I have spent the past few days conducting studio visits in a city foreign to me. Encountering works of art in the context of their production—and seeing how they are informed by factors ranging from the architecture of the building to the character of the neighborhood—throws them into striking new relief. As does hearing artists talk personally about their practice and the lived experience from which it emerged. Their work is couched in situations that make it more easily legible, even (perhaps especially) if it rebels against the social, historical, or political milieux in which it is made.
The removal of the work from the studio also removes it from the networks of relation that might lend it meaning. Anyone who has witnessed the transformation of an object that has been kicked around a studio for two years into something to be handled with kid gloves when it leaves for the gallery will be sympathetic to the idea that it is precisely this abstraction from contexts that establishes the object as a “work of art,” with all of the implications of value and status connoted by the term. It is by entry into the immaculate space of the white cube, as Brian O’Doherty wrote four decades ago, that these materials transcend their base origins. Like the soul entering heaven.
And, of course, much effort has been devoted to contesting and resisting this process, much of it on the principle that it substitutes meaning for status. To reconnect a work of art to its settings is both to acknowledge that the artist is always embedded in their surroundings and to foreground the degree to which their work is shaped by them. The consensus of the moment is that this is broadly a good thing, and the arguments for situating art in its own time and place will be familiar to our readers. But it might be worth proposing, if only for balance, that the abstraction of a work of art from the conditions in which it came into being might not always be a bad thing.
It might, for instance, allow the work to be understood as part of a discourse wider than the city, culture, or historical moment in which it was produced. It might encourage engagement with it by people who do not share the lived experience of its maker, fostering new forms of sympathy and, potentially, solidarity. It might support minority cultures that, if real engagement with any form of art demands personal affiliation to the culture from which it sprung, will be doomed by demographics and globalization to marginality. All of which is to say that there are sometimes benefits to cropping out the contexts that can seem too straightforwardly to situate—to explain—a work of art: the artist’s own biography, their implication in a particular socioeconomic system, the books on their studio shelves.
Deciding where to draw that line is one responsibility of the critic. How to relate an artist’s practice to their social, historical, or cultural inheritance without reducing it to them, as if every work of art could adequately be understood as a constellation of data points? What information to give, and what to withhold? What facilitates an audience’s engagement with a work of art without overburdening it? How to better understand an artwork’s effects without presuming to explain it?
As editors, too, we must also try to strike that balance. That’s why, beginning this month, we’re introducing a new series of profiles on the work of artists and collectives, conceived as complements to the reviews that must always consider work as it is arranged for exhibition. The hope is that this will allow readers to better understand the different circumstances in which artists are working and to reflect upon the ways in which their practice is inflected by, acts upon, and might ultimately, if conditionally, move beyond its contexts.
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