Talking about the Studio

In the Alte Saline in Hallein today, Milena Dragicevic and Charlotte Cullinan provided us with a thought-provoking performance which probed the many nuanced meanings and roles of the “studio”. Their conversation was a performance: “We intend to energise you”, they began, and so they did. The dialogue swung from the conversational to the poetic, interspersed with a series of film clips ranging from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Woody Allen. The result was an impressionistic collage which challenged and provoked us into rethinking what a studio is.

The studio is the theme of this year’s Summer Academy, and our speakers revealed its complexities. They explained that the studio both is, and has the potential to be, many things. It is not merely a place, but also an action or a gesture: even the act of going to the studio, how you walk there, what you do and do not see. Issues of form and practice melded to those of creation and perception. The comparison with boxing, a recurring image in the conversation, was, they told us, “beyond metaphor”: in both painting and boxing the viewer participates, and in doing so both gives meaning and legitimises. These connections are fundamental.

The questions they raised reflect and dissect the very notion of what a studio is, what it represents, and how it can influence our perception of the creative process. Dragicevic and Cullinan have certainly made us think.