"Production Site: The Artist's Studio Inside-Out"

If you’re not an exterminator, you might leave “Production Site” feeling little more excitement about the artist’s studio than you did when you arrived. And that’s a shame. The show’s meant to evoke the experience of a studio visit, Museum of Contemporary Art curator Dominic Molon explains in his exhibition brochure. But “Production Site” probably will seem skimpy to anyone who saw the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) “Picturing the Studio,” which addressed similar issues before it closed February 13 at the Sullivan Galleries.

The discrepancy between the two exhibitions—both part of the citywide initiative Studio Chicago—is partly due to size. “Picturing the Studio” had more than twice as many artists as “Production Site,” which highlights 13. The SAIC show’s artists had ample room to draw fruitful parallels between the studio and other workplaces, to build multiple re-creations of their studio spaces and to contemplate their practices in a historical context.

Despite its smaller scope, “Production Site” demonstrates the diversity of studio practice, conveying some truths about how contemporary art is produced. Ryan Gander’s life-size photos of his assistant remind viewers even art attributed to one person may be collaborative. Not all artists work by crafting objects in their studios. Two projects, Nikhil Chopra’s Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing XI and Deb Sokolow’s You Tell People You’re Working Really Hard On Things These Days (both 2010), are rooted in performance. Kerry James Marshall’s paintings 7am Sunday Morning (pictured, 2003), which depicts the South Side neighborhood around the artist’s studio, and Untitled (Painter) (2009)—the self-portrait of an imaginary black, female artist—remind us certain groups are reclaiming representations of the studio after centuries of exclusion from European and American versions.

What’s missing is a sense of what most of these artists do all day. Instead of the intimacy and insight into an artist’s process that a studio visit suggests, we get the blankness of Amanda Ross-Ho’s installation Frauds for an Inside Job (2008). It should make a dramatic impression, considering that its walls were removed from the artist’s former studio, but it comes off as dull: a collection of white panels empty except for a smattering of magazine clippings, gold chains, and a poster of the Notorious B.I.G. and Puff Daddy, drained of life by the museum’s antiseptic glare. It’s fun to marvel at the verisimilitude of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Untitled (2005), a flawless re-creation, in carved and painted polyurethane, of 105 mugs, boots and other objects from their studio, arranged in messy piles. But what have we learned—that artists engage in intense, repetitive labor? That they’re slobs?

The latter lesson’s repeated several times, actually, as in Bruce Nauman’s 2001 infrared video installation tracking the movements of his cat and the mice it chased through his studio at night. We know this project concerns a creative blockage so frustrating that Nauman decided to film his vermin. The artist omits human activity deliberately. But as we watched the piece, all we could think about was decluttering.

Two artists do bring the studio’s creative ferment to life. In her digital slide show Sufficient Self (2004), Andrea Zittel presents photos from her compound in Joshua Tree, California, to explain how she transcends the studio, making her own clothes, furniture, bowls and architecture. Covering another room with nine black-and-white video projections, William Kentridge immerses viewers in a fictionalized version of his studio that’s fantastic in every sense.

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