Inside the White Cube

Brian O'Doherty, collection of articles from 1976-1986

Post-modern debate on display and consumption of art in the modern gallery/museum.

Key Terms:
 * Spectator
 * Eye
 * Gallery/Museum

Notes:
 * About spectator (not they eye and art in the gallery space)
 * "As modernism gets older, context becomes content."
 * In salons each picture was seen as self-contained, isolated from its neighboring pictures by heavy frame.
 * "Space now is not just where things happen; things make space happen." Space is constructed
 * Spectator arrived with modernism, with the disappearance of perspective. "He is mystified, demystified. In time, the spectator stumbles around between confusing roles." REF: The Emancipated Spectator
 * "The eye can be trained in a way the spectator cannot. It is a finely tuned, even noble organ, esthetically and socially superior to the spectator. It is easy for a writer to have a Spectator around -- It is more difficult too have an eye, although no writer should be without one. Not having an Eye is a stigma to be hidden, perhaps by knowing someone who has one."
 * Ex: Schwitters in Merzbau brings the outside in.
 * The gallery becomes a transforming place.
 * The passion to actualize, even illusion is a mark - even a stigma - of sixties art.. the gallery impersonates other spaces. (Segal-Living Room/ Hospital- Kienholz/ Bedroom- Oldenberg). In these tableau forms we feel like we shouldn't be there -- we are voyeurs
 * Late sixties Eye and Spectator negatiate transaction. Minimalism objects provoked perceptions other than visual. Despite was the Eye saw the body had to check.
 * "Presence before a work of art, then, means that we absent ourselves in favor of the Eye and Spectator, who report to us what we might have seen had we been there. The absent work of art is frequently more present to us." EX: Rothko
 * "For the Spectator and the Eye are conventions which stabilize our missing sense of ourselves. They acknowledge that our identity is itself a fiction, and they give us the illusion we are present through a double-edged self-consciousness." We aren't really there-- our Eye stands surrogate for ourselves.
 * O'Doherty faces space differently than Fried and Greenberg, by thinking about additive art as opposed to minimalist art.
 * We can only experience via absence, we always have a surrogate.
 * Much 70s art attitudes aren't focused on art, but the art structure.