University of Chicago Press recently published The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner. In it, I found a reprint of a refreshingly sarcastic review written by David J. Getsy in 2002 after the reconstructed Francis Bacon Studio went on public view in Dublin.
Here are some of Mr. Getsy's thoughts on museum practices, celebrity cults, and voyeurism –
Dublin has become the posthumous home of Francis Bacon. Some seventy-five years after he left Ireland at the age of sixteen, he has been welcomed back as a local art hero. In addition to important exhibitions and collections, the centerpiece of Dublin's embrace of Bacon is undoubtedly the re-creation of his London studio. Originally located at 7 Reece Mews in South Kensington, the studio and and its contents have been moved to the Hugh Lane Gallery, one of Ireland's foremost museums of modern and contemporary art. Donated by John Edwards and the Bacon Estate in 1998, the studio opened in May 2001 in a new wing built specially to house it, as a permanent annex to the HLG, which has undertaken the Herculean task of cataloging and reconstructing Bacon's famously chaotic workplace. A team of archaeologists and art historians sifted through the mass of material, ephemera, and rubbish contained in the studio at the time of the artist's death in 1992. The outcome of this "dig" is a vast computerized database of over seven thousand records, which viewers can peruse in an interactive gallery. But while this painstaking effort of preservation and reconstruction has yielded spectacular results, its underlying assumptions and motivations appear to have gone unexamined.
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There are only three limited vantage points from which to see the interior of Bacon's workplace. First, a doorway opens onto the reconstructed atelier. The spectator, however, is given only enough room to step inside the threshold, as a Plexiglas box prevents further entry (a situation that also allows room for only one person to view the space at a time). The two adjacent windows located on the far end of the studio, which were kept blocked by Bacon with the back of his canvases in progress, are opened up to provide a second site from which to peer into the room. Perhaps the strangest treatment of the studio is the third avenue of visual access. When not standing in the doorway or at the window, visitors to the HLG installation are confronted mostly with blank, gray walls. In order to add another vantage point to see inside the studio space, the far corner of one of these solid walls has been pierced with two eyeholes. Two steel cylinders have been attached to the holes and protrude out from the otherwise blank exterior wall. Around twenty centimeters in length and ten in diameter each of these protrusions contain fish-eye lenses, which allow the viewers to see parts of the studio not visible from the door or through the windows. Bacon often used the walls and ceilings of the studio as his palette. The lenses are focused on sections of wall on which Bacon has tested out paints and colors, framing them as if they were paintings in their own right. (Here, the installation builds on an offhand comment by Bacon that these walls were his only "abstract" works.) Whether peeking in the windows, looking through the Plexiglas-encased vestibule, or peering through these eyeholes, the visual experience of Bacon's studio becomes like a solitary peepshow, a voyeuristic quest for the apprehension of some titillating detail.
The limited and restricted vantage points guarantee that one cannot easily see another person looking into the studio, no matter how busy the gallery is. The installation keeps the viewer outside the studio but stages access to a fictitious interiority. Because the studio's main contents are tools and debris, the viewer searches for clues and personalia in and amongst the rubbish. Reading the headlines on discarded newspapers or looking at the photographs strewn across the floor, spectators can easily be fooled into thinking that they are gaining privileged access into Bacon's private space. The initial shock of the chaos of the studio fades, as one begins to recognize how its contents have been subtly arranged. Too many of the photos and books are legible from the doorway, forming lines of sight emanating from a vantage point inside the threshold. Despite its overwhelming mess and disarray, the space is a carefully orchestrated artifice – one designed to convince us that we are seeing into the inner workings of Bacon's workplace and, by extension, his creative process.
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The HLG installation does little to illuminate the technical, conceptual, and visual sophistication of Bacon's art, nor does it critically engage with the construction of Bacon's artistic persona (by himself and others) through the studio. For all the assiduous reconstruction of the space, the studio is presented less as a workspace than as a social space. Photographs of Bacon's friends and companions (many taken in the studio) have been installed in the display cases, yet there is little attempt in the installation to discuss how Bacon actually used his studio and what it allowed him to do in painting. The focus is largely on Bacon the individual rather than on Bacon the painter. Fittingly, there is no art inside the studio. Unlike other reconstructions, such as the Atelier Brancusi in Paris, the Bacon studio has had its art extracted. An important group of over seventy drawings (Bacon repeatedly and famously denied that he created drawings for his paintings) have been transferred to the HLG collections. Some of the canvases, which remained incomplete upon Bacon's death, have been installed in a separate gallery in the studio wing, presented like finished work. Preserved as it is in its Plexiglas shell, the Bacon studio resembles an empty stage set, or an old-style history museum display. As such, it lacks only its taxidermied protagonist.
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