The politics of art in the gallery space week 5 response
I think about the over-stimulation culture we live in now and wonder how sensationalist your art needs to be to grab people? On the other hand do we need a new influx of minimalism to contradict the current trend?
“The white wall’s apparent neutrality is an illusion. It stands for a community with common ideas and assumptions. Artist and audience are, as it were, invisibly spread-eagled in 2-D on a white ground.” (79) In the second half of O’Doherty's book he gets more into the politics of a gallery space and what it means to be a spectator and artist in a white cube. I appreciate his well thought-out criticisms of the gallery space and art in the 60’s and 70’s. I could tell his political stance came from the error he was writing about.
“Materialism in America is a spiritual thirst buried deep within a psyche that wins its objects from nothing and will not give them up.”(94) I noticed the idea that art could belong to a society. In his comparison of European and American artists he made it abundantly clear that they had been questioning the gallery space a lot longer in Europe. I believe this is in part due to the fact that Europe has had an established gallery culture for a much longer time and in part the fact that capitalism and materialism is so much more rampant in our culture. Buying and selling are at the height of importance in modern US society.
I liked the piece by Daniel Spoerri in Copenhagen where he arranged it so his dealer sold groceries out of their gallery stamped with the words “Caution: Works Of Art.” Each item had his signature on it to certify it. This kind of humor poking fun at the “Parody of Commerce,”(92) made me laugh and look deeper into the concept of gallery as capitalist venture. It was interesting to see how this book investigated history and took many different stances on the importance of a white cube to convey art in our culture. He takes another political view when he refers to the work of the Rosario Project in the piece “Graciela Carnivale” (99) where the artist group locked people in a dark room with no exit. The spectators finally ended up breaking a glass window in order to escape. He talks about the significance of this work in Argentina and how different it might be seen in a gallery in Soho. Art seems to be determined by the current society as to what will sell and how an audience might react. I think of the over-stimulation culture we live in now and wonder how sensationalist your art needs to be to grab people? On the other hand do we need a new influx of minimalism to contradict the current trend? Artist’s live on the edge of society and are what pushes a society creatively forward I think money interferes with this process and gives us watered down commercialism that only pushes the boundaries in order to push the buck further.
Margaritte Knezek
