A classic with more contemporary facets than ever before in today’s analogue-digital space, Inside the White Cube marked a decisive turning point in the perception of the work of art, and explains to us, without many frills and in fairly critical terms, through an analysis that one might say is scientific, why a fire extinguisher, in the white cube, is immediately transformed into an aesthetic enigma.
Brian O’Doherty, doctor, artist and critic (who, for those interested, has a fascinating house-museum in Todi, a true work of immersive art between painting and architecture) is of Irish origin and for decades has used the pseudonym Patrick Ireland, as a sign of his closeness to Northern Ireland’s independence issues and as a sign of protest at the 1972 Bloody Sundey. This is to sketch the writer’s attitude, which is also maintained when he talks to us about the triangulation of space-work-spectator.
In the essay published by Johan & Levi we find the four essays that O’Doherty wrote, between 1976 and 1981, on Artforum, plus a fifth that remained unpublished until 2007. Each of them opens our minds, through an unconventional writing, at times almost narrative, that uncovers the unspoken of an artistic system, with its iron rules of the past, on the verge of collapse.
A kind of mythology of the exhibition is revealed to us: the dangers of the ‘outer space’ to the ‘white cube’, the advent of the curator, the wall as a space of ideologies, the intimate clash between our eye and our body, the snobbism of postmodern galleries (identical to what we have today by the way), the space of the white cube, part operating theatre, part medieval church, part design room. And then numerous stories about the avant-garde artists and contemporaries to these essays, some very peculiar.
A beautifully aged text, still a ‘sensory bible’ of exhibition, though often undervalued in favour of other more mundane books. Read with today’s eyes, then, we easily realise how the characteristics of the white cube adhere to those of digital space, a huge and multifaceted issue, but that is another story.
Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 1999, Univ of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles London
