. While paper provides an epithelial layer within the depicted interior, separating the inside and outside of being, it also functions as a screen debarring entry into the life-sized represented interior. Thus, subject to photography's “maddening” temporality, paper also reflexively separates here past and present. The anterior futurity of the Namuth photograph and the past/present presence of the paper model segue in and out of one another, over and over, notions of interior and exterior and past and present are set in dizzying motion.17 Spatially re-enacting the Namuth photograph, its historicity is made subjective with the destruction of the paper reconstruction, returning three-dimensional space to memory. Barn becomes both mnemonic and historical – though not by bringing the two into conversation, or retrieving one in the other, but in underlining the consanguinity of both. Barn's re-appropriation of Namuth photograph enacts the complex intersection of personal memory and public history (as, perhaps, public memory and personal history). In this way, Barn suggests an antithesis to definitions of temporality as straightforwardly epochal – with one thing after another – but rather as a entwined network of formations, much in the same way that Raymond Williams conceived of residual, dominant and emergent formations, each dependent one the others for their shape. A definite end of the “romance of the studio” and its supersession by “post-studio” rhetorics – favoured, respectively, by popular and art-world audiences – are also, therefore, challenged in the same gesture. Contrary to the mythical readings of the studio-view, the artist-studio nexus occurs around a set of spatio-temporal practices that we call artwork or creativity, which sculptures is the skin: “The consequence of trying to rebuild qualities originally attached to a ‘surface’ in the interior of the photograph, is that in Demand’s case we are given a kind of sculpture in which the outside has migrated to the inside – for which, as a result, there is no skin; that is no boundary marking the ‘outside’ of an object.” Tamara Trodd, ‘Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall and Sherrie Levine: Deforming 'Pictures'’, Art History, Vol. 32, no. 5, 2009, p.972 17 Barn’s temporal form is then reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s (spatial) description of time itself in which past and present, the weft and warp of the same fabric and attuned to being being turned inside out. Walter Benjamin, “Image of Proust” in Illuminations, (Pimlico: London, 1999), p.200.

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takes place between artistic bodies and studio space and configures both as contingent and fragmentary assemblages. In Demand's work, paper literalises this relationship, materialising as the contours of studio habits. As noted in the introduction, in recent years, one particular problem for history-writing and visual culture has been the ephemerality of live performances, their “disappearance” and, for some, their reappearance in documentation. The materialisation of ephemeral (or immaterial) practices makes them available to, and constitutive of, institutional networks. Fleeting moments of practice can thus circulate, be transferred or otherwise valued and made available to the gallery, the museum, the archive and history; examples include those fugitive instances of studio habits “caught” in the studio-view photographs of these four painters, the acts of painting traced as they splashed the floorboards of the Springs studio, or the paintings themselves as marked by those acts. Part of my project has been to address the ways in which the institutionalisation of artistic practice has been articulated and circulated via the studio-view and according to an inflexible set of assumptions and exclusions about what constitutes studio habits. Acts of painting institutionalised in this way are, of course, changed by their mediation; live spectacle or lived practice, never to be repeated, is not the same as its recorded accounts, however precise or extensive. Certain immaterial practices have a particular capacity to resist straightforward documentation as artistic practice: to account for wasted time, thinking time or repose in a space dedicated to production is a difficulty. In terms of agency, language itself tends toward attribution of a do-er and done-to and struggles with the middle registers of practice when considered – as this thesis does – as a negotiation between artist and material world. Stepping back from a sole reliance on opticallyverifiable traces of acts of painting, this thesis has turned its attention to practices that remain beyond the visual.18 This has involved approaching studios as affective interiors 18 For more on this see Schneider, Performing Remains, p.87-111

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the mood or atmosphere attributed to a place may not only rely on what the eye can see. Counter-intuitively it may be more difficult to “see” anything approaching the reality of artistic practice in the plenitude presented by meticulous archiving or the presentation of preserved rooms. The over-abundant materials of the Bacon Archive, described in chapter one, and its supplementation on-site by the airless studio-astableau-vivant make it difficult to look away from its lavish display of remainders. These seductive reference materials are too readily narrativised, by some, as originary providing comforting interpretations, foreclosing on others. Similarly bountiful, the Pollock-Krasner House and Studio, the subject of both chapters two and three provides the viewer with an immersive experience; yet, the viewer's ability to inhabit those spaces (contrary to the encounter with the encased Bacon Studio) and to imagine Krasner and Pollock's inhabitation of the space enable an alternative experience of the site's history – as an embodied and affective re-enactment, retracing the past in the present. In contrast to over-whelming materiality, as discussed in chapter four, the posthumously dispersed remains of Agnes Martin's studio do not constitute any visible archive. However, documentation of Martin's practices exist elsewhere: in photographs of her at work, on film, in written accounts (some autobiographical) and in her paintings. As described, Martin's grid paintings can also provide a return to studio time and space and thus generate an affective studio presence. A visual and haptic retracing of her grids, hand-on-hand, reproduce her performance of painting; in this, looking back to the studio, orientating the viewer in space and time, two incongruent presents map onto one another. Materially traced acts of painting map onto immaterial acts of looking drawing the viewer toward a field of (re-imagined) artistic practice and away from a limiting tracing of a frame of reference. Rather than subject to a fixed origin or enclosed (teleological) meaning, the studio Martin's practice takes us to is a dislocated space and

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a discontinuous temporality that is unsusceptible to the strictures of linear history. The past can be present (a historical present) whilst remaining past. The paper-strewn remains of the Bacon Studio Exhibit provide an interesting comparison to Demand's still-life. The commencement of an archive (consigned as a supplementary space), the trash of Bacon's studio become reified documents. Demand's photographic objects work with the convention according to which paper signifies documents – connoting archives, libraries, law-making, narratives and history-writing. Paper also signifies waste and the process of Barn's creation and its final form is wasteful; it appropriates the throwaway photo-journalistic images; these are already digested and interiorised by collective memory – then regurgitated; and Demand's sculptural practice is wasteful, many hours spent on these elaborate forms is wasted in the subsequent destruction of the paper sculpture after its photographing. In Barn paper becomes an analogy for history-writing. Defining the interstices between artistic body and creative space it is a materialisation (or documentation) of temporal practices, it maps out the writing of histories of ephemeral creative moments. Materialised in paper, those past practices are, like the re-performance of my inhabitation of the PollockKrasner Studio and the tracing of Martin's graphic lines, made to matter in the present. But Demand's photographic object, like my other case studies, disturbs the boundaries between trash and document as well as interior/exterior, public/private in ways that similarly threaten the boundaries between history and memory, past and present, that depend on it. Rather than appearance alone, the feel of paper can provide the viewer with imaginative access to the interior spaces of Barn. We imagine inhabiting this papery space and touching its objects. Paper's sensational qualities are key to our encounter with Barn. Paper is not an arbitrary material in this artwork; it relies on the prior sense

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of paper as more than visual. It is an ambiguous material: immediately recognisable with a unique feel (papery), taste, smell and sound, it is also, in its blankness, thoroughly nondescript. Paper provides a sensational catalyst, bringing forth a Proustian “structure of recollection.”19 While paper provides the sensual key to access (imaginatively) its ambivalence as material, for the studio-barn reconstructed, disturbs any sense of a solid foundation to those spaces. Full and flat, the feelings aroused are disconcerting. Though we are moved, by cultural convention, to intellectualise the space – to ask: whose room is this? – on close inspection (or imagined inhabitation) this space is discombobulating. Something is not quite right, the paper barn is flat and empty, something is missing. The visibility of these four painters' studios exemplify practices in which loss is “materialised in the social and cultural realms and in the political and aesthetic domains,” as David Eng and David Kazanjian put it, in their more general argument about loss.20 However, the specificities of these losses, where these case studies are concerned have been acutely prone to mis-recognition. The question of what exactly has been lost, by which means this loss has occurred, and whose loss this represents is both difficult to define and, potentially, politically fraught. Given the propensity for studio material (in all its guises) to be read according to

19 The constructed quality of Demand’s spatial memory-objects recall Proust’s description of the spatial explosion that marks the act of remembrance in, for instance, the manner in which the adult narrator’s entire childhood springs forth from a catalytic taste of Madeleine cake and lime-blossom tea. Proust explains how the lost time of the past is put back together, presented (or re-membered) spatially with a papery metaphor: “And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but the moment they became wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become the flowers or houses […] the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, towns and gardens alike from my cup of tea.” (Proust, Swann’s Way: pp.48-51) Like Demand, for Proust, remembering entails the three dimensions of mathematical space as much as the fourth dimension of temporality. Memory is described in terms of an unfurling of paper form – a spatial expansion of tissue petals in a bowl of water – fluid, ephemeral and intangible (and thus, reminiscent of Demand’s destroyed and untouchable sculptures described on photographic paper). 20 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (University of California Press: Berkeley; London, 2003) p.3

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modernist protocols, this thesis has looked for ways in which the past is otherwise made to matter in the present. In Barn, for example, the past is materialised in Demand's reperformance of the gap between artist and studio in the Pollock-Krasner studio-barn. As elsewhere, this has involved bringing incongruent and overlapping studio presents together. This view of past artistic practices has been made in responses to studio materials that are sensual, tactile and embodied. My discussion of Bacon's pose in the historical studio he rented in South Kensington rested on the tactile historicity of his citation of his Pre-Raphaelite forerunner's occupation of the same role, bringing bodies together across time and disturbing the frame of the studio-view. The sense of Bacon as an origin (or tangible authority) for his works is, therefore, cast into doubt in its contingency on an earlier (and equally tenuous) prototype. The “preservation” of the Pollock-Krasner House was described in terms of Abraham and Torok's description of melancholic incorporation and, as such, a somatic rather than linguistic relation to past and loss. Aurally, a life beyond the frame was also defined in the editing of studio-based films made around this location. The off-frame voice-over, a supplement to vision, indicates a lack in the film's subject through exceeding its frame – Pollock and his practice – “living” beyond it in our imagination. Still at the Springs farm, a multisensory retracing of the artist's steps in pilgrimage to inhabitable and exhibited studio spaces provides another example of an embodied response to studios past. I described my interest in photographic source material as being the thwarted desire to see more in relation to Martin's practice. In turn, this desire “animates” (in Barthes's sense) the photograph, producing a “blind field,” open and unlimited which adds to (or expands on) what is already there in the image. Reading paintings, reading photographs and performances they document, reading films and visiting spaces. Each of these makes productive demands on the materiality of artistic practice.

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In its elision of Krasner and Pollock, their work and actions, Demand's Barn seems to meditate, along with the other four studios I have discussed here, on certain losses inflicted upon art's institutions in the latter half of the twentieth century. As the previous chapters have begun to describe, a tangible proximity to modernism's beloved lost objects – the authoritative artist and the valuable art object – is what is hoped to be found in the studio's ruins. The studio materialises, therefore, in display and archives of the remains of practice as metonymic placeholders for these absent objects. This strong desire (on the part of the “art world”) to see origins and presences in the studio belies anxiety regarding losses that have fundamentally threatened the discourse of art since the late 1960s, a period in which authority and objecthood became increasingly vulnerable in their subjection to destabilising critiques. This theoretical shift coincided with a diversion of attention from the art object itself in an expanded field of artmaking. The emergent practices of “post-studio,” conceptual and performance art clearly changed the status of the painting practices (and their products) favoured by Bacon, Krasner, Pollock and Martin. Centred, in part, on Pollock's supposed “destruction” of painting – the scenario which Barn cites – attention shifted (in ways that impinged upon the practices of all four artists) to immaterial and ephemeral practice. This deprecation of art's beloved objects which, literally and metaphorically, no longer matter to the same extent (if at all) has created difficulty for the art world, particularly its institutional markets and the academy. As either product or knowledge, art is difficult to circulate when it becomes immaterial. Hence, in making the studio matter more than ever, the melancholic art world can deny its losses through comforting narratives of presence and plenitude. The increasing attention to studio material may, therefore, provide a palliative supplement for the subject of loss. This has been described earlier in, for example, the posthumous

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commencement of studio archives for Bacon. Elsewhere the studio has been described in terms of Abraham and Torok's “psychic crypt” where such unspeakable losses impel the preservation of the Springs site, it forming a space inside yet outside the subject of art. The stage-managing entailed in covering over these tracks, to hide them in plain sight, makes the studio a dislocated kind of space, neither inside nor outside of official discourse. However, as I have argued, the artistic personas – Bacon, Krasner, Pollock and Martin – constituted through these evocations of the studio are similarly called into question by their contingency on the unstable ground, and indefinable margins, of these spaces. If, as Griselda Pollock argues, certain modernist forms of art history are predicated on a mythic special being, “the artist,” I would suggest that, on encountering studio space, the tendency to correlate studio exhibits with their absent former occupants is one pathway via which this modernist artist-figure is returned.21 Thus, it is the art-world and its renewed interest in the studio that returns the modernist version of the artist against post-1968 theoretical protocols, suggesting that the problem with the studio is, at least partly, art history's. The popularity of inhabiting (or otherwise viewing) spaces in which creative acts occurred – either in exhibited spaces, or via photographs, films or other accounts of the studio – is entwined with a continuing strong desire, within the art world, for the figure of the artist and the fruits of his labours – a fantasy at odds with post-modernist (or “post-studio”) theories of art. The preservation, or documentation, of the studio seems to provide access to these objects of desire; yet, all we are offered is their posthumous remains. Demand's tableau-vivant similarly animates the viewer in its dizzying spectacle of the studio-barn; but loss is documented, literally, in Barn's use of paper – its flimsy approximation of the Pollock-Krasner House produces equally frail facsimiles 21 See, for instance, Griselda Pollock, “Jackson Pollock, Painting and the Myth of Photography” in Orton and Pollock, Avant Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (1996)

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of the absent artists we wish to see in its interior space. What is lost, Barn seems to suggest, cannot be recovered; preservation is a fantasy (both in its museological sense and the psychoanalytic definition of melancholic incorporation as “preservative repression” of loss); and time cannot be stilled or reversed. This thesis has looked to studio habits as an antidote to the easy conflation of the psychic and architectural meanings of interiority and its comforting palliative to absence and loss. In each of these studios I have visited, physically and imaginatively, studio habits of the past have been examined in their re-animation via the punctum of the photograph, the off-frame voices in studio-view films, the re-treading of steps round paint-splattered floorboards, and in the tracing of brush-marks and artistic practice visually, haptically, bodily. What has been demanded here is for the relationship between these artists and their studios to be considered according to the studio habits that existed between them and that co-produce both our sense of artistic subject and creative space. Barn, I contend, suggests a valuable lesson where the image of the studio is concerned. We should be aware that the popular pleasures of re-inhabiting creative spaces (if only imaginatively) may also enable the return of outmoded, and politically retrograde, versions of art-making and, similarly, dictate who gets to occupy the studio.

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