ReViewing BlackMountain College 2024

White Cube Thinking: How to Contextualize and Present Practice?

Response to Tobias Green (2017)

The Witworth.

Brian O’Doherty in his book, Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space (2000) frames the term White Cube as a metaphor for the modern gallery. The Whitworth with its recent renovations (2014 by MUMA architects) with influences from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater 1964, the new build spans glass rectangular projections into the natural environment, connected to gallery spaces, lofty and multileveled, the traditional white cube.

The Gardens so beautiful even now in the dead of winter, sharp cold sunlight, everything has died back and it is such a life struggle to make new green shoots, new beginnings, new connections and leave the old dead past behind. But it’s not completely behind, it’s the structure of the future, it is the pylon and armature of what is to be created. Black stumps of WW1 trees, poked, black, mouldered and wet out of the muddy grasses and water logged paths. But that is outside.

Inside the white cube, everything is carefully and skilfully ironed out, flattened, smoothed and neutralised. O’Doherty (2000) insists that, ‘the outside world must not come in,’ making it exclusive, rarefied, a scientific lab for viewing art, ’…the windows are usually sealed off, walls are painted white, the ceiling becomes the source of light…’.

Outside the glass wall, separating out from in, twigs litter the ground artfully. Inside, O’Doherty’s implication that nature can be safely viewed from within the cultured confines of the white cube but must not transgress the borders and actually enter the space. The only untidiness and outside-ness are the shadows cast, constantly in motion from the solar sundial across the polished concrete floors, sweeping an arc of time in its wake. A contemplative space, meditative atmosphere, O’Doherty proffers, one could read white cube as a religious or mystical experience.

Inside the Whitworth are chance conversations – bumping into people in happy happenstance, I find myself Story collecting and really thinking, What does my project mean here? In the white cube?

Does the white cube contextualise research? 

How can the white cube Present Research for Practitioners?

How can the white cube transform Practice into the performative?

How can the white cube facilitiate Practice as a language and a physical language

How can the white cube Exhibit Practice?

[The word - Present, to an artist means a formal or informal exhibition, to an academic means  a lecture or symposium].

Built in a U shape, or that’s how it feels. Long corridors of glass, light and buffed concrete, calm confidence inside, folks walking around coatless in mirror contrast to Outside World, were people rush frenetically by in coats scarves and hats.

Clifford Geertz, philosopher and anthropologist, in his collected essays, Available Light, deploys an analogy ‘What is needed is a Bridging connection between the world within the skull and the world outside of it… (Geertz, 2000, P202). Or a connection needs to be made between being inside the white cube and being outside the white cube.

While sitting on the bench writing I take a few photos on my phone and think about reflection. Outside is a chromium sculpture of a tree with a highly polished surface, throwing back to me images of the trees that surround it and myself sitting by the glass wall looking.  In some ways the sculpture was blurring the boundaries between in and out; outside reflecting inside on its outerness. Oblique mirroring in the dark shiny concrete inside, of trees and landscape echoed from outside. Perhaps these counterparts may act as Geertz’s bridge.

Wittgenstein’s concept of innerness and outerness of thought, has fascinated me. The idea of the two domains, the interior-ness of thought in my head, dialogue, judgement and taste. A play being played out for one, in the inner-ness of my skull, like the inside of the gallery space – nakedness in the protected environs, absolute truth, that I associate with the white cube. In the outer-ness what Wittgenstein names as ‘going into the market square’ of out-of-our-innerness. I interact, joining the world in the place I call, Outside World, beyond the gallery, external to the white cube. Out of the ‘nautilus’ (Norton 2017) of my head and into the public arena.

‘Wittgenstein’s demolition of the very idea of a private language and the consequent socialization of speech and meaning, the location of mind in the head and culture outside of it.’ (Geertz 2000) Suggesting that we have our ‘private language’ our internal dialogue, but as we are social creatures not living in isolation but engaging with our communities of inquiry, in our families, with our colleagues, with students and that culture goes on ‘in the market place’. A subtle warning from Narcissus not to spend my days looking into the reflection, frozen and immobile, or Lot’s wife who turning for one last look is petrified into a pillar of salt. No don’t look back or linger too long at the pensive.

And just like that, my white cube world is re-created. As I sit on this bench looking outside from the inside, the wall next to me swivels around and becomes a door and then locks into place and becomes a wall again in a different position. Like a moveable maze or matrix. Time is up, we leave.

Change of venue – we are now in the Manchester Art Gallery

This is a different kind of white cube, its yellow and maroon, last time I was here it was black, pure black. In this white cube the echo is part of the experience. An old building cubed inside, noises of chat from the café and browsing shoppers  drift into the space and allow me to know my own self here, vestiges of community unspeaking yet present a few students drawing quietly in their own interior-ness a few looking, thinking. What have they focused on? Who do they rate? Interesting, different from what I have fastened my fascination upon. In this room a joint practice development is apparent, a collaborative work between a potter (my background) and a collector, or collection the Mary Greg collection of 3000 objects, (for the Mary Greg collection see marymaryquitecontrary.org.uk) and she liked the hand made. 

It reminds me of the collected, curated inspiration objects of Barbara Hepworth at the Hepworth Gallery and at her house in St Ives and the amazing collection of carved shovels and platters, collected by and remade by Ursula Von Riddingsvard.

In the white cube we can see:-

Practice focused research – research about practice, informed by the doing, the haptic

Practice as collaboration, as joint practice development – informing, shaping bringing about new ways to research, to practice

Practice as a solitary occupation – writing, an artist siting in the studio making alone

Practice as a public occupation – in an exhibition, at a lecture, at a conference or symposium, teaching, sharing knowledge

Practice as a response to a collection – me and the icon collection at Blackburn, me and the mourning hankies collection at the Discovery Centre, me and my current work, looking at pattern using icon painting techniques, from looking behind the scenes at the icon collection at Blackburn and today looking at the Haywood and Greg collaboration.

Practice as a response to an object -  Haywood and Greg, Grayson Perry, also what we get students to do all the time, go research an artist and come up with a response to it, coca York, V&A and ceramic responders to the collection in the form of artists in residence like Claire Twomy ceramic installations and Neil Brownsword’s reflection on the Potteries, its histories and post-industrial present in the symposium Topographies of the Obscure, (2015) It is part of the artist’s practice is to look at what has gone before and respond to it in some way.

Sitting in a room full of porcelain is a bit unnerving as it is my craft practice, not used at the moment, left in hiatus while teaching, learning, other avenues are trodden including writing, painting, textiles and the  curatorial. This white cube is an anathema, anachronistic, interstitial, to my current practice, it will never leave and the practice of making, shaping, refining is part of my muscle memory which informs every other art form I attempt to practice.

These are my thoughts about practice, in the white cube, what it could be space for:-

Practice as a mirror to another practitioner – working in the style of or using the same palette of colours, or the same composition or the same materials or the same subject matter, Van Gogh copying from Hokusai and Hiroshige.

Practice as an act of humility – I don’t know the answers so I must look to my artistic forbears, teachers, philosophers and theoreticians of the past.

Practice as an investigation – specific microcosm of processes and skills

Practice as experimentation – to fail is to learn, trying even in the face of at first non sucess

Practice to show something – a performance, proving an argument or hypothesis

Practice to say something, political, ecological, sustainable, futuristic

Practice to get better – practice-ing

Practicing means I’m not there yet, I’m on a journey, in transit, open to the possibilities and constraints of the white cube and how my practice and the practice of others could be played out in that performative space.

Bibliography.

Geertz, C. (2000) Available Light, Princeton New Jersey, Princeton University Press. Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindle-eBooks-books (downloaded 11 February 2018).

Graff, G., and Birkenstien, C., (2006) They Say/ I Say; The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, 3^rd edn., London, W. W. Norton and Company.

Norton, F., (2017) Curled in the Nautilus of Herself, in Frances O’Donnell Poetry, https://francesodonnellpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/curled-in-nautilus-of-herself-curled-in.html, accessed 15 march 2018.

O’Doherty, B., (2000) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Expanded Edition, London, University of California Press.

Tobias Green, K., (2017) X≠Y: How to put up a shelf (V), 07.04.2017 — Review http://www.corridor8.co.uk/article/x-%E2%89%A0-put-shelf-v/ accessed 16 march 2018

Image: Ghost Tree, Anya Gallaccio, Whitworth gallery
image; whitworth Museum
image: Kate Haywood, Manchester Art Gallery