The melancholy studio

The two works under consideration are representations of the artist’s studio separated by roughly five hundred years. Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I and Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) are allegories of aesthetic practice that respectively mark the emergence of the modern idea of the studio and of the studio’s demise. Each work conjures the studio as a province of activity in seclusion with specific attention to the artist as maker and thinker. Who is the author of a work in which the conventions of authorship are undermined by ambivalence or doubt? The question exposes a paradox identifying a limitation within the epistemology of making: that the artwork, as an artifact of material, technical, and formal means, can make only uncertain claims to knowledge, including claims to the artist’s self-knowledge. The following text is offered as a variation on the usual means of reflecting on the meaning of works of art. Our premise is that different voices might usefully illuminate a general problem by writing in response to one another about different objects in different places and times that seem to harbor a related question. The respective stages of this exchange are meant to resonate without, however, claiming to build a particular historical connection or a uniform theory of art-making. Rather, each voice undertakes a separate investigation of the properties of an object inspired by the other, each step in the exchange initiated to some degree by the preceding one. The (paradoxical) consequence of this procedure proves to be a gradual convergence of themes as the objects in question become more precisely defined and therefore increasingly discrete. 1. Michael Auping, “A Thousand Words: Bruce Nauman Talks about Mapping the Studio,” Artforum 40, no. 7 (March 2002): 120. For basic information about the work and important descriptive accounts, see Lynne Cooke, Bruce Nauman, “Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage),” exhibition brochure, Dia Center for the Arts (New York, 2002); and Christine Litz, “At Night All Cats Are Grey? Mysterious Elements in Bruce Nauman’s Work,” in Bruce Nauman: Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), exh. cat., Museum Ludwig (Cologne, 2002), 21–27. The camera