El cubo blanco no tiene ventanas ni elementos decorativos. Es espacio puro para arte "pura" del objecto artístico. Cuando lo percibimos a través de fotografías nunca vemos la presencia de personas; no hay ningún elemento que nos permite establecer una relación de proporción o de escala. Con la llegada y el éxito del minimalismo, el cubo blanco ve explotadas todos su capacidades de "crear" contexto, o lo que es más importante, de dar lugar a un arte de contexto.
In installation shots the question of scale is confirmed (the size of the gallery is deduced from the photo) and blurred (the absence of a spectator could mean the gallery is 30 feet high). This scalelessness connforms with the fluctuations through which reproduction passes the successful work of art.
As we move around that space, looking at the walls, avoiding things on the floor, we become aware that that gallery also contains a wandering phantom frequently mentioned in avant-garde dispatches- the spectator.
-
Contrary to the modern myth that art is "useless." `if art has any cultural reference (apart from being "cultural") surely it is the definition of our space and time. The flow of energy betweeen concepts of space articulated through the artwork and the space we occupy is one of the basic and least understood forces in modernism.
-
Everyone wants to have photographs not only to prove but to invent their experience. This constellation of narcissism, insecurity, and pathos is so influential I suppose none of us is quite free of it. So in most areas of experience there is a busy traffic in proxies and surrogates. The implication is that direct experience might kill us. Sex used to be the last stand where privacy preserved direct experience without the interposition of models. But when sex went public, when its study became as unavoidable as tennis, the fatal surrogate entered, promising "real" experience by the very consciousness of self that makes it inaccessible. Here, as with other mediated experience, "feeling" is turned into a consumer product.
Some postmodern art shows an exact appreciation of this. Its quotas of process are frozen by those traces of organized memory - documentation, which provides not the experience, but the evidence of it.
Marcel Duchamp, Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from the Ceiling over a Stove, 1938
(part of his installation for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, Paris)
This inversion is the first time an artist subsumed an entire gallery in a single gesture - and manged to do so while it was full of other art. (He did this by traversing the space from floor to ceiling. Few remember that on this occasion Duchamp also had his say about the wall: he designed the doors leading in and ot of het gallery. He made them - again with reservations from the police - revolving doors, that is, doors that conduse inside and outside by spinning what they trap. This inside-outside confusion is consistent with tilting the gallery on its axis.)
From this moment on their is a seepage of energy from art to its surroundings. With time the ratio between the literalization of art and mythification of the gallery inversely increases.
-
Seventies art tends to deal with what is immediately present to the senses and the mind, and so presents itself as intimate and personal. Thus it often appears narcissistic unless this is understood as a mode of locating the boundary where a person "ends" and something else begins. It is not in search of certainties, for it tolerates ambiguity well. Its instimacies have a somewhat anonymous cast since they turn privacy inside out to make it a matter of public discourse - a seventies form of distancing. Despite this personal focus, there is no curiousity about matters of identity. There is great curiousity about how consciousness in constructed.
