Art In Null Space
In 1976, Brian O'Doherty, an artist and critic, wrote a series of essays critically examining the prevailing art gallery environment, which we all know with its blank walls, clean harsh lights, and claustrophobic silence. He termed this kind of space “White Cube,” which is a term that has become a primary staple in art critic vocabularies.
Woman looking at paintings on a wall, March 31, 2023, Photo courtesy of Shawn Rain on Unsplash
The White Cube is designed to be as minimal and unstimulating as possible so that your attention passes right over it. Art galleries are attempting and partly succeeding in subtracting themselves from the art viewing experience, but in doing so, they have ignored and suppressed alternative viewing experiences, and in some cases, the intended viewing experience.
Art gallery, February 19, 2018, Photo courtesy of Dannie Jing on Unsplash
We can see why the White Cube was arrived at. Firstly, paintings are silent and still. Why should an art gallery be anything else? Secondly, galleries raise the art into a pure, equal environment, which is fair to the artists and does acutely focus attention on the works. Thirdly, it removes art from context intentionally, so that viewers can appreciate the art from a primarily aesthetic point of view.
Needing the environment
For some works of art painted intentionally for a public gallery or hung for sale in a commercial one, the White Cube aesthetic may be advantageous or no issue. But let’s look at The Last Supper to understand why some works of art need their environment.
The Last supper by Leonardo Davinci, photo courtesy of last-supper-milan.com
Do you know where the Last Supper was painted?
Yes, that’s right, Italy. But more specifically, it was painted on a wall inside the dining hall of a convent. Knowing that immediately deepens the appreciation of the work by calling our attention to meta aspects of the painting, like who it was for? Why was it painted? Was it effective for its purpose? What did the Nuns feel, did they like it, or were they frightened? Was it a tool of suppression or inspiration?
There are many, many paintings and sculptures - mostly religious and mostly historical - for which losing the intended environment is like losing a limb. Think of the cave paintings at Lascaux about which Picasso is said to have uttered, “we have invented nothing,” the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Islamic calligraphy and tile work, Christian Icon paintings, illuminations in manuscripts, and art printed on the pages of a book.
Lascaux Cave paintings, photo courtesy of Cotton COulson, Nat Geo Image Collection
You may have noticed in that list that, barring Christian Icons, those works of art are painted on their environment. Most paintings ever done were painted on a mobile medium meant to be sent around and hung somewhere the artist may have never even visited. This is true, but even for those artworks, many meta questions still exist.
Before we move on though, I want to sneak in a technical point about art and the environment. Many works of historical art were painted in daylight hours with supplemental candlelight when needed. No one can say if the daylight-approximate lighting of a White Cube space would be satisfactory for certain historical artists, but all we know for sure is that the hues many painters saw were cast under a different light. This is still true today, and even for digital painters when the screens they use aren’t expensive and professionally calibrated.
Benefitting from the environment
So what about old and new art painted on mobile mediums? They were designed for a variable space. True. But only the most rarefied modernist pieces and Rorschach ink blots can be said to be truly independent of all contextual factors like time, space, personal feeling, national feeling, and art-world context.
Most paintings, or at least most galleries, want to carry some additional feeling, information, or context into a new time and space, and it’s usually done with docile white labels underneath the art itself. These labels hint at a largely unserviced dimension of art. The dimension of additional information. The White Cube banishes all of it in an admirable one-size-fits-all solution and attempts to reintroduce it on a work-by-work basis via label.
"Ottone Rosai Piazza del Carmine, December 13 2023, Photo courtesy of Hayden Gorringe
Some galleries - mainly the big national ones - have gone further with audio guides designed and written in collaboration with the artist. This is quite good, but typically it says no more than a label can, and it’s seldom ever used. The tricky business of music rights limits the guide to speech and uninspiring free-use music.
Sometimes in a gallery, you’ll find little QR codes next to a work of art which take you to the artist’s profile and a write-up on the piece which can be much lengthier than what a label can contain.
Other, even rarer galleries sometimes go to the expense of assembling sound domes, projections, touchscreen alternatives to labels, and other techy, experimental means of giving the viewer more information than the painting can convey alone.
All of these solutions are gesturing towards something, and that thing is the immersion and mental occupation of the viewer's mind by the artist. If the artist wants this, they will find limited success in galleries. There are other places, however, which might work surprisingly well.
Woman looking at Jenny Saville painting in Contemporary art gallery, Photo courtesy of insights.masterworks.com.
Alternatives to the gallery
Today, to attend a gallery, you need to be the sort of person who wants to stand before an original. Who gets a little cold shiver down the spine in the company of masterworks. Who likes to support the arts. For these people, galleries will always exist. But most people enjoy art in another way - digitally.
For over 100 years, mass media operatives armed with cameras have been engaged in an incredibly prolific act of the reproduction and distribution of art. It stands today that nearly 100% of all known art is available online. You can view any of it any time you like, framed by the bezels of your own device, with your wallpaper around it.
If only given adequate attention by the artist and readily available tools and platforms, the viewer could enjoy an artist’s work in a deeply immersive environment.
For historic art, the digital curator may want to inform you that for this particular piece it’s important that you understand this and that about the English Civil War. And that the artist would likely want you to understand that the depicted individuals gesticulating wildly, spilling beer on one another, mouths agape, over a table scattered with parchment are rowing about land ownership post Civil War.
To deepen this immersion, the curator might arrange a soundscape made up of a town-crier belting the news of Charles I’s death, a tangle of indistinct angry voices engaged in argument, wooden mugs knocking together in the foreground, and the trotting of cavalry outside on stone streets.
Let’s imagine how a piece of contemporary art might be laid out. The artist wants you to understand the vague overtones of dementia. Rather than explicitly explain how dementia has affected her family, she may simply write, “It was her favorite piece.”
The image is depicted in a simple, grave black frame. The frame itself is surrounded by floating particles clumped into spongy masses.
The audio is an old song from 1972.
