BRIAN O’DOHERTY AND GORDON MATTA-CLARK
Two recent New York exhibitions provided the occasion to rethink some of the dynamics of space, place and site in the art of the recent past. ‘Beyond the White Cube: a Retrospective of Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland’ at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and ‘Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the Measure”’ at the Whitney Museum documented the careers of two very different artists whose work helped formulate issues of site and context long before the concept of site-specificity had congealed into curatorial cliché. Critic, writer and artist O’Doherty—he adopted the name Patrick Ireland as protest over Bloody Sunday in 1972—gave the seventies one of its key critical concepts when he showed how the ‘white cube’ space of museums and galleries determined the content of contemporary art. Matta-Clark’s grandly ephemeral, radical interventions in urban sites which were often slated for destruction, took place outside the usual spaces occupied by art. Posthumously (Matta-Clark died in 1978 aged 35), this work poses questions about the aestheticising gesture of such locationally specific actions.
‘The white cube’, sometimes glossed by others as ‘the white modernist cube’ (the qualifier is always implicit, and unnecessary), since its first appearance in a three-part series in Artforum in 1976, Brian O’Doherty’s formulation has functioned as a kind of shorthand for a critical model of the space in which advanced art since Impressionism had been shown. Applying equally to commercial gallery and museum, the ‘unshadowed, … clean, artificial’, white cube’s space could be described as follows: it is highly controlled and controlling (it is not an open space); it is permeated by the odour of false sanctity; it is a place where ‘conventions are preserved through the repetitions of a closed... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline