“The bottom line is that artists work where they can, and how they can,” writes the former curator of the MOMA, Robert Storr, in the anthology The Studio Reader (2010). “There is nothing mysterious about this, since artists must be pragmatic even when they pretend not to be or do the best they can to disguise themselves or conceal their process.” In other words: however much artists may hide or display, deconstruct or stage, leave behind or return to the studio, turn its presence into a symbol of status or its absence into a symbol of critical engagement, or its temporary availability into a nomadic strategy, there will always be a place where artists work. To provide an all-encompassing definition of the studio, we might therefore state that studio spaces emerge wherever the artist chooses to unfold her practice. Moving beyond the description, categorization and analysis of these extremely hybrid and dynamic spaces themselves — the successful strategy adopted by many recent publications on the studio — this definition allows us to concentrate on the work of art-making that goes on within.

This epilogue aims to answer some of the questions which arise when studying this work. Why, we may ask, is the motif of “hiding making/showing creation” so incredibly robust? Can we overcome the “mind vs. hand” dichotomy that still dominates most studies of artistic practice? And where might we find useful approaches outside the field of art history to study this practice?

THE MOTIF OF SHOWING CREATION — FETISH OR EPISTEMIC PROJECT?

If the general definition of the studio is that it is a place generated by the artist at work, a general definition of this work itself could be that it comprises the interaction between maker, materials, tools, ideas and concepts. To trace the representations of these interactions has been the key aim of this book. Not only have the case studies unraveled the ongoing dialectic between showing and hiding the work that actually goes on inside the studio, they have also shown that artists as disparate as William Turner and Theo van Doesburg have employed surprisingly continuous strategies when it comes to representing and “depresenting” their practices in various visual media.