When 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.
Acknowledgments
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
