First published in 1976 as a series of three essays in Artforum, artist and art critic Brian O’Doherty’s “Inside the White Cube” took stock of modern art’s relationship to the ubiquitous white gallery. In short, the context of the gallery had become, in his view, the actual content of the art. To view art was no longer to stroll through a 19th-century salon packed with painted scenes, but to experience the relationship of art to its conditions of display. Marcel Duchamp’s 1,200 Coal Bags (1938)—with coal bags on the ceiling and a chandelier-like lamp on the floor—was a primordial example of the antagonism: it turned the artwork into the experience of occupying a room upside down. Rather, in the presence of the work, there were effectively two galleries: one where observers were standing upright, and another, inhabitable by kinesthetic imagination, where spectators were pinned to the ceiling. The coal bags and lamp, pretty much worthless in themselves, were valuable because they created a distant vantage from which the spectator could interrogate the real physical scenario.
Devastatingly powerful questions could be launched from this newly made place. How should galleries be oriented? Who makes spaces for art—the gallerist or the artist? For whom? And what are this subject’s capacities? While asking these questions carried the spark of new agency for the gallery-goer, O’Doherty thought a series of purifying exclusions had to be made as a price for the gain. Galleries had to stay white, blank, and sealed up against the intrusion of life from the outside. Art had to jettison content in order to produce a proper meditation on context, leaving a void to be filled by art’s new tendency to physically engage walls, floor, and ceiling.
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