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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Common terms and phrases
American appearance artist assumptions attempt audience avant-garde became becomes beginning body called ceiling century Christos classic closed collage Color consciousness contains context course courtesy criticism defined door Duchamp easel picture edge empty energy esthetic eternity exhibition experience Field figure floor forced formal frame gallery space gestures gives hanging happen idea ideal illusion inside installation invention kind late light limits literal living looking material matter means mind modernism modernist museum myth nature object once painting perceptual perspective photographs picture plane piece political present Press question radical relation remains removed seems seen senses separate seventies sixties social sometimes Spectator stand structure style suggesting surface tends things tion tradition transformation turned usually void wall white cube window wrapping York Yves Klein