Our Production, the Production of Others, 1986/2012, CD Cover Version II

The majority of Clegg & Guttman’s works are group portraits that draw on the history of the genre, high and low—from Rembrandt’s Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild to contemporary annual-report photography and album-cover art. They reverse the traditional artist-patron relationship by recruiting those who usually do the commissioning—collectors, museum directors and curators, foundation heads, and the like—to appear as (anonymous) characters in their pictures, integrating them into complex mise-en-scènes of rear-screen projection and lighting effects.
In 1985, while participating in a group show in Stuttgart, Clegg & Guttmann approached the Melos Quartet about making its portrait. The musicians asked the artists’ permission to use the portrait on the cover of their Deutsche Grammophon recording of Beethoven’s late string quartets. Clegg & Guttmann agreed on the condition that they, in turn, be allowed to make a new series of works using the label’s design incorporating their photograph.
The artists structured the edition so that as the record company subtly altered the cover design to accommodate changing formats (from vinyl record to cassette tape to compact disc), so, too, did each of their prints— the "production of others" turning their 1986 image into a 2012 work. In this labyrinthine way, Clegg & Guttmann fed their original photograph directly into the production line of design, fabrication, promotion, and distribution just as they teased apart and lay bare the art-historical machinery that gives the group portrait its rhetorical force.