The Studio Reader

The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, eds Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner, School of the Art Institute of Chicago/The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 376pp, pb, 16 [pounds sterling], 978 0 2263896 15 The first problem with this collection is its pretention to being a reader. A reader implies a thorough approach to a given subject, taking into account the archaeology of the development of its discourse (one of the editors, Michelle Grabner, even refers to how the book is 'an archaeological undertaking' in her introduction) and how this discourse in turn has affected the subject itself. But in no way can The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists claim to do this. While there are gestures towards the history of the discourse on the studio as it developed in the late 17th century with Svetlana Alpers's essay, the mid 20th with Michael Peppiatt and Alice Bellony-Rewald's, and the late 20th with Daniel Buren's 'The Function of the Studio', 1971, by no means is it systematic. The other recent collection of essays on the studio, The Fall of the Studio: Artists At Work (Reviews AM336) was a much more challenging collection and much clearer too about its aims.