120° of Separation
Selected works by artists from 3 studios located within 500 metres of Linden

ST KILDA BOWLING CLUB STUDIOS
Jean Cooper-Brown, Cath Brown,
Althea Bartholemew, Belinda D’Arcy, Michael Durkin,
Julie Gough, Pete Groves, Lee Hamilton-Rose,
Giz James, Salvatori Lolicato, Jarek Luszpinski,
Gaye Lyons, Ted Paterakis, Christophe Stibio,
Betty Greenhatch, Sharon Flanagan, company in space

ESPY ARTISTS STUDIOS
Lisa Barmby, Gavin Brown, Michael Bullock,
Greg Geyer, Susie Hansen, Jason Hartcup,
Judy Holding, Allan Mitelman, Pye Rankine,
David Hugh Thomas, Elke Varga, Peter Walsh

30 THE ESPLANADE STUDIOS
Liat Azoulay, Leanne Baker, Christopher Beaumont,
Heather Clugston, Sue Ford, Elizabeth Gower,
Teresa Lane, Coconut Lu, Amanda Morgan,
Lewis Miller, Sarah Pratt, Jan McClellan Rizzo,
Amanda Schlesinger-Goss, Annemarie Schweitzer,
Mark Stoner, Prakash Verapen

STUDIOS FROM THE IMAGINARY,
AND OTHERS JUST DOWN THE ROAD

The artist's studio might be a real place, but it is also a part of the imaginary. It is not just where images are made - its own image is a vivid creation. More than anywhere else, the cultural construction of the artist occurs in the studio. But as well as fashioning the idea of what an artist is, the very space wields a powerful allure.

It is worth describing just where our ideas about the studio have come from.¹ For while the pre-modern studio was imagined very much a part of the social realm ("an institution predominantly collaborative in nature"² one has put it), Romanticism moved it into the garret. The door was closed, and the studio was re-imagined as an intensely private space, the dreamer’s white-walled and silent "cell of intimacy."³

If the studio’s mythic mix of bohemian poverty, salacious and drunken behaviour, interrupted by inspired fits of genius, was drafted in nineteenth century fiction (principally in Du Maurier’s phenomenally successful Trilby, but also La Boheme and the Henri Murger book from which it was derived), it is through photography and the moving image that it has been indelibly imprinted on popular consciousness. The studio came to represent "a powerful topos - the solitary individual artist in a semi-sacred studio space."⁴ It is in this context that a studio is more than simply a necessity of production, it is a powerfully symbolic expression of being serious about making art - the studio itself taking on an almost spiritual significance as the ‘birthplace’ of art, as Delacroix had put it, a "crucible" of human genius.

The stories of art and artists that demonstrate the public fascination with the studio include the photo-journalistic essays of figures like Alexander Liberman and Hans Namuth (and their contemporary magazine-contributing equivalents); the anecdotal descriptions of artists and their hangers-on in biographies; and the countless cinematic representations of the theme. Such sources routinely turn the studio into stage on which the apocryphal ‘agony and ecstasy’ of artistic creation is performed. This account of the three studios in 120° of Separation opts for a less theatrical mode of interpretation. The roughly fifty artists in these three studios, all less than 500 metres from Linden, are working across almost every possible media – including painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration, jewellery, ceramics, printmaking, photography, digital media, graphic design and multimedia performance. They vary from the most established artists – heavyweights who have chalked up survey shows and are represented in state and national collections, including an Archibald prize winner – to emerging practitioners who graduated from art school just last year, as well as makers working outside the dominant academy of contemporary art. To claim that all their art is uniformly shaped by the spaces in which it is made is clearly too prescriptive. So what follows is a less narrative and hopefully more poetic, attempt to account for the spatial and visual resonances of each of the three studios.

A [SHARED] ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

If the idea of studios overlooking a garden is redolent with pastoral fantasies of folly ruins and topiary animals, the surroundings of the St Kilda Bowling Club Artist Studiosare more Watts Towers than Watteau. The site was used for lawn bowls from the 1960's until 1998 when the Bowling Club vacated the site. Due to potential redevelopment plans and an insecure lease, the site lay fallow until the City of Port Phillip organised for the main hall to be divided into studio spaces. The spirit of cooperation that so visibly pervades the garden is certainly also present in the studios. Given this, if it were not for the practical requirement of defined space to create (plants or art) it might seem a little paradoxical that both were once open spaces now carved up into person-sized portions.

The artificial floor plan of St Kilda Bowling Club Studiosis formed by a patchwork of recycled partitions. The varying degrees of seclusion formed by these makeshift walls describe the desires for privacy of the artists they contain – most screen incomplete work from passing eyes, though a few are open. A number of lock up spaces are also used as studios, including the garages re-purposed by sculptors, and the darkness of the ‘gents’ colonised by a photographer. Artists might have made the eight arbitrarily divided spaces their own – the very presence of their creative output sees to that – but it is difficult not to notice the visual trappings of the bowling club, from the crumbly aerated plaster ceiling panels to the glimpse of the loco-rococo carpet conceived to hide a spilt shandy.

FINDING A STUDIO: ‘SEARCH AND RESCUE’

In a voraciously hungry property market, real estate signs often don’t even make it up. Those that do, usually disappear quickly. When a ‘For Lease’ sign hangs about for months, it is a thoroughly off putting – that is, for everyone other than artists sniffing out their next studio.

30 The Esplanade Studiosonly became viable as studios after no one else could do anything with it. When it gets bulldozed one can’t quite imagine anyone bothering to protest, despite its spectacular location, except perhaps Elizabeth Gower and the artists who have been there since early 2004. That Gower managed to secure the property (surely pitched with every ‘location location’ line in the book, plus a dash of local ‘Secret Life’ cliché for good measure) was significantly assisted by a strange residential zoning that made the building fairly unattractive to other potential tenants. It did of course still present an obstacle course of permits, zoning regulations and property law. And, as is the typically unstable realm of studio spaces, all of this for a short 12 month lease.

The building was previously the Water Police/Search and Rescue premises, a standard-issue brown brick block surrounded by bitumen and fronted by a three-metre chain fence topped with barbed wire. The site is significantly cheered up by the hyperbolic grin of Luna Park across the road, whose happy colours even manage to compete with next door’s luminous McDonald sign. And from inside the compound the views from the prime south-facing rooms on the top floor are truly postcard.

As well as these light-filled (and, luxury-of-luxuries!) air-conditioned ex-offices, the ground floor spaces at 30 The Esplanade Studioshave become a veritable warren of artistic activity. The qualities of each of these spaces has defined their new uses – the car park has been taken over by a sculptor and his large cast concrete works as they dry, and a shed-like annex behind the building has become a somewhat Spartan workshop for jewellers.

A ROOM WITH A VIEW, OF A TOWER WITH A VIEW

The Espy Artist Studios, at the rear of the Espy Hotel, is almost archetypal of the romantically shabby studio complex, its Spanish Mission-style façade looking like a stage flat straight from Carmen. While common internal areas are similarly crumbly, the rooms themselves prized – it comes as no surprise to find that space in the complex is highly sought-after, and usually passed between artist friends. The derelict two-story block of flats has been studios since 1997 but won’t be around for much longer. In the overgrown internal courtyard a five-story scaffolding tower has been erected by property-developer owner Becton. Prospective buyers of the apartment high-rise that is to replace the 1930s ‘Baymour Court’ block are led from the display apartment on the Esplanade to climb above the studios to inspect the view.

One wonders if those who make the climb appreciate the irony that the website pitch for the Esplanade apartments celebrates the "gently decaying buildings" of St Kilda. As they look over a studio’s north-facing window and out to the bay, they also overlook the very qualities that attract developers and buyers to somewhere like St Kilda. Capitalising on a "gritty past" we are told that the replacement for the gloriously grungy building will be "contemporary yet timeless, strong but not intimidating, luxurious but not ostentatious." Indeed!

The future of the Espy Artist Studiosbrings us to the often-conflicted relationship between art and commerce that is exposed in the studio. In fact the forces of the market never collide as conspicuously as they do in the studio. Nowhere else are the processes of production, distribution and consumption, and the functional categories of living, learning and working, revealed to be so malleable.

One currently fashionable myth of creative counter-cultures is that their practices are first and foremost a form of resistance. However, social defiance is but a small part of the creation of working environments for artists, musicians and writers. It might be the effect, but the causes are always more pragmatic – proximity to home, to like minded friends and above all, low cost, are the recurring central considerations in finding a studio. When under appreciated, the way a place looks – its urban forms, peculiar shops, the people on the street etc – are part of the mix that attracts artists. This might all seem somewhat obvious, but in the context of the increasing involvement of public policy in fostering artistic communities (or, to adopt the public policy jargon, ‘cultural vitality’) it is significant. For such conditions are entirely non-replicable, and usually counter to any government’s idea of economic development.

The transition of downtown New York studios from industrial production to genteel poverty and eventually to gentrification, is described by Sharon Zukin, who implicates artists in the process by which loft studios made cultural production a commodity to sell real estate.⁵ Richard Florida’s recent manifesto The Rise of the Creative Classalso pays close attention to the relationship between creative types (his boldly broad definition encompassing artists and writers, but also scientists and IT professionals) and specific geographic locations. His contention that "in culture as in business, the most radical and interesting stuff happens in garages and small rooms"⁶ is, in a sense, an expansive account of the studio that undercuts its discursive sanctification.

The activity of the studio might be intensely private, very much internalised, but its impact on the urban spaces that surround it is profound – as though the charcoal dust itself is an airborne artistic disease, infecting streets, blocks, suburbs, and sometimes whole cities. Though its fortunes continue to shift, St Kilda continues to be one of those places. But the range of work in 120° of Separationdoes more than just describe the continuing energy of artistic practice in St Kilda.

The art object’s journey from the studio to the gallery or museum is one that Daniel Buren regarded as troubled, and in probably the most widely read essay about the studio space, he claims that it is "only in the studio that the work may be said to belong."⁷ By engaging the studio as its central framework rather than just the site for some clever curatorial shopping, 120° of Separationis rare for major exhibitions in that it gracefully sidesteps the totalising effects that the gallery or museum can often have, complicating the artificially distinct realms of production and display.

One can only guess that decision to put on an exhibition bound just by the geographical proximity of three studios took more than a little nerve. Though ‘diverse’ is the de rigour descriptor for almost every survey show, the word is truly appropriate for the work in 120° of Separation– diverse in age, in prominence, in medium and in intellectual concern. With no totalising thematic box to jump back into, the process of combining the endlessly multifarious practices of the large group of artists in this exhibition is no small achievement.

Alex Taylor

1. This account of the shifting idea of the modern studio is derived from the introduction to Alex Taylor, (2003) Constructing the Artist’s Studio: Inside Australian Art 1900 – 1940, BA Hons Thesis, School of FACSA, University of Melbourne.
2. Anthony Hughes (1990), ‘The Cave and Stithy: Artists’ Studios and Intellectual Property in Early Modern Europe’, Oxford Art Journal, 13:1, 34.
3. Gaston Bachelard (1994) [1964], The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press: Boston. 228.
4. Caroline Jones (c1996), Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 1.
5. Sharon Zukin (1989), Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, Rutgers University Press.
6. Richard Florida, (2003) [2002] The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, Pluto Press: Australia. 184.
7. Daniel Buren (1987) [1971] ‘The Function of the Studio’ in October: The First Decade 1976-1986The MIT Press: Cambridge. 203.