Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Paper on Inside the White Cube
Essay by Brian Krueger,
October, 2011
Inside
the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space
By
Brian O’Doherty
The
Lapis Press Santa Monica San Francisco, Copyright 1976, 1986
Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the
Gallery Space is not
strictly about the inside because
deductive logic requires us to think about, when one refers to the inside of
something, what remains outside. What lies inside is intrinsic to what lies outside.
O’Doherty begins the book writing about the exclusionary construction of the
easel painting and the frame itself as a kind of editor deciding what is
allowed in and what is excluded. He compares this to the mural which is a
painting made directly on a wall thereby becoming part of “place” which for me
implies it as a shared or collective form of discourse. It is the binary
construction of inside and outside that seems to be the nucleus of Brian
O’Doherty’s episteme in his book of essays initially written in 1976 for
Artforum magazine. Since
modernism, how has the gallery space been reconsidered in regards to artistic
practice, artistic content, the spectator and contextualization? I would like
to examine O’Doherty’s essays with a general critical analysis and explain how
it may be relevant in contemporary art practices both inside and outside of
museum and gallery spaces. Also, in more specific terms I would like to explore
the significance of O’Doherty’s writings with regards to a trip I made with
fellow University of Nevada Reno art students (October 19th-23rd,
2011) to galleries, museums and artist’s studios in the city of Portland,
Oregon. Finally, I would like to address my own community service project at
University of Nevada Reno with respect to ideas expressed by O’Doherty in his
essays.
In the introduction
of the book, Inside the White Cube,
Thomas McEvilley writes about ancient tombs of Egypt and what they contained.
The remains of the dead and his/her possessions were sealed off from the
outside world as a way to imbibe the body of the emperor/empress and their
respective possessions with some form of vicarious immortality. In being sealed
off from the human eye the objects transcend the physical world. The mode of
aesthetic discourse in a large sense becomes conceptual. This allows the “real”
to be transmuted through symbols, and the “invisible” which service the mind as
opposed to the retina. Without this synthesis these “sacred objects” may not be
endowed with what Egyptians believed to be eternal life. O’Doherty believes
this is analogous to the modern and contemporary gallery space. According to
O’Doherty modernists configured the gallery space to be insulated or neutralized from any connections with
the outside (real) world so as allow the art to take on an aura of universal,
modernist ideals. It seems though, that this attempt at fostering totally
neutral ground elicited new dialogue with how art was made, perceived/received and
how space can be used to elicit fresh approaches to the relationship between
the art object and spectator. These spaces also inadvertently, as O’Doherty
writes, highlighted a cultural code for the elite by, if nothing else, the
sheer exclusionary affections of the space itself.
The art object’s
existence is intrinsic to its context. The Gallery space is a place often explored by many
contemporary artists, in large part, as the axis (context) off which art can be
defined, qualified and utilized. In postmodern discourses the absolutist canons
of the western thought can be challenged by artists poignantly in gallery
space. I believe Marcel Duchamp adequately demonstrated this with his 1200 Bags of Coal, installation at the
“International Exhibition of Surrealism,” at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938,
New York (O’Doherty references this work on page 68 of Inside the White Cube). In this work Duchamp hangs 1200 bags of
coal from the ceiling of the gallery (or at least he claimed it was 1200 bags
of coal). In doing so he draws attention
to the gallery as a “frame” or context by using space in a gallery never before
used or really considered. Duchamp wanted to put art back in service of the mind versus in service of the retina.
However, this “game”
can be a delicate balance for the artist. On page 81 of O’Doherty’s book, in
the essay titled, Context as Content
O’Doherty asks, “Is the artist who accepts the gallery space conforming with
the social order? Is discomfort with the gallery discomfort with art’s
etiolated role?” I feel certain that Duchamp was “playing” with art’s etiolated
role in light of the fact that the canons of the west were what seemed to have
brought humanity mechanized warfare and genocide. I can’t help but suspect
Duchamp felt he must challenge the canons of art to highlight his questioning
of the entire epistemology of western thought. However, I hope to keep in mind
during my own studio practice that as with Duchamp it was often what was left
unsaid that elicited the most power in his work.
As an artist (and I
would question whether this should apply only to an artist) I found that the
studio visit was a significant way to address an artist’s practice, intentions
and effect. The artist’s studio is probably most often where a work is
conceived, developed and made (installation art serves as an adequate
exception). During the studio visit one is immersed in the space of creation.
It seems this may be the place where one delineates the space between art and
life with the highest degree of precision. During my trip to Portland our group
had the opportunity to visit a few artist’s studios. One artist who seemed most
relevant to O’Doherty’s writings was Joe Thurston. Upon entering Joe Thurston’s
space I was immediately on the lookout for the art. The space was a warehouse space filled with lots of tools,
graffiti, crates and junk. What I found interesting was that it was not
immediately apparent (could this be a key in revealing the artists inadvertent
intentions?) which of the items was the art.
About 30 seconds into the visit it became clear where the art, other objects
and studio space could be delineated. Thurston uses art-shipping crates with
which he transforms into art signifying (or actually realizing) a tomb (a
metaphysical tomb perhaps). These art-shipping crates have been used to ship
the art of noted artists. One crate, for example, was used to ship the art of
the famous artist, Gerhard Richter. Inside these art-shipping crates he entombs
photos, letters, family heirlooms, and objects from his past. They are sealed within the works, out of
the site and mind of spectators and
or collectors. He informed us that he did not mention to spectators or
collectors what these crates contained. These works seemed to function on
several levels. The works address questions as to what art is, what it can be
and how the visual/psychological dichotomy of art can play on one another. Do personal heirlooms, photos and
letters interfere with or confuse our ideas of actual experience? The work seems to address the ideas and
epistemologies of oral tradition. Have Humans learned how to, in a sense, forget the actual and reinvent experience through the use of mementos? Do
these objects serve as barriers that suspend or interrupt actual experience?
These objects are entombed very much the way the gallery space and possibly
museum space serve as tombs of mediated societal phenomena. O’Doherty addresses
this idea succinctly in his book’s second essay, “The Eye and The Spectator”:
Much of our
experience can only be brought home through mediation. The
vernacular
example is the snapshot. You can only see what a good time you had
from the
summer snapshots. Experience can then be adjusted to certain norms of
“having a good time.”
These Kodachrome icons are used to convince friends you
did have a good
time-if they believe it, you believe it. Everyone wants to have
photographs not to
prove but to invent experience.
(52)
Consequently,
Joe Thurston is not a member of Facebook. He described the experience of exorcising
his mementos from sight to be cathartic and this allowed him to see himself and
his identity in a refreshingly new way. I can’t help but wonder how Brian
O’Doherty would interpret the Facebook phenomena. Thurston permanently buries his
personal illusions within the tombs that are his art (the art crates). In a
sense they become a personal proof of an exorcism. He exorcises illusion to
allow his metaphysical space to BE and to allow actual experience to be lived.
He has, in effect, given himself permission to BE.
I really appreciated
O’Doherty’s references as to an artist’s relationship with gallery space
because they point to the persistent conundrum the practicing artist faces.
Success in artistic practice (even if the success is in the form of rebellion
as with Duchamp) leaves the artist vulnerable to “the western art world’s” cozy
trappings and ripe for subjugation to the capitalist “blob”. By “blob” I am
referring to the 1958 movie The Blob
starring Steve McQueen about a monster with an insatiable appetite (ironically,
critics of the time of the movie believed The
Blob was about communism’s insatiable appetite). I find it interesting that
often, on close examination, industrialized capitalism appears more and more a
mirror image of communism. I use the term “blob” because of capitalism’s purely
defining characteristic, which is to subsume everything. I find no better way to illustrate this “purity” of
operation than how it will unhesitatingly subsume even those who attempt to weaken
its domain. Unless one remains acutely aware of
capitalism’s unquenchable thirst one remains susceptible to it. It seems that
unless artists are committed to a continuum of gestures questioning accepted canon they are doomed to become
little more than parcels on a store
shelf. Accordingly, they must be defined as gestures because to elicit the
required impact they must initially operate outside of the accepted canons of
contemporary aesthetic discourse. I
have committed to memory a passage in an essay called “Reactionary Prophet” by
Christopher Hitchens for the April 2004 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. This was a piece written about another essay by
18th century Irish political theorist and philosopher, Edmund Burke,
written in 1790, called Reflections on
the Revolution in France. Hitchens wrote, “Edmund Burke understood before anyone else that revolutions devour their young—and
turn into their opposites.” This
passage illuminates the paradox of the gallery space O’Doherty wrestles with in
this book. In the second essay of
his book O’Doherty highlights artists who have wrestled with the paradoxical
conundrum gallery space presents. Some of these artists include Alan Kaprow
with his happenings, George Segal with his relatively non-existent or removed figures and William Anastasi who
during the sixties and early seventies have tried to expand the power and
relevance of aesthetic discourse by using space, place, context and more as
mediums, motifs and material. They accomplished this blurring the lines between
representation and the represented. In essence, they’ve allowed the context to
be defined as content.
During
the trip to Portland our group visited the Fourteen30-Contemporary gallery and saw a show by painter,
Grier Edmundson. Owner/director of the gallery, Jeanine Jablonski, who was present for a gallery talk, equated a
wall-paper-like pattern background covering the walls of the gallery as reminiscent
of Andy Warhol’s 1960’s “Death and Disaster” series of silk-screened paintings.
For the show Edmundson covered the entire wall of the main gallery space with a
repetitive silk screened, black and white abstract pattern, which, from a
formal standpoint at least, recalled Warhol’s disaster series. This wallpaper
background certainly took up the lion share of the gallery space’s “real
estate”. In addition to this background were hung a series of paintings
executed in three distinctly different styles. Two of the paintings were
relatively small. One was an untitled, loosely (if slightly clumsily painted),
representational portrait of Rick Welts, Chief of Operations for the Golden State Warriors (24”x18”, 2011). The other painting, made in the same loosely
representational style was of a monkey painting a canvas, humorously titled “Portrait
of the artist as a young man”,
(16”x20”, 2011). There was also
one untitled canvas of black text on a white ground stating, “I Am What I Am”
(48”x42”, 2011). There were three other formally abstract (early Frank
Stellaesque) paintings of loosely (and again clumsily) painted bands of multi
colors forming a spiral-graph-like pattern on each. Two of the canvases were
60”x60”, the other canvas was 16”x12”. The three abstract canvases were titled
respectively, “Looking Around Looking”, I, II, and III. I found this show to be fascinating for
a few reasons. First of all, it generated the most opprobrium amongst two of my
three my hostel roommates. Both saw no redeeming qualities in the installation
and thought the canvases were unorganized and very amateurishly painted. I went
to great lengths to try and defend the show without knowing for sure if I had a
leg on which to stand. Secondly, I
found the show very unique regarding how it addressed the gallery space in
terms of straddling the fence between content and context. Was the “wallpaper”
pattern on the wall more akin to “gallery space”? Or was the pattern a “work”?
The artist, in my view, humorously installed the wallpaper background as an
interior decorator may. Yet, it had enough “content” inherent in the design to
easily confuse the spectator. The
artist successfully underscored that blur in my view. Because the pattern
dominated the “real estate” of the space it had a tendency to eclipse the
relatively smaller canvases if one was convinced the pattern was in fact, a
“work”. The fact that the canvases were done in three distinctly different
styles further underscored their lack of unity. The idea behind this
installation elicited an M.C. Escheresque matrix of confusing overlapping
conceptual approaches which, from where I was standing, became an exciting and
highly sophisticated way to use a gallery context AS content.
If
art as an institution is to avoid a further etiolated destiny it must engaged the “spectator” with
radical gestures. These institutions need to make new efforts to demonstrate
that the epistemologies used in the process of art making are more necessary
than ever. The left-brain epistemological processes used to usher in and bring
industrial capitalism to its nadir have peaked and will soon be on the wane.
Advances in technology have gradually been taking the more linear (left
brained) tasks out of the hands of humans and leaving these tasks to machines.
Creative and visual/spatial thought processes appear to be the last component
of the human episteme that technologies have yet to master. Artists and the institutions
that make art available to communities at large must be willing to continually examine
their respective rolls in society with respect to contemporary experience. I
believe there is an opportunity to forge a bridge between the often-insulated
gallery/museum spaces and potential spectators who are not part of the cultural
elite. The institutional component of art is in a position to engage and
further show their respective communities that art should not be treated as
strictly optional. I saw one significant example of this idea at The Museum of
Contemporary Craft during my trip to Portland. The museum held The Oregon
Manifest Constructor’s Design Challenge winner’s exhibition at the museum
during my visit. The Oregon Manifest Constructor’s Design Challenge was a
competition held this fall challenging designers to create a bicycle not just
meant for sports, competition and recreation but as mentioned on the Oregon
Manifest’s web site, “a tool integrated seamlessly into
everyday life”. This is the Oregon Manifest’s
threefold mission statement:
FIRST, to inspire and foster real design
innovation around a bike that recognizes
the needs of
modern living. SECOND, to
celebrate and champion the resurgence of
American craft—bicycle craft in
particular. THIRD, to show
riders and
enthusiasts
that a well-crafted bicycle isn’t just for sport and recreation, but can
also be a
tool integrating seamlessly into everyday life.
I
have seen other art institutions organize similar exhibitions. While I believe
this is an important step in the right direction, I do not believe these
institutions are digging deeply enough. For the arts to remain significant and
relevant now and in the future a very delicate balance must be struck. There
seems to be a conflict between two seemingly opposing forces. The first is the
cultural aspiration of societies to elevate the status of the arts using the
sacred aura endowed by its institutions. The second is the real need for
educational institutions to incorporate more creative, visual/spatial
epistemological approaches into their pedagogic missions. There is a built in
paradox and conflict in this binary construction. The aura endowed upon high
art by institutions makes these methodologies of artistic practice seem more out of reach by communities at
large thereby, in a sense, rendering them impotent. I would like to do something to help bridge this
delicate gap. As an MFA student at University of Nevada Reno I am required to
perform a community service project. I have chosen to create one very large
drawing by going to various schools, businesses, jails, stores and more and
enlisting average citizens to contribute to a large collaborative drawing. I
intend to animate this drawing using stop motion animation to capture the
collaborative creative process of each person who makes a contribution to the
drawing. I would like to use this project as a platform off which to elicit a
discussion within my community on how to begin framing the artistic process in
a much different way. By creating an ambitious work of art using average
members of my community and using this as frame for discussion I hope to
illuminate the idea that art in service to a community does not require aura strictly for the elite. The arts
should not be ruled by a strictly qualitative
modus operandi. I would like to reframe a discussion about how art is not only
perceived but used by shifting these
often inherently paradoxical contexts.
Brian
O’Doherty, in writing these essays on gallery space, contexts, content and how
they are perceived, has ignited a significant dialogue about how art can
operate in contemporary society. Once artists understand that context can serve
as content does it mean that anything can be art? When do art-like gestures
transform from art-like to art? When he writes about contexts serving as
content I suppose he may be suggesting that for any thought to have resonance
there must be some kind of frame off of which the idea can be activated. It seems the answers to these questions
operate off a kind of a shifting landscape. However, this is why I believe his
writings are as relevant now as ever.
Works Cited
Edmundson, Grier.
Untitled. Fourteen30-Contemporary,
Portland.
--.Untitled. Fourteen30-Contemporary,
Portland.
--.Untitled. Fourteen30-Contemporary,
Portland.
--.Looking Around Looking
I. Fourteen30-Contemporary, Portland.
--.Looking Around
Looking II. Fourteen30-Contemporary, Portland.
--.Looking Around Looking III. Fourteen30-Contemporary, Portland.
Hitchens,
Christopher. “Reactionary Prophet.” The
Atlantic Monthly. April 2004. 27 Oct.
2011 <http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2004/04/hitchens.htm>
McEvilley, Thomas. Introduction. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery
Space. Santa Monica and
San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986. 7-12.
O’Doherty,
Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.
Santa
Monica and San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986.
Oregon
Manifest. “The Oregon Manifest
Constructor’s Design
Challenge,
September
23/24, 2011.” Online Posting.
Sept. 2011.28 Oct 2011.
The Blob.
Screenplay by Theodore
Simonson and Kay Linaker.
Dir. Irwin S. Yeaworth.
Perf. Steve McQueen. Paramont
Pictures, 1958.
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