ABSTRACT
The home-studio is a hybrid conjoining two sites – the domestic dwelling and the artistic laboratory 1 – that have often been counterposed in social studies of invention. In trajectories of invention, these two sites often occupy opposing poles: artistic experiments are conducted in the studio and the artefacts they produce are later domesticated in society. 2 In such trajectories, home and studio appear, if not antithetical to one another, then minimally, as social contexts that are distinguished by their proximity to, or distance from, experimental practices. 3 In this chapter I explore whether, and in what ways, the home-studio invites us to reconsider the role of domestic settings in processes of invention. 4 I suggest that two consequences follow the choice to investigate the home-studio as the conjoining of artistic laboratory and domestic dwelling: first, the social significance of the studio is more than that of simply serving the production of culture; second, the home is no longer simply circumscribed and differ-entiated as a social context, such as the private sphere, marked by its distance from experimental practice. The home-studio, I argue in this chapter, does not simply site invention in a context of everyday life, but also incorporates into studio experiments various practices, procedures and materials that might otherwise be dismissed as uninventive modes of domesticity.
