We're in Richmond,
Virginia, where we're
meeting up with Hope Ginsburg.
We're going to be talking
with her inside of her Sponge
HQ, which for the
past five years
has been her project space
as well as interdisciplinary
lab, workshop, and classroom
here at Virginia Commonwealth
University.
Hope is a self-proclaimed
sea sponge obsessive.
And her work and research have
explored both sponge biology
as well as its
metaphoric potential.
For a 2013 project in
Porto Alegre, Brazil,
she focused on four types of
sponges, which she rendered out
of handmade, hand-dyed
wool felt and presented
in tank-like spaces.
These were made collaboratively
through workshops in Virginia
and in Brazil.
And learning experientially
and with others
is really at the
core of her practice.
It was her interest in sponges
that initially led Hope
to her recent series
"Breathing on Land,"
for which she
meditates in full scuba
gear in a variety of
locations all on land.
She has done this
alone but often
with others, calling
attention to the relationship
between individual and
environmental health.
Hope's way of working is driven
by investigation, learning
by doing, and is highly social.
She works most often outside
of a formal studio, per se,
or in collaborative spaces.
With Hope, we're going to talk
about what a studio can be
and how you might imagine
your ideal space for learning,
thinking, and making.
Hi, I'm Hope Ginsburg.
And this is your art assignment.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You know, I guess
my studio journey
begins with like a
tiny table and chairs
under the basement steps in
the house that I grew up in.
I think that living in
New York for so long
and not having a studio
outside of my house,
I can certainly recall times
of hosting studio visits
with a very neatly made bed and
a projector two feet from it
and a slide screen in
front of the couch.
So I think that,
as with my artwork,
my studio and my living
space were most often
collapsed into one another.
I think, however,
there was always
the thought of, OK, this
desk or this surface
or the fantasy of if I
paint Homasote panels white
and hang them in the living
room, is that the studio?
Is the studio in the kitchen,
where the felt gets made?
So there is this real overlap
between living and working.
And there are always has been.
The Sponge project started
as a workshop model
when I was in graduate school.
And I was really interested
in a kind of situated school
within a school.
And so I set up a
four-day sponge workshop
that was intended to scramble
hierarchies between experts
and learners and
mix disciplines.
And that workshop model
got piloted a few times.
And I started to dream of
planting the Sponge somewhere,
like a sea sponge would
plant on a marine reef,
and allow it to kind of
scramble subject matters
and experiences.
And so the Sponge
HQ, planted here
at VCU and the School
of the Arts in 2010.
Your assignment is to
conjure a studio that
can be a real space
that you make,
like the inside of a drawer
or the surface of your desk,
a closet or maybe a building.
It can be a real space
that you would love to make
but for now will need to make
with a drawing or a collage.
It can also be an
imaginary space.
Is your perfect world
studio underwater or on
another planet?
In that case, you'll
most likely need
to draw it or render it
or mock it up as a model.
But we want to see
your ideal work space.
John, I really like
this assignment.
And I think it's
because we all have
a very firm idea in our heads
of what an artist studio is
or should be.
Right.
You think about canvases
and paints and lots
of light streaming in,
The Artist in His Studio.
Unfortunately titled.
And there is only one
female artist in this book.
And it's quite lovely.
And it's full of photographs
of artists in their studios.
And they're all very different.
But it's mostly a
person alone surrounded
by stuff and canvases, painting,
maybe with a supportive wife.
Of course, that
book got its title
from the famous
Rembrandt self-portrait,
where you see the artist
alone, the genius working out
how to use the canvas.
And other artists have
displayed themselves
in their studios, like Courbet
in a more populated space
surrounded by people
but it's still a guy
with a model painting a canvas.
But of course,
these days artists
don't necessarily
work like that.
Like I thought of Andy
Warhol and the Factory
in the 1960s, which
really destroyed
the idea of the solitary artist.
That's a really great example
because Warhol was working
collaboratively on films.
And so many artists are
doing different things
than making paintings
or sculptures alone.
They're working out
in the community,
building things in groups
together with other people.
So, Sara, I'm really
excited to design
my own personal ideal workspace.
But I'm hoping you can
give us a little more art
historical context.
Definitely.
Today, I'm going to talk
about Marcel Duchamp
and what he did in his studio.
NARRATOR: In 1913 in
his studio in Paris,
Duchamp mounted a bicycle
wheel upside down on a stool
and liked to watch it
spin, saying it was simply
letting things go by
themselves and having
a sort of creative
atmosphere in a studio,
probably to help your ideas
come out of your head.
When he set up a new studio
in New York a few years later,
he populated the room
with everyday objects
but displaced them from their
usual positions and functions.
And the time he was thinking
about modern spatial geometry,
in particular, Henri Poincare's
theory that an observer
in a moving system cannot tell
up from down and left from
right.
So Duchamp put a coat
rack on the floor, a hat
rack on the ceiling,
a urinal in a doorway,
and hung a snow shovel
from the ceiling.
These were not works of art
in the traditional sense
but instead experimental devices
made to stimulate the senses,
subvert expectation, and raise
questions instead of answer
them.
It was exactly the type
of creative atmosphere
he sought, a laboratory to help
ideas come out of your head
and perhaps the first time
a studio could be considered
an artwork in itself.
So this Sponge
Headquarters, which
has been a great space for
making work for five years,
is winding down.
And that leaves me with
a kind of wide open slate
for thinking about what
the next studio will be.
I am totally engaged in this
breathing on land project.
And part of me fantasizes
about a dive shop
for breathing on land, which
is this standalone kind of dive
shop and studio from which
this project springs.
And then there's
always the question
in the back of my mind
about some proper studio,
as if there is such a
thing, but a studio that's
not so driven by any one
project but rather a space
that multiple projects
can flow through.
Since the assignment is to
make something real or imagined
and to imagine
something imaginary,
that people can project
themselves somewhere
that they would like to be.
Would they like
to be underwater?
Would they like to
be on another planet?
Are they dying to get to
a city or do they need
a kind of more open landscape?
I might start with
site and imagine
how one could subsist there
or do what it is that they
want to do in that place.
I think the studio can
always be the imagined ideal.
But I think the space is
always really important.
And that space can
be a head space.
That space can be
the way you organize
the desktop on your computer.
That space can be the way you
organize your physical desktop.
That space can be a
drawer, a chair, a corner.
But I think that
having some control
over the conditions in
which you're working
is of fundamental importance
to getting work done.
As an artist in 2016, there's
an awful lot of running around.
And work gets done in
minivans on the way
to Canada for a film shoot.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
