Dear Everyone,

I'll tell you, "Inside the White Cube" grew on me this week. I became comfortable with O'Doherty's prose and the text became less and less of a challenge. The complex and intriguing art theory invented and dissected and reiterated throughout was suddenly clear, and now I just wish I had time to read the whole thing again before seminar. O'Doherty turns the notion of the gallery space on its head, and his often ranting can be utterly fascinating: "The white cube is usually seen as an emblem of the estrangement of the artist from society to which the gallery also provides access. It is the ghetto space, a survival compound, a proto-museum with a direct line to the timeless, a set of conditions, an attitude, a place deprived of location, a reflex to the bald curtain wall, a magic chamber, a concentration of mind, maybe a mistake" (80). That homogenized, universally pervasive space--spare and white and as devoid of meaning as seems possible—is heavy with meaning. It was a revolution, ill advised or no.

"The white cube" strives to be a dead space, an empty void having nothing to do with the art it contains. But in this attempt to divorce art from physical context, it has become more married to place than ever before. The modernist gallery is inevitable, a space to be embraced or challenged, but never ignored. And it seems that since its inception, the “cube” has been continually defied, approached as an obstacle to be heroically surmounted. In 1960—and he was most certainly not the first—Armand P. Arman said “fuck you” to the gallery’s haughty minimalist pretensions as directly as he knew how: by slowly filling one with garbage. The space inside was entirely replaced by his statement, or “gesture,” and thus the gallery was truly made to act out its proposed mission statement: an empty vessel eliminated by the art inside it.

Of course, all these “gestures,” from Duchamp’s “1,200 Bags of Coal” to Keith Wilson’s “Puddle” hardly made a dent in the colossal institution of the gallery space. But these challenges seem to heighten the gallery’s meaning, strengthen its value. As countless artists thrash around and throw fits inside the white cube, the gallery is only reassured of its power. It may not be devoid of context, as it so desperately wishes it was, but its contextual monopoly is an admirable equalizer. We walk into one of the thousands of identical white voids and we know, at least, we will always make a uniform attempt at ignoring where we are.

Love,

Ryan

P.S. If you like being exposed to new works by contemporary artists EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE, you should check out weblog.bezembinder.nl. I do. Obsessively.