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The 'ontopology' of the artist's studio as workplace: Researching the artist's

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 The ‘Ontopology’ of the Artist’s Studio as Workplace: Researching the
Artist’s Studio and the Art/Design Classroom

Derek Pigrum University of Bath and Vienna Int. School

Introduction
A practicing artist is involved in a life- long learning process conducted for the most part in
the workplace of the studio. It is a life-long learning process that exceeds the mere acquisition
and refinement of technique and skills, an ‘ontopology’ that as Derrida states links ‘…the
ontological value of … being to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a
locality, the topos of a territory’ (Derrida, 1994, p.82). If one of the goals of life long learning
is to enhance personal identity, creative fulfillment and innovation then the situated practices
of the artist can provide us with important clues of how this can be achieved.

This paper has its origins in a particular moment in time when, in the middle of research into
what I have termed the ‘Transitional Drawing’ practices of artists (see Pigrum, 2001) I
entered my studio and became suddenly aware that some things in the room were present- at-
hand while others had a ‘readiness-to-hand’. At that time I characterized this as levels of
presence and absence according to the visibility and accessibility of things. Subsequently
Heidegger’s notion of the ‘ready-to-hand’ (Heidegger, 1962) and Summer’s ideas concerning
the spatial setting apart of things that involves, values of ‘facing’ and proximity (Summers,
2003) modified my understanding. I went on to make a detailed study of the workplace of the
Austrian sculptor Oswald Stimm (my main research informant) and the studios of a number
of other artists. This research has led over a long period of time to the restructuring of my
classroom as a topos or place of proximally finished and unfinished things.

Section one is a reflection upon the nature of place as subjectile (Derrida, 1998), as the
ground of the totality of things, configurations and involvements. The next section is a
discussion of the notion developed by Winnicott (1971) of ‘potential space’ as the source of
individual identity and all subsequent creative activity that is inextricably interwoven to the
conditions of real place. The third section draws out the relationship between Lefebrve’s
understanding of lived space (Lefebvre, 1991), its relationship to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus
(Bourdieu, 2000) and the nature of the artist’s workplace. The following four sections
describe the complicity that exists between place and the artist’s creative process in terms of
placing, layering, making and unmaking and the role of the notebook or journal. Throughout
these sections Derrida’s notion of ‘Ontopology’ (Derrida, 1994) is developed in terms of
Heidegger’s ideas on the proximal relations of the ‘ready-to-hand’ and the situated being of
Dasein ‘or literally ‘being-there’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 27). The final section looks at the
notion of closure and Das Gegenwerk (Pigrum, 2005 and Pigrum and Stables, 2005) or the
work towards the final work that is in opposition to definitive closure and descriptive of the
artists workplace. In the conclusion the ready –to hand is aligned with McCormick’s notion of
“salience’ (McCormick,1999) and Glaser’s ‘peripheral participation in communities of
practice’ (Glaser, 1999). The key to learning in the workplace is seen in terms of
Wittgenstein’s notion of learning ‘how to go on’ (see, Pigrum, 2002).

Place as Subjectile

Place or ‘The Chora is properly a mother, a nurse, a receptacle, a bearer of

imprints…’(Derrida, 1998, p.233). These are ‘what tradition calls the figures—comparisons,

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images, metaphors—proposed by Timaeus’(ibid, p.233). At the same time the word Chora
itself means quite literally, place. Elsewhere, writing about the drawings of Artaud, Derrida
refers to the subjectile as place. The place of the studio, like Derrida’s notion of the subjectile
‘stretches out under the figures that are thrown upon it …’ (Derrida & Thevinin,1998, p. 139).
Derrida uses the unusual word ‘subjectile’, to refer to the interminable permutations of figures
in the sense of innovative representations that sound the depths that lie ‘between the subject
and the object’ (Derrida & Thevinin 1998, p.122).

Following Derrida (1998), place is that which, like the ‘subjectile’ is underneath the totality
of things, configurations, concerns and involvements that constitute the workplace as a figure
of mother, nurse, receptacle and bearer of imprints. Before attempting to show that it is
primarily place, in the form of the artist’s studio that is the mother of invention, I will probe
on the basis of a recent experience a little deeper into the notion of place.

Not far from where I am writing this paper is the house where Mozart lived for a while and
composed. The plaque on the wall commemorates the site rather than the situatedness of
Mozart’s creative activity. We often reduce the notion of place to ‘site’ as a formal identity of
position, reinforcing the deeply held view that creative work is body and place independent.
Not far from the Mozart house is a bust commemorating the painter Oscar Kokoschka, a
bronze head with no hands.

The photocopy shop on the corner of the street where I live is undergoing extensive
reconstruction; the windows and dividing walls have all been removed leaving nothing but a
builders tape separating the interior of the gutted premises from the street. I tried to recall
where the copy machines, counter and I had stood but the absence of a boundary and a
threshold had transformed place into a recessed part of the housing block with permeable
borders to the street, a place lost. However, the loss of place is deceptive for even when space
has been bounded, has become a receptacle it remains heterogeneous to everything it receives.
The contents of the studio of the painter Francis Bacon have been excavated with painstaking
care and transferred to a different place in Dublin; the jerry built studio of Giacometti has
been demolished but sections of the walls covered with his drawings have been preserved in a
museum; the studio of Oswald Stimm will, in the near future be given over to the
encroachment of building developers.

Nietzsche stated ‘we are accustomed to abstain from asking how it (the work of art) became:
we rejoice in the present fact as though it came out of the ground by magic’ (in Schaeffer,
1992, p.225). Gadamer echoes this when he states ‘…to the observer the work…is reflected
as a miraculousness of creation by inspired genius. …the self-knowledge of the artist remains
far more down to earth. He seeks possibilities of making and doing…’(brackets are
mine)(Gadamer, 1991,p.93); possibilities that are to a large extent provided by the topos or
place of the studio.

Potential Space
A close reading of Winnicott (1971) provides the link between ‘potential space’ and real
place. What Winnicott termed ‘potential space’, is where the infant destroys the internal
object (phantasy) of the mother/child unity and discovers the external world as ‘other-than-
me’(Winnicott, 1971). In ‘normal’ development the individual infant, child, or adult develops
their own capacity to generate potential space. ‘Potential space’ is, as Winnicott states ‘an
intermediate area of experiencing that lies between the inner world, inner psychic reality and
actual or external reality’(in Ogden, 1998, p. 205). Transitional object use in ‘potential space’

2
is a ‘highly charged activity involving the use and animation of transitional objects that help
us to bridge or effect a passage, across gaps in continuity…’ (Ogden, 1992, p. 214).
Imagination is the result of the transformation phantasy undergoes when it is brought into
‘potential space’. Bachelard states ‘a child may be given a deep internal life if we grant him a
place of solitude, a corner’ (Bachelard, 1987, p.99) echoing Winnicott’s notion that ‘potential
space’ is based on two external conditions; ‘the external emotional environment and the
physical environment …’ (Winnicott, 1996/1971,p. 13). It is the author’s belief that these two
conditions merge into one in the place of the artist’s studio.

‘Lived’ Space
Lefebrve’s ideas on space are concerned with the ability of the body to locate itself, to
organize its immediate surroundings for complex purposes. Lefebrve (1991), drawing on
Heidegger’s reappraisal of the narrow, calculative Cartesian model of space divorced from
experience (Heidegger, 1962), developed a notion of ‘lived space’ and of habiter or a form of
inhabiting that implies situated activity. The habiter has a strong link to the idea developed by
Bourdieu of habitus as a system of durable, dispositions which functions as the basis of
unified practices. A key disposition of habitus is to produce a workplace that facilitate moves
from the inner to outer world and from the outer to inner world, moves, that, encompass
Lefebrve’s triadic notion of spatial practices, real space that is generated and used;
representations of space, such as drawings and diagrammes and the space of knowledge; and
spaces of representation, space that through its use is modified overtime (Lefebrve, 1991).

The way the artist orders her workplace determines the world of things she encounters
everyday. Throughout this paper the word ‘thing’ will be used and not object. The word
‘object’ derives from the Latin objectum and suggests a standing over and against the subject,
in German this is brought out in the word Gegenstand where gegen has the meaning of
against. The etymology of the word ‘thing’ is the old German word Ding meaning a meeting
to discuss something of concern (Perrotta, 1999, p. 238). Thus ‘thing’ has the connotation of
the ‘circumspection of concern’ (Heidegger, 1962 , p. 135). As Brown states ‘the thing really
names less an object than a particular subject-object relation…The word things designates the
concrete yet ambiguous within the everyday…functioning as a place holder for some future
specifying operation…hovering over the threshold between the nameable and the
unnameable, the figurable and non figurable…’ (Brown, 2004, p. 4-5).

Artistic production is intimately linked to the complexities of economic and cultural factors
that are beyond the scope of this paper to discuss but, following Summers ‘the particularity
of an artefact is…rooted in the particularity of its making’ (Summers, 2003, p.73) of the
situated nature of practices of the Dasein or the being-there. Summer’s argues that ‘social
space is second nature in the sense of ingrained habit’ but goes on to state that ‘there is also a
sense in which second nature simply is “nature” since given nature is never encountered in
itself, but rather from within a culture’ (Summers, 2003, p.23). The cultural development of
the artist’s workplace has set it apart in the larger civic space in which it is situated as a place
of extraordinary activity identified with the autonomy of the artist and the veiled mysteries of
artistic creation. The idea of the artist at work alone in the studio is deeply formative of our
ideas concerning the personal authenticity of expression of someone who is conceived of as
‘radically free and autonomous’ (Summers 2003, p.637). Unlike most people engaged in
production processes the artist is not an interchangeable part, nor exposed to an assessment of
the efficiency of process.

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We need only stop to consider that such a well known British artist as Frank Auerbach works
from very early in the morning until late at night in his studio, a work pattern broken by one
day’s holiday a year to realize the extent to which the everyday world of the artist is grounded
in the workplace. The photographic documentation of Oswald Stimm’s studio over an
extended period of time (ten years) has produced an understanding that as Bachelard states
‘the description of forms is easier than the description of movements’ (Bachelard, 1987, p.
22). The accumulated record of movements and transformations together with interview data
has produced an understanding that the artist Oswald Stimm alternates between a ‘turning
away’ or deferral of the work, a freeing himself from its immediate appearance and concern,
to a ‘taking up again’ that reverberates in a wholly unexpected way, a surge from the direction
of the topos in which the thing is situated that grants ‘the sign of a new being’ (Bachelard
1987, p.74).

The studio serves as a tangible way of approaching those passages in Heidegger’s ‘Being and
Time’ that deal with relationship between the ‘ready-to-hand’ and Dasein that is the basis of
the ‘ontopology’ of the studio. Heidegger suggests that every entity that is to-hand has
different conditions of closeness and identifies three states of proximity that are linked and
that enable Dasein to signify: the presence-at-hand where things are not proximally given, the
‘proximally ready-to-hand’ (ibid,p.135), and readiness- to- hand where the thing and our
immediate concerns converge. Together these proximal relations eliminate any conception of
things just lying around but rather that each thing has a definite topes or place within the
totality of places within place. It is in the ‘round about us’(das Um-uns-herum) (Heidegger
1962, p.136) that ‘all “wheres” are discovered and circumspectively interpreted as we go our
ways in everyday dealings…’(ibid, p.137).

Zurückgreifen (Reaching Back)

Oswald Stimm took twelve years to ‘integrate’ the place of his studio, to create optimal
conditions in which the cyclical movement of his creative thinking and action can take place;
a movement or rhythm in which new cycles are born from previous ones, a movement
pervaded by repetition. But this repetition is not an arid, stuck in the groove repetition, but
one that creates difference. The spatial conditions of Oswald Stimm’s studio coalesce in the
vicinity of the table at the centre of the workplace and around whatever piece he is working
on at the moment. The table is then the notional point from which sightings are made.
Completed works are relegated to the sides and back of the studio often juxtaposed to work
whose completion has been deferred (see Pigrum, 2001). The incomplete work is placed in
such a way as to offer itself to sight and what Heidegger terms ‘ the circumspection of
concern’ (Heidegger, 1962, p. 135). When Stimm takes up a work again he describes this as
‘zuruckgreifen’ (Pigrum, 2001). The word zurück has the connotation in German of turning
back and greifen means grasp but is also related to the word begreifen or understanding.

The deferred completion of a work is a ‘turning away’, a breaking off of activity reminding us
of Perseus of ancient Greek myth who must turn his head to feel his way to accomplish his
exploit of decapitating the Gorgon. Thus, Stimm’s studio can be seen as what Steiner terms a
‘vast storehouse of as yet unperceived… undeclared possibility’ (Steiner, 2002, p.105) an
archive, an 'inventory' open to the backwards reaching of Stimm’s 'zurückgriefen'.

The reader might be tempted here to conceive of Stimm as someone who produces works
purely by processes of finding and association when in fact Stimm is a sculptor in the
constructivist tradition whose work is carefully planned in working drawings and executed
with great precision. Everywhere in the studio there are different configurations of planar

4
ordering –the horizontal planes of the central table strewn with writing and drawing
implements, materials, texts and working drawings, the large work bench and mobile tool box
and the vertical and tilted planes of completed works and works in progress. The internal
organization of paths between things in the studio, their vertical and horizontal positioning is
critical in directing the artist’s attention, movement and actions.

On the walls are works, most often by other artists and people he has known that he states
produce a certain ‘creative temperature’ (Pigrum 2001). They are among the few things in the
room that are not subjected to continual change but belong to an almost ritual setting of
boundaries; the boundaries of the studio within which Stimm spends most of his life.

On a recent visit to Stimm’s studio I noticed the mutilated torso of a striding figure I had seen
on a previous occasion. When I asked Stimm why he had radically changed this figure he
replied that ‘Only now can I endure it’ ( Jetz erst kan Ich das Erdulden). When Stimm turns
away from the work it is still in a state of what Heidegger terms ‘being-towards’. While
referring to the studio as ‘chaos’, Stimm’s can, nevertheless locate and retrieve works and
drawings, books and catalogues relevant to our conversations within minutes, suggesting a
deeper ordering. Rather like the figure of Solanka in Salaman Rushdie’s book ‘Fury’ (2001)
Stimm has ‘learned the value of working, like the great matadors, closer to the bull; that is,
using…his immediate surroundings…’ (Rushdie, 2001, p.16).

The variation engendered by deferral unveils the inexhaustible possibilities present in place.
Deferral is then a detour with the capacity of unfolding a succession of sightings; sightings
that do not seize hold of possibility all at once but gradually give access to a set of new
relations.

Layering Stuff
Heidegger states ‘every entity that is to-hand has a different closeness, which is not to be
ascertained by measuring distances (but by) Daseins circumspective concern (umsichtiges
Besorgen) and its directionality (Ausrichtung)’ (in Casey, 1998, p. 262). Direction locates for
example, equipment, tools, materials, drawings, and resources and works in a particular place;
circumspective concern takes continual account of what is happening in the ‘near sphere’ of
the artist. The combination of these factors brings together the ‘round-about-us’ of place.
Bacon possessed knowledge of the place of his studio that was a form of co-existence, of
continual acquaintance ‘expressed in a matrix of habitual action’ (ibid).

Bacon’s studio was a horizontal ‘ankle deep strew of books, photos, old shoes, paint tubes,
rags etc., …like the partial physical manifestation of the mental compost’ (Peppiatt, 1996, p.
203) and subjected to continual attunements, transformations, and re-adjustments of
proximity and distance. This layering included a paratactic collection of photographs of
friends, golf and x-ray manuals, film stills, reproductions of paintings by artists such as
Michelangelo, Valasquez, Rembrandt and many others, photographs from Muybridge’s work
on human motion and of photographs of mouth and skin diseases. In this way Bacon’s studio
was what Heidegger (1997) has termed a place of ‘gathering’ (versammeln) where things are
drawn together within a bounded place. I believe that Bacon layered ‘stuff’ in order, as
Derrida writing about the subjectile states, for it ‘to be traversed, pierced, penetrated in order
to have done with the screen, that is the inert support of representation…’ (Derrida and
Thevenin 1998, p.76) and, in this way drawing from images more than they could give Bacon
in their pristine state. Bacon’s movement within the studio was in itself ‘place productive’,
because it animated and reshuffled the strew of stuff laying images ‘open to sight’.

5
Deleuze (2003) writing about Bacon concentrates on the actual ‘diagramming’ on the canvas
that displaces, what he terms ‘figuration’ in the direction of the figural but he does not
mention the role of Bacon’s studio. I believe that the ‘layers of stuff’ in the studio reveal the
capacity of Bacon to so organize place as to render, by ‘finding’ the arbitrary quality of
images as an object of meaning. These ‘fundgegenständer’, found objects, are de-
contextualized through the vicissitudes of the physical place of the studio. However, their re-
contextualization in terms of the work in hand did not consist of the construction of an image
from the ‘readiness-to-hand’ of the ‘found’ fragment. Both the images ‘found’ on the topos of
the studio floor and the images ‘found’ through the diagramming are convergent and
emergent.

Like all studios Bacon’s was ‘place-as-pragmatic-as the realm of worked-on-things’ (in
Casey, 1998, p. 246); place as a receptacle where material was altered or imprinted, an
imprinting that operated as a mid-wife or nurse to his final work.

The Figure Theatre

In the photographs we have of Giacometti’s studio we see it populated with sculptures in a
variety of states, from half finished skeletal structures of raw plaster to completed bronze
casts and in between them clay figures shrouded in damp cloths to retard the drying process.
Once cast, the clay or plaster figures would be returned to the studio to be re-worked and
recast. The cast itself was a delay, ‘a momentary ‘fixing’ that opened onto a new
figure’(Stoessel 1994, p.53). Stoessel suggests that the way sculptures in the studio were
juxtaposed and re-arranged was like the ‘stage properties of a figure theatre’ (Stoessel 194,
p.78); a figure theatre that produced new solutions.

Stoessel states that Giacometti transformed the walls of his studio ‘into an over-dimensional
piece of paper’ (ibid, p. 83) in a constant process of drawing and over- drawing. Thus, the
boundaries of the studio reflected ‘what pre-occupied the artist, as a mirror of the state of
artistic concerns and problems’ (ibid, p.84).

Unlike Stimm and Bacon, Giacometti also used the things that cluttered the studio as a theme
for paintings, as if the very confines of the studio provided Giacometti with a world of things
that was close enough to be attended to. For Giacometti the studio was the place where his
Dasein, his ‘being there’ met up with what Stoessel describes as ‘profane thinglyness’.

In the ancient memory system described by Yates (1969), the orator walked through a real
identifiable place in imagination gathering topics (from topos, place) by association along the
way. In this system a physically existent place is imagined, a topos that, like the topics in
rhetoric, aid memory and invention. Yates quotes Fludd as stating in his ‘Art of Memory’ that
‘…an image of a place, reflected straight from reality is stronger and clearer than if reflected
from an imaginary place…if place is fictious it will not be stable in memory, just as
reflections in mirrors grow weaker the more distant they are from reality’ (Yates, 1969,
p.148). The totality of involvements in the planarity of real place ‘not only enables the
definition of relations as such, but, more generally provides the potential for the definition of
further relations…making a new system of choices available (Summers, 2003, p.334). If we
follow Heidegger then the’ ready-to-hand’ subjected to continual reshuffling in place enables
the artist to encounter them ‘under modifications in which (there) readiness- to-hand is
revealed’ (brackets mine) Heidegger, 1962, p.104). Thus, the ‘compost heap’ of Bacon’s
studio, the ‘figure theatre’ of Giacometti’s and the chaos of Stimm’s studio are in fact a

6
deliberate artifice, a gathering of the ‘totality of involvements, (ibid,p.120), a ‘set up’ that
allows the artist as habiter to ‘find’ and invent from what is given in topos. It is interesting to
note that the word ‘find’ and ‘invent’ in German have the same root- finden (find) and
Erfinden (invent). In the gradual production of place the artist discovers the optimal relation
between place and practice. In this sense the phrase ‘learning takes place’ has a reality beyond
that of transmission and event, to one of the interdependence of learning and place.

The Place of the Paper

The journal or note/sketchbook is a place within and beyond the place of the studio. Like the
studio it is a place of juxtaposition, layering, weaving and unweaving, the salvaging
operations of memory and retrieval; a conglomeration of things of different orders and
different strands but it does not have the ‘around about us’ of the workplace.

The relationship of text and textile, both of which derive from the Latin textus (fabric,
structure, text) converge in the past participle of textere ( to weave). Just as Perseus must turn
away in order to decapitate the Medusa so Penelope must weave and unweave in the halls of
Ithaca to postpone marriage to one of her suitors, to postpone closure.

Threads or strands are interlaced in the journal, drop from sight, reappear, are deferred only to
re-emerge. In the pages of the journal we need not take up a position but can remain open to
possibilities. We can enter the journal anywhere. Nothing we encounter there is conclusive,
each entry orients consciousness in a somewhat different direction and yet there is, at the
same time complementarity and intersection. The oblique routes into the place of the journal
and into the place of the studio are both designed to unfetter consciousness. An important
aspect of this unfettering in the journal is the use of more than one sign mode (see Pigrum
2001). In terms of creative thinking, Kress (1997) argues for the efficacy of ‘multi-mode’ use;
when the limits of one mode have been reached it helps to be able to switch to another mode.
The freedom to shift mode helps the agent to avoid conceptual entrapment and premature
closure. Etymologically, the relationship between writing and drawing is close. The German
‘riss’ is closely related to both writing and drawing (riss is the origin of the word 'writing' in
English). In German the concept of wresting is related to the concept of riss, rift or incision.
Reissen is to wrest. Den Riss is the design, reissfeder the drawing pen and reissbrett the
drawing board, but it is the relationship of the concept of ‘to wrest’ and to draw or design or
write which is of importance( see Pigrum , 2004a). Drawing and writing have a quality of
projection, of ‘thrownness’ that facilitates the wresting of an idea (Heidegger, 1975).

By keeping a journal the individual is able to ‘take over their own development’ (Harré, 1983
p.257). Reflexive monitoring of creative process in journals helps us to become reflective
learners, both on-action and in-action to examine our own self-development. Journal use, is
related to Harre’s way of formulating agency in terms of ‘powers to be’ and ‘powers to do’;
the dialectic between reflexive powers, action, reflective judgment and the growth of
understanding and competence. Thus keeping a journal produces a continuity of self-
understanding and eventually it helps us to understand the complexity of our own creative
processes.

Although it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in any detail in a very tangible way,
the field notebooks of the qualitative researcher operate rather like the artist’s or designer’s
note/sketchbook, situated somewhere between the work in progress and ideas derived, or
interpreted from the real world, and replete with abandoned directions and false leads and
reflections upon closure (see Pigrum and Stables, 2005).

7
Closure and the Enclosed
If we think of the completed work as what Derrida refers to as a ‘minor structure necessarily
closed’ (in Critchley 1992, p.64)—then we can think of completed work as an infinite
opening beyond closure. Thus, the finished work is not an unbroken boundary, like a
continuous wall constituting a finite totality but is that which has the directionality of
‘towards’ and as such can be designated as Das Gegenwerk (Pigrum 2005). The word gegen
has two meanings in German: one is toward and the other, against. Elsewhere this neologism
has been applied to rough notes and sketches, drafts, notebooks, and the diagramming of
expert practitioners and more recently to the practices of qualitative research. (see Pigrum,
2004a, 2004b, 2005 and Pigrum and Stables 2005). Things that are characterized by
indeterminacy, provisionality, and non finito signification in terms of drafting and drawing
practices Thus, das Gegenwerk is the work toward the finished work but also the work that is
in opposition to the closure of the completed work.

Critchley (1992), writing about the all important concept of closure in the philosophy of
Derrida states ‘…to erect a closure is literally to build…an enclosing wall…dividing the
inside of a circumscribed territory from the outside’ (Critcheley, 1992, p. 62). Critchley’s
comparison of closure and the enclosure of place illuminates the difference between the
studio and most other workplaces in that in the artist’s studio there continually exists an
alternative to the existing planar order of things making of it a place or enclosure that always
leaves openings that offer ‘the promise of a new beginning’ (ibid). The workplace as
Gegenwerk holds itself underneath, above, and around the activity of the artist as a receptacle,
a nurse or midwife to invention, a bearer of imprinting, it constitutes all the figures of Plato’s
Chora, (Plato, 2000) while at the same time residing spectrally in the finished work where,
like the subjectile, it is the ‘unfigurable receptacle of all figures’ (Derrida,1998, p.135). Even
when we are afforded a glimpse of das Gegenwerk in the form of the studio or the rough
sketches or journal entries of the artist it is always as a supplement to the completed work .

The qualitative research methodology used to research the workplace can itself be
characterized as Das Gegenwerk, as research that does not offer the consolation of completed
form, but rather involves transformation, and re-determination as processes of emergent
disclosure that embraces the uncertainty of transitional states that have the potential to
develop quality, reflexivity, and criticality ( see Pigrum & Stables, 2005).

Conclusion
Glaser (1999), referring to expert knowledge suggests that we ‘should focus on situations
where there are complex patterns to be perceived, and where recognition of these patterns
implies particular moves and procedures for solutions…of re-presenting a problem or self
monitoring performance’ (Glaser, 1999, p.97). The thesis of this paper is that the artist’s
studio represents just such a complex pattern; a pattern in which the topos of the workplace
operates as a reservoir of re-presentations and connections that provide a source of creative
inspiration.

I take groups of students to Stimm’s studio as a motivation for their learning activity, for them
to see what he does everyday and where he does it, to see the situatedness of practice and the
importance of the ‘around about’ us of things that are always in excess of what the individual
creates. This is not a one- off experience because they return to a classroom set-up along
similar lines enabling them to embed themselves in what Lave and Wenger term ‘Legitimate
Peripheral Participation in Communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1999).

8
Perhaps the most important learning that takes place in this peripheral participation is
Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘knowing how to go on’ mentioned earlier (see Pigrum, 2002).
Deferral and reaching back, layering stuff, the theatre of figures and the weaving and
unweaving in the journal or note/sketch book are all ways of ‘going on’. Stables has also
employed this notion of Wittgenstein’s in a recent paper where he identifies it as a key aim of
education (Stables, 2005). The problem is ‘how can he (in this case the pupil) know how he is
to continue the pattern by himself’ (brackets are mine)(Wittgenstein, 1963, p.84). How does
the pupil ‘know how to go on’ in the autonomous context? Following Wittgenstein the answer
would not seem to lie in a consideration of ‘the reasons for doing this or that’ but in a
response to the pressure of an immediate task where the journal operates as, what
Wittgenstein terms ‘signposts’ (see Pigrum, 2002). The pupil goes by a signpost only ‘in so
far as there exist a regular use of sign posts’ (ibid, p.80). ‘Regular use’ constitutes the journal
as a ‘signpost’ that becomes a ‘generative structure’ or habitus (Bourdieu, 2000).

‘Knowing how to go on’ in terms of the practical knowledge that operates in the studio
involves reflective, contemplative thinking and awareness of the particular ‘salience’ of
things, of their ‘readiness-to-hand’ in the totality of involvements within place.

McCormick states ‘the practical situation has salience located in the features of the context’
(italics are mine) (MacCormick, 1999, p. 126). Stimm’s reaching back, his zurückgreifen is a
recursive activity that involves a new grasp, or understanding of ‘how to go on’ (Wittgenstein
1963 p.84) generated by the way the work offers itself to sight in a new topos. Salience
produces an incitement that binds the external world to receptive consciousness. However,
as we have seen this receptiveness is free from any reductive application. Deferral and
salience is not only putting off until tomorrow what we cannot do today but a putting off that
is a putting in place where it can become salient in a different way.

Salience, not transfer, is the heart of the knowledge problem for McCormick, the ‘where and
what the cues are’ (ibid, p.127). Thus, the studio, classroom and the workplace are not merely
sites with distractions that need to be filtered out, but are a potent source of salience evocative
of a play that dissolves the boundaries between the subject, the thing and place, between the
inside and the outside, between place and potential space of the individual dasein.

McCormick, writing about practical knowledge in science states, ‘most of us no doubt assume
that knowledge is in the head, and that we dig it out of our memory banks to use it for some
task…’ (ibid). He goes on to point to the connection between knowledge and activity,
knowledge that guides and is guided by action and quotes Scribner as stating ‘what you learn
is bound up with what you have to do’ (ibid) and I would add, the place you do it in. Learning
unfolds in place and the ‘ontopology’ of the artist’s studio, the classroom and the workplace
hinge on the opportunities for engaging in the situated practices of the community, an
engagement in practices and place that eventually transforms identity and the ways in which
we define ourselves and develop our creativity.

© Derek Pigrum 2007

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Dr. Derek Pigrum

Affiliation: University of Bath and Vienna International School
Address: Zedlitzgasse 3/13, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Tel: 0043 1 512 59 24

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