The rebranded totally revamped incarnation of the Museum of Art and Design (formerly, the American Craft Museum) openend last Septemeber 2008 at Columbus Circle, a bustling intersection on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Central Park South.  As part of the institution’s education and outreach program, it hosts Artist Open Studios every day of the week on the 6th floor.  Last Sunday, I stopped in to see what Bridget Parris, a skilled Industrial Designer with home hardgood designs gracing Anthropologie’s catalogs, the european-inspired women’s wear and decor specialist, was creating.  On the bus ride to the museum, I was envisioning a post about the rewards of visiting an open studio, of learning first-hand from the artist, crafter or designer by joining in on a student-teacher dialogue.  I further hoped to pick up a skill or technique for a future craft.  What came from the visit, however, was entirely unexpected.

Watching someone at work, in the midst of a creative moment, feels invasive and uncomfortably personal.

In an open studio context, you quickly get the impression that there are unspoken rules of engagement.  Do not stare;  scan the studio with enthusiasm; never fix eyes on something that may appear unfinished, private; look interested; refrain from too many questions when s/he is creating; make art-intelligent statements; mind your step — these items are one of a kind!;  maintain appropriate physical and metaphorical distance between you, the subordinate, and the artist-teacher.  In the presence of art and craft making, behavior is heavily coded, turning what should be a pleasant, informative experience into quite possibly one of the most awkward encounters a person could have.

Ever walked in on someone naked, sharing equally in their horror as you turn to panic?  That’s exactly how I experience an artist’s open studio — can’t get out of there fast enough, yet am compelled to stay and mingle in the artist’s private practice.

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), a wealthy French realist-impressionist artist painted crafts and tradesmen at work.  Caillebotte’s pictorial treatment of the laboring class came to mind at Parris’s open studio, where I sensed I was more voyeur than visitor.

Above, The Floor Scrapers by Gustave Cailebotte, 1875 (oil on canvas) 57 1/2 in. x 40 in.

The 1875 painting Les raboteurs de parquet or The Floor Scrapers, a study Caillebotte did of the working class laborers hired to repair his studio, is a poignant rendering of the complex relationship between the upper and working classes and between the fine artist and the skilled artist/artisan. Caillebotte depicts the sweat and raw muscularity of men in the throes of backbreaking labor.  The physical possession of his subjects goes beyond Caillebotte’s preference to paint the men nearly naked, stripped of their privacy, but to the formal qualities of the work itself.  The angle that the viewer enters the scene is from above, pinning the men firmly in the control of the artist and by proxy our gaze.  The power of the artist is asserted further by the imposed sense of claustrophobia, signifying a tenor of ownership. If you are inclined, Norma Broude’s book Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Paris and Terry E. Smith’s In Visible Touch:  Modernism and Masculinity both offer additional in-depth analyses into the subject.

Caillebotte channeled the inherent discomfort, perhaps anxiety, that arises from a relationship in which power is unevenly distributed.  Unlike Caillebotte I was not the dominating force in the open studio dynamic, which would have ideally constructed the perfect opportunity to absorb all the lessons that the expert desired to impart.  However,  the sense that I had violated a sacred space, whether perceived or true, prevented the free-flowing exchange of information.

What has been your experience in the studio?  I am quite curious!