Description
Book SynopsisConcerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, the author raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system.
Trade Review"Not only in the context of art institutions and gallery spaces, but also in broader territorial and political senses, the dichotomy between inside and outside has become a cornerstone of what we would now call installation art. Thus, we should not only read
Inside the White Cube as the vital document of the 1970s post-studio art scene that it undoubtedly is, but also as a nodal point that connects in two directions: backwards to the modern history of art, and forwards to contemporary spatial practices." * e-flux *
"Brian O’Doherty’s precise scrutiny of this near-omnipresent mode of display—the result of a worldview in which the apparatus of exhibition was newly understood as itself the carrier of meaning—still retains disruptive power." * Art Journal *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction by Thomas McEvilley
I. Notes on the Gallery Space
A Fable of Horizontal and Vertical ... Modernism ... The Properties of the
Ideal Gallery ... The Salon ... The Easel Picture ... The Frame as
Editor ... Photography . .. Impressionism . .. The Myth of the Picture
Plane .. . Matisse .. . Hanging .. . The Picture Plane as Simile ... The Wall
As Battleground and "Art" ... The Installation Shot ...
II. The Eye and the Spectator
Another Fable ... Five Blank Canvasses .. . Paint, Picture Plane,
Objects ... Cubism and Collage ... Space ... The Spectator ... The
Eye ... Schwitters's Merzbau . .. Schwitters's Performances .. . Happenings
And Environments . .. Kienholz, Segal, Kaprow . .. Hanson, de Andrea ...
Eye, Spectator, and Minimalism ... Paradoxes of Experience ...
Conceptual and Body Art ...
III. Context as Content
The Knock at the Door ... Duchamp's Knock ... Ceilings ... 1.200 Bags of
Coal . .. Gestures and Projects ... The Mile of String . . . Duchamp's
"Body" .. . Hostility to the Audience ... The Artist and the Audience ...
The Exclusive Space . . . The Seventies .. . The White Wall . . . The White
Cube ... Modernist Man .. . The Utopian Artist ... Mondrian's Room ...
Mondrian, Duchamp, Lissitzky ...
IV. The Gallery as a Gesture
Yves Klein's Le Vide ... Arman's Le Plein ... Warhol's Airborne Pillows ...
Buren's Sealed Gallery ... Barry's Closed Gallery ... Les Levine's White
Light ... The Christos' Wrapped Museum ...
Afterword
