INSIDE THE WHITE CUBE:
NOTES ON THE GALLERY SPACE
huojianPart I
命理学
BRIAN O'DOHERTY
更改电脑开机密码A recurrent scene in sci-fi movies shows the earth withdrawing from the spacecraft until it becomes a horizon, a beachball, a grapefruit, a golf ball, a star. With the changes in scale, respons slide from the particular to the general. The individual is replaced by the race and we are a pushover for the race a mortal biped, or a tangle of them spread out below like a rug. From a certain height people are generally good. Vertical distance encourages this generosity. Horizontality doesn't em to have the same moral virtue. Far away figures may be approaching and we anticipate the incurities of encounter. Life is horizontal, just one thing after another, a conveyer belt shuffling us toward the horizon. But history, the view from the departing spacecraft, is different. As the scale changes, layers of time are su
perimpod and through them we project perspectives with which to recover and correct the past. No wonder art gets bollixed up in this process; its history, perceived through time, is confounded by the picture in front of your eyes, a witness ready to change testimony at the slightest perceptual provocation. History and the eye have a profound wrangle at the center of this "constant" we call tradition. 阿替洛尔片
天价诱饵All of us are now sure that the glut of history, rumor and evidence we call the modernist tradition is being circumscribed by a horizon. Looking down, we e more clearly its "laws" of progress, its armature hammered out of idealist philosophy, its military metaphors of advance and conquest. What a sight it is -or was! Deployed ideologies, transcendent rockets, romantic slums where degradation and idealism obssively couple, all tho troops running back and forth in conventional wars. The campaign reports that end up presd between boards on coffee-tables give us little idea of the actual heroics. Tho paradoxical achievements huddle down there, awaiting the revisions that will add the avant-garde era to tradition or, as we sometimes fear, end it. Indeed tradition itlf, as the spacecraft withdraws, looks like another piece of bric-a-brac 条形码申请
on the coffee-table- no more than a kinetic asmblage glued together with reproductions, powered by little mythic motors and sporting tiny models of muums. And in its midst, one notices an evenly lighted "cell" that appears crucial to making the thing work: the gallery space.
The history of modernism is intimately framed by that space. Or rather the history of modern art can be correlated with changes in that space and in the way we e it. We have now reached a point where we e not the art but the space first. (A cIiche of the age is to ejaculate over the space on entering a gallery.)An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art. And it clarifies itlf through a process of historical inevitability usually attached to the art it contains.
The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is "art." The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itlf. This gives the space a prence possd by other spaces where conventions are prerved through the repetition of a clod system of values. Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics. So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this chamber that once outside it, art can lap into cular status- and converly. Things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus on them. Indeed the object frequently becomes the medium through which the ideas are manifested and proffered for discussion- a popular form of late modernist academicism ("ideas are more interesting than art"). The sacramental nature of the space becomes clear, and so does one of the great projective laws of modernism: as modernism gets older, context becomes content. In a peculiar reversal, the object introduced into the gallery "frames" the gallery and its laws. 卤鸭翅
A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as tho for building a medieval church. T
he outside world must not come in, so windows are usually aled off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying ud to go, "to take on its own life." The discreet desk may be the only piece of furniture. In this context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as the fireho in a modern muum looks not like a fireho but an esthetic conundrum. Modernism's transposition of perception from life to formal values is complete. This, of cour, is one of modernism's fatal dias.
Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the technology of esthetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, scattered for study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. Art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of "period" (late modern), there is no time. This eternity gives the gallery a limbolike status; one has to have died already to be there. Indeed the prence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, ems superfluous, an intrusion. The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are n
ot- or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannekins for further study. This Descartian paradox is reinforced by one of the icons of our visual culture: the installation shot, sans figures. Here at last the spectator, onelf, is eliminated. You are there without being there, one of the major rvices provided for art by its old antagonist, photography. The installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space. In it, an ideal is fulfilled as strongly as in a Salon painting of the 1830s.
