Studio Practice Online: The Return to Art as Concept

With this paper, I hope to argue for a positive consideration of teaching visual art studio classes online. I will discuss the benefits that eventuated from my own experience teaching a painting class via Zoom for the National Art School (NAS), Sydney in semester one of 2020 and extend these outcomes to consider their application to the field of contemporary art more broadly. The intention of this paper is not to offer solutions to the challenges presented by teaching studio classes online, but to provide an analysis of the recent phenomenon concerning our inability to view or physically experience material artworks under lockdown conditions. I will position this phenomenon in relation to the frequently forgotten or overlooked ideal of art’s dematerialisation with conceptual art and consider a definition of the contemporary moment as ‘post-conceptual’ in light of art’s recent and actual dematerialisation.