SM01

Associate Studio Programme 1 : Stephen Melville

The first of the Associate Studio Programme studio visits was made by Stephen Melville in December 2013. Stephen Melville is an Art Historian and Theorist, is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University and has published widely on contemporary art as well as on issues in contemporary theory and historiography. With Philip Armstrong (Division of Comparative Studies) and Laura Lisbon (Painting), he curated a major exhibition of contemporary painting at the Wexner Center for the Arts in May, 2001. The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial catalogue from The MIT Press.
The Associates ask each visitor to bring something they’re happy to leave with the studio to form over time a collection as a kind of record or archive of the visits. Stephen brought a copy of Jack Flam’s ‘Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings’, Smithson being an artist Stephen has written about extensively.
The discussion his visit prompted centred around the different characterisations of the studio – as a solitary space from which work emerges only when finished, or as a more open space in which work is seen in process. Equally, questions were raised about an artist’s day-to-day practice – as a daily routine from which work develops or as a focussed or more directed ‘project-based’ approach.

Notes have been disabled.