Making Art Work: The Mike Smith Studio (Contemporary Ar)

In the 15th century, the ideas of the great Renaissance artists required the attentions of engineers and artisans to construct and explain the dynamics of their ambitious works. Leonardo da Vinci's helicopter was built in a studio; very probably his submarine, too. Today that endeavour and enquiry is represented by Mike Smith, whose studio in the Old Kent Road in London furnishes the architecture for the most pressing installations and sculptures of young British artists. He is the carborundum that enables the best artists working in Britain today to realise their work--Rachel Whiteread's Monument in Trafalgar Square is a testament to his abilities. The painter Patsy Craig has here unravelled the activities of the Mike Smith Studios, including the symbiosis of the studio with those of Damien Hirst, Mona Hatoum, Keith Tyson, Darren Almond, Mark Wallinger, and others. The last 12 years of the studio's archives include the detritus, correspondence, notes, ideas, failures, and successes of these and other artists who collaborate with the studio. They are a diary and vade mecum of the construction of a significant theory in current British art. It is an extraordinary assembly of the very templates of the thinking, design and creation of art in Britain today, edited with a painter's eye to the relevant and disdain for the irrelevant. It is as if one were provided with a pop-up illustration of how and why artists think, and how their ideas are engineered by those who translate their odessys into reality. Germano Celant, a Senior Curator for Guggenheim New York, has contributed the critical text. William Furlong, from Audio Arts, has conducted the artists' interviews.

Mike Smith Studio in London has been in operation since 1990. The studio has realized a broad range of contemporary work from Damien Hirst's tanks to Rachel Whiteread’s Monument project for Trafalgar Square. The studio employs approximately 20 people many of whom are also practicing artists and in this way also aims to provide a means through which un-established artists can subsidise and facilitate their own practice.