Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded EditionWhen these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated—the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others. O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system. These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar. With an introduction by Thomas McEvilley and a brilliantly cogent afterword by its author, Brian O'Doherty once again leads us on the perilous journey to center to the art world: Inside the White Cube. |
Contents
Acknowledgments | 6 |
The Eye and the Spectator | 35 |
Another Fable Five Blank Canvasses Paint Picture Plane | 52 |
Context as Content | 65 |
The Gallery as a Gesture | 87 |
Afterword | 109 |
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abstract Allan Kaprow ambiguities Analytic Cubism art's Artforum artified artist artwork assumptions attempt audience avant-garde became becomes body Brian O'Doherty canvas Castelli ceiling century Christo and Jeanne-Claude Christos Claes Oldenburg classic collage collectors Color Field Color Field painting consciousness contains context courtesy Cubism discourse door Duchamp easel picture edge empty gallery esthetic eternity exhibition experience floor formal frame gallery space gallery's hanging hung idea ideal illusion illusionism installation shot installation view invention Iris Clert's kind Klein's late modernist Leo Castelli limits literal looking Marcel Duchamp Merzbau metaphor Mile of String mind Modern Art modernism's Mondrian mural myth ness object perceived perceptual perspective photographs picture plane political post-Minimal postmodernism present radical ritual Salon Schwitters senses seventies art sixties social Spec Spectator stripes structure style surface tator things tion tradition transcendence transformation utopian viewer visitor void wall white cube window wrapping York photo Yves Klein