Value in the studio

Figs. 24-26: The threshold: Gordon Froud’s studio doors – August House before moving out (left);

August House after Sam Nhlengethwa moves in (centre); Froud’s new studio at Nugget Square (right).

The studio is the starting place in this research for getting to grips with ‘what art is’, a philosophical rabbit-hole that nonetheless needs some exploration to begin unpacking different notions of value. This links back to George Dickie’s institutional theory

described earlier, “an artifact a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld)” (Yanal, 1998: 2). Conceptualism freed the artwork from its materiality and in so doing gave greater agency to immaterial factors like the idea to constitute what makes an artefact a work of art. I will not enter a definitional quagmire suffice to say that institutional theory takes the artwork beyond purely aesthetic considerations. The institution in Dickie’s definition is not

necessarily a corporation but “an established practice” (1974: 29). Dickie himself built upon earlier theorists, particularly from the 1950s, who rejected the traditional method that sought to discover art’s essence in some function common to all works of art and instead positioned the work within a multiplaced network of much greater complexity than anything envisaged by earlier theories (Kelly, 1998: 31). Dickie’s institutional theory is critiqued by Richard Wollheim (1980) among others, querying who represents this amorphous artworld and whether sometimes such “factions and coteries” can be for the better (Wollheim, 1980: 166). The theory is also criticised for strong proceduralism (Matravers, 2000: 43) – that all there is to being a work of art is to be an artifact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. It is not as simple as that, but there is some consensus that a coterie of academics, researchers, critics, artists, curators and gallerists among the artworld all help shape the discourse of what constitutes art and that this notion shifts over time. Before the work engages the artworld, however, it is birthed in the studio or its equivalent.

Daniel Buren (2012) describes the studio as the first frame of production, the first limit upon which all subsequent frames or limits will depend. He says the museum or gallery and studio are linked to form the foundation of the same edifice and the same system: “To question one while leaving the other intact accomplishes nothing.

Analysis of the art system must inevitably be carried on in terms of the studio as the unique space of production and the museum as the unique space of exposition”

(Buren, 2012: 83). Both must be investigated as ossifying customs of art, Buren writes – notably, in a text republished from 1971. Since then, the concept of the studio (and art) has moved on but the larger point about the studio as first frame remains; it is still the key place of work for most artists, however conceived. As Buren points out, the studio is a place of production, storage and distribution – since gallerists, dealers and curators may also visit to select works and discuss them. It is important to recognise the studio is not just a private space but already often permeated by the

market. Nonetheless, Buren says the studio is where the artwork truly belongs in the sense that it is closest to its own reality there, before being subject to infinite

manipulation serving other purposes even its creator may not anticipate (Buren, 2012:

85). This “own reality” is the notion of intrinsic value that the first case study was designed to track, despite the apparent paradox that “when the work is in place, it does not take place (for the public), while it takes place (for the public) only when not in place – that is, in the museum ... Thus, the unspeakable compromise of the

portable work” (Buren, 2012: 85). Buren bemoans the disconnect between the

richness of an artwork in situ and its banality torn from its context, yet an artwork that stays put in the studio is a “non-entity” (2012: 88). He says the studio creates objects that complement our society of exchange and market value and its value is directly influenced by exchangeability, critically relying on the artwork’s “eternal nomadism”

(Buren, 2012: 90).

As Conceptual art in the late 1960s dematerialised the artwork and unmoored it from physical constraints, so the contemporary studio could also be a laptop or a street. “A studio isn’t just a place where artists make art but a platform for negotiation and a stage for performance,” writes Sarah Thornton (2008: 203), after visiting the studio of renowned artist Takashi Murakami. His studio practice famously engages a large number of assistants with artist credits on exhibitions that can take up an entire wall.

Thornton found that what united this complex, transnational, multistudio setup of the Japanese artist with the post-studio, periphery-embracing, anticraft ethos of the Californian conceptualist, Michael Asher, was a shared keen sense of discipline (Thornton, 2008: 201).

Jens Hoffmann, in his introduction to a volume that deals with the role and function of the studio in contemporary artistic practice and its shift from a site to a situation, says artists throughout history have conceived of the studio in various ways – from the starting point for their own work (Rembrandt van Rijn’s Artist in his Studio c.1629) to the recent trend in the artworld of representing and displaying complete artists’ studios by museums and galleries (Hoffmann, 2012: 13). Indeed, this played out during the research period itself: a representation of the studio of Froud formed part of his solo exhibition at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, a national art festival in Oudtshoorn (Fig. 19).

For the moment, in order to reflect upon more general notions of intrinsic value that the studio generates, I will subsume artistic value into the larger umbrella term of cultural value, despite the legitimate risks of conflating the two. The resurgence of interest in stores of value, uncertainty and risk following the 2007-08 global financial crisis was noted in Chapter 1’s research rationale but cultural value has been paid much less attention than other notions of value in the ensuing recalibrations.²⁵ The authors of a recent UK report on understanding the value of arts and culture say it is hard to find an established discourse of ‘cultural value’ within academic inquiry and the term in many ways makes its way into academic discussion from elsewhere (Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016: 13). They also note that the concept of cultural value may even be seen as a construct of policy. In the UK, which has helped lead creative economies discourse globally, this lack of attention has been partially redressed through a spate of recent research inquiries. A brief recap of this important body of grey literature offers a helpful starting point to further interrogate artistic value because it provides a useful overview of the key points of current debate and its gaps, and how this research engages and extends this investigative ground.

The focus upon UK reports is worthwhile because the UK has strongly advocated for economic validation of the arts and current South African public policy in many respects followed this lead, with attendant problematics. Because of the UK’s pivotal role in these debates, related learnings have implications for South African

policymakers and art practitioners (and vice versa). What emerges from this overview is how the creative economies discourse is increasingly critiqued as reductive and instrumentalist. This in turn begs the need for other conceptions of why art matters, a broader conversation into which this thesis makes its own contribution. These reports reflect key concerns and concepts the thesis intersects with and develops upon, as below.

a) The AHRC Cultural Value Project (2016), an inquiry supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), had two main objectives: to identify the components that make up cultural value, and to consider and develop methodologies and evidence to evaluate them. It attempted to break down the divide between the intrinsic and instrumental camps – that is, of art for art’s sake or art for economic

25 The BBC’s podcast series The value of culture offers an interesting overview (Bragg, 2012-13).

benefit. It centred upon individual actual experience and worked outwards from there in its bid to assess why arts and culture matter. “The value begins there, with

something fundamental and irreducible, and all the other components in the

framework might be seen, to a greater or lesser extent, to cascade from it” (Crossick

& Kaszynska, 2016: 21). In this key respect, its report titled Understanding the value of arts & culture resonates with the ambit of the thesis; its research started with individual experience in the studio and worked its way out to explore an alternative value proposition. Components of cultural value in the AHRC study included elements such as reflectiveness, empathy and imagination about other life circumstances and possible futures – an effective way, then, to counter Tett’s

smudged lens. Such components were ahead of concerns like the economy, health or cities (Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016: 57). Such characteristics form part of artistic thinking, in Chapter 4.

The report also acknowledged that the contribution of arts and culture to other areas was often embedded in individual experience and small-scale assets. The idea was to stress a complex ecology of talent, finance, content and ideas rather than binary worlds. “Culture is an organism not a mechanism; messier and more dynamic than linear models allow” (Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016: 99). This AHRC report drew upon over 70 pieces of original research, critical reviews of literature, and workshops.

A range of methodologies included arts-based research, ethnographies and network analyses. Its findings chimed with both thesis case studies, which also demonstrated a rupture of linearity in favour of a dynamic web of relations instead.

b) An ecological approach to the artworld, above, was also highlighted by the 2015 Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Value. Its report, Enriching Britain:

Culture, Creativity and Growth, generated three major insights. These were: cultural and creative talents comprised both a public good and a commercial return; they existed in a distinct ecosystem; and insufficient attention had been paid to synergies within the latter. The commission’s understanding of an ecosystem described the interconnectedness of the cultural and creative industries in terms of the flow of ideas, talent and investment from public and private sources that characterised them (Knell, 2015: 21). These flows, the report said, generated economic value, audiences and consumers.

Likewise, an ecological understanding of the artworld also emerged from my thesis research. I firstly came to understand August House, or the atelier, as an ecosystem of sorts. This is described in Chapter 1, for instance when Gibson Khumalo, one of the former caretakers, described the atelier’s sale as a mess thrown into the bird’s nest (personal interview, 2014). That characterisation proved a helpful metaphor. Further, the rooftop garden shifted nomadically within the building and came to symbolise its transition. The building also represented an ecosystem through the range of its tenants; they included not only art practitioners but also a fine art logistics company, an exhibition and art installation company, a commercial gallery, a non-commercial project space and a residency space for visiting artists. Scheryn fitted with the idea of an ecosystem too, as set out by Anders Petterson (Table 2). His schematic referenced all the so-called ‘tastemakers’ that usually participate in the Western contemporary art market ecosystem (i.e. Euro-America), which together carry out an endorsement process (Petterson, 2014). This table is extended in Chapter 6 by my own Cascade model drawn from ecosystem services thinking (Figure 72).

c) The Arts Council England’s report, The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society: An Evidence Review, affirmed the importance of starting with the intrinsic, or

“how arts and culture illuminate our inner lives and enrich our emotional world”

(Mowlah et al., 2014: 4). This is partly a philosophical assertion, the report said, that cannot be measured in numbers – yet the arts did confer certain benefits and were a strategic national resource that also needed to be appreciated. The report set out this balancing act and drew attention to gaps in literature and data that pointed to an holistic case. An holistic case meant arts and culture had complex, subtle and

interrelated impact, and each benefit related to a cluster of other benefits (Mowlah et al., 2014). The report called for a new language of cultural value that in time would help better understand the contribution the arts made to our lives. This thesis research likewise began with the intrinsic – the studio – and progressed from there. The disruption of the linear method resonates with the complex, subtle and interrelated impact described in this report, and it also sought to develop a new language of artistic value through an alternative script.

In summary, reflecting on the above reports, this thesis can be understood as part of a family of recent inquiries into cultural value. It extended some of the attributes the inquiries elucidated and added others of its own, from a global South context and

focusing more pointedly upon artistic value as a subset of cultural value. Starting within the studio, the research sought to understand the contribution of contemporary art specifically to a broader discourse on (cultural) value by following the trajectories of artworks, the principles behind their making, and the artistic thinking they

embodied and carried out into the world (Chapter 4).