BETWEEN ART AND SPACE
Six transparent glass panels, held together by a reflective stainless steel border, sat under heavy light atop a pedestal in a white-walled, laminate-floored room in a campus gallery building at the University of California Irvine.
In the September of 2018 I spent eight hours with the glass cube; an untitled 1972 work by the artist Larry Bell, one of a number of West Coast minimalists associated with the ‘Light and Space’ movement of the 1960s and 70s. In a series of three-dimensional, at times architectural works primarily built with glass, Bell used the medium of sculpture to address the relationship between the art object and its surrounding environment.
Over my prolonged observation of the work it became apparent that no matter how Bell’s cube is viewed, it simply cannot be separated from its surroundings. I frequently noted other gallery-goers question the piece. Was it a part of the exhibition? Perhaps a display case missing its contents? Was there some illusion to its form that appeared absent at a glance? Visitors circled the glass structure, viewing it from up close and afar; some dropped to their knees to look up through the cube’s base. Others simply did not notice the work, strolling past it towards other art objects in the room.
In senses both physical and social, the space and its inhabitants became a part of the work and place it in a state of constant fluctuation.
Bell himself has been quoted as expressing a belief that “life can enter directly into art” (Bell, 1972). Fittingly, his cube serves as a window into its own surroundings. The work exists as both the physical form of glass and steel, as well as all that falls within its boundaries. This could mean light, air or perhaps the ‘framed’ image of the surrounding space; people, the room, or even other artworks. In the duality of the work a question is raised as to the implications of a gallery space on the art it contains.
Larry Bell’s cube sat between unembellished walls — white, of course — under artificial light. So like many artworks exhibited since the 20th century, Bell’s too is drenched in the hangover of modernist notions of the most ideal setting for art viewing. Between these paradisiacal walls, art is freed from the chains of context; pure, unspoilt, existing purely as itself and nothing else. Art as art.
The seminal writings of the Irish artist and critic Brian O’Doherty, published in Artforum magazine from 1972 onwards, would challenge these enduring ideas and define much of today’s thinking on the now commonplace ‘white cube’ art gallery. O’Doherty suggests that context is not destroyed but rather created by such a space; rather than one motivated by the ‘experience’ of art, it is one motivated by capital and a desire to immortalise the value and worthiness of an artwork. He writes:
“Aesthetics are turned into commerce—the gallery space is expensive. What it contains is, without initiation, well-nigh incomprehensible—art is difficult. Exclusive audience, rare objects difficult to comprehend—here we have a social, financial and intellectual snobbery which models (and at its worst parodies) our system of limited production, our modes of assigning value, our social habits at large” (O’Doherty, 1976: p.76).
In the case of a work such as Bell’s — directly grappling with its own surroundings in a physical sense — a perceived ‘emptiness’ to the form is erased by its environment, replaced instead by the foundations for value and criticality that arguably would not exist otherwise. The ‘rules’ of the white cube space, as well as the political, social and economic ideas embedded in its silent intentions, are overwhelmingly forced upon the work. Perhaps the same can be said, to varying extents, of the output of any artist displayed in such an environment.
RULE BREAKER
The white cube art gallery and its traditions serve as an example of a set of rules that constitute a single type of pre-designed space in society. However, such a space serves as a particularly interesting case study for exploring the previously discussed idea of ‘unseen rules’ (see 2-1). This is due not only to the highly visual expression of said rules, but also to the immediacy of the effects the rules of the space’s design have on both what it contains and by extension, its inhabitants.
My position for this project sets out a desire to bestow the power to identify the presence of rules of this type onto someone who is inherently subject to them by existing in particular spaces. In this case, the gallery-goer becomes the subject; however, the modification of a physical gallery space is not an accessible option at this time.
Instead I will be looking to the potential of virtual space as a way to iterate free from certain physical contexts and constraints. I have previously written on the suitability of virtual galleries for a restructuring of certain aspects of existing art world hierarchies, particularly those concerning space.
As an artwork simply cannot be separated from its surroundings, works in a traditional gallery space are unavoidably subject to certain inherent notions embedded in a largely dominant structure of gallery architecture. This absence of separation persists in virtual spaces, too. However, as opposed to the brick-and-mortar white cube’s faux rejection of context as a subtractive impurity, virtual space presents context as a malleable tool through which an artist can self-define the crucial aspect of the environment surrounding and characterising their work. Power is moved away from the pre-designed intentions of a space and into the hands of the individual artist, now able to craft an elaborate frame constitutionally more representative of their own desires or intentions.
Having explored in writing the potential of this relatively new medium for re-distributing power towards the artist, I will be seeking through my visual experiments to test similar possibilities for restructuring the experience of the art viewer. My starting point will be constructing a virtual space using video game development tool Unity, through which I will aim to simulate and then subvert some of the pre-designed rules of an art-viewing experience, traditionally imposed on a gallery-goer by their presence in a white cube space.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bell, Larry (1972) Larry Bell / An Exhibition organized by Barbara Haskell, Pasadena Art Museum, April 11 to June 11, 1972)
Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum
O’Doherty, Brian (1976) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space
Santa Monica, CA: The Lapis Press