Contextual Review Draft:
This week I finalised and submitted my first draft for my Contextual Review. It was a necessary but also encouraging experience to formulate and contextualise the research that I have been doing into a clearly structured narrative and the reflections on this constructed narrative will surely help inform my perspectives as I continue to research further.
(Installation view, Robert Rauschenberg: White Paintings, October1968)
Word Count: 3169/3000
The aesthetic of art curation has stagnated for the past century, refusing to progress as culture shifts and the development of new technologies expand our artistic horizons.
An important historical critic of the white cube aesthetic, Brian O’Doherty, discusses the ideal gallery as one which ‘...subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that is ‘art’. (2000).
It was within this hope of minimising distractions that the white cube emerged in the 1930s.
O’Doherty’s original commentary on the format distinguishes between two white cube aesthetics. First is the physical white cube, characterised by a bold emptiness, with white painted walls, brilliant artificial lighting installed to eliminate shadows and bare wooden floors that reduce the gaze to the horizontal.
It was developed by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) director Alfred H Barr, Jr and was revolutionary at the time for its clean execution, adaptability and objective focus, isolating each work to exhibit alone on an empty wall. It was formed in response to the increasing abstraction of modern art, such as in cubism and prepared the contemporary gallery space for the arrival of minimalism.
The second white cube that O’Doherty describes is the metaphysical one; Beyond the physical, formulated in the ideation of the space. An incongruous isolation from the vicissitudes of time, context and relationality to the viewer. It is enforced by the staff at the venue and by a collective cultural conscience, with a ‘…tendency to alienate art from its history as well as those who come to view it.’ (Birkett, 2012). Through this dualism, the spirit of the aesthetic inspires a respective silence of visitors and instils in them feelings of displacement in the physical space.
In its overzealous attempt to remove distractions from a pure-art experience the white cube aesthetic rejects time, context and relationality; all of which, it can be argued, are integral to the experience of any artwork.
The aspects of art, rejected by the metaphysical white cube, are concurrently inherent predicates of sound-based art, which therefore acts as the ideal vessel to explore the critiques of the aesthetic. Because ‘sound is intrinsically and unignorably relational…’ (Labelle B, 2015) and because sound cannot exist without the dimension of time and the context of a surrounding architecture, it embodies relevant challenges to how we define, exhibit and experience artworks.
The challenges that sound brings to the White Cube aesthetic are embodied in contemporary Art’s criticisms and disqualifications of sound art. A genre enabled by the advent of audio recording in the 1870s and emerged slowly around the 1970s. As an art genre, it has had a confused and unclear history. Its boundaries are uncertain for what constitutes as sound art and what does not qualify as sound art, leading many important ‘sound artists’ of the past to reject association the term. Artist Max Neuhaus is an important example. Neuhaus defined his criticism as category error, writing that because sound art can include anything, the term has no meaning at all, using the analogy of proposing ‘steel art’ which puts together both steel guitar music and steel metal sculptures, whereby the term loses meaning through indistinct predicates (2000).
This criticism holds particular weight in response to the landmark sound art exhibition which was David Toop’s Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound (2000), the largest exhibition of sound art in the UK, which defined the genre as ‘sound combined with visual art practices,’ including works that didn’t intentionally make sound, focussing on the spectacle of sound in visual practices rather than exploring the sound itself; seen in the inclusion of a live DJ playing electronic club music. (Toop, 2016). Neuhaus goes on to say that despite this loss of meaning, there does exist however a dialogue of sound-based works that deserves a named genre. The ends to which he proposes ‘sound installation’ as a suitable alternative, defining it as sonic composition that ‘situates itself in space rather than time’ (Ouzounian, 2008), as is the case for musical compositions. This would categorise sound within the established dialogue of installation art and acknowledges the importance of context and immersion, as an important aspect of installation art is its intermediary ability to create a dialogue between the observer and the space (Pardo, 2017).
However, the outright rejection of time marks this classification as reductive. Sound’s unique ability to evolve and augment through time should not disqualify its artistic integrity, similar to how performative and video artworks exist within time. Composer and musicologist Gascia Ouzounian has suggested a broader definition of sound installation as works that ‘…privilege concepts and experience of sound and space.’(Ouzounian, 2008). This definition succeeds at encapsulating the scope of sound-based works within installation art. Alternatively, sound art curator Manuel Rocha Iturbide proposes that both installation and sculpture become expanded disciplines when sound is added to them (2014), defining sound in artworks as a means of expanding established art contexts and genres.
Though for many years unacknowledged by western writing, possibly due to post-war tensions, the German genre of Klangkunst developed as an independent dialogue of sound in art which had clear predicates, academic routes, a traceable history, a focus on the sound itself as well as its relationship with time and space (Engström,2009). The landmark exhibition for Klangkunst was the 1996 exhibition Sonambiente and was directed by Matthias Osterwold in Berlin. In Latin, Sonambiente translates as ‘the sounds that surround’, displaying a focus on the spatiality and immersive quality of sound. Even the title embodied the genre’s relational dialogue which contrasted greatly to Toop’s Sonic Boom exhibition, only named as such because it ‘sounded exciting’ (Toop, 2016).
Although the term ‘sound art’ is consumed and holds no literacy in establishing an art genre, Iturbide defines the term as a ‘…kind of crutch, an artificial way to be able to talk about these intermedia phenomena’ (2014). As klangkunst is a direct translation of sound art, it displays how the concept applies a certain globalisation, a term to encapsulate all dialogues of sound and art is required. The term therefore holds the face value of a dialogue of sound-based artworks with the contemporary art world and it is this holistic, global dialogue rather than any specific attempt at defining a genre that will be used to investigate the critique of the white cube aesthetic.
An acceptance of the tenets of sound art’s disqualification would also positively affect our experience of visual art.
In its attempt to achieve invisibility and remove distraction from the gallery space, the white cube becomes visible as an aesthetic object so different from its surrounding aesthetics.
Curator and theorist Simon Sheikh challenges the neutrality of the gallery space, describing it as an aesthetic object that ‘not only conditions, but also overpowers the artworks themselves’. (2009). In its attempted disappearance and separation from the world around it, it displays as this bold representation of alienation and isolation. The stark iconography of separation can be seen in Renzo Martens’ White Cube (2020), in which a white cube gallery is constructed in Lusanga, Democratic Republic of Congo. Here the glossy white walls juxtapose greatly to the surrounding fields of the cocoa plantation, shifting the focus of the white cube as a container to place content within, to making the container itself the content (Sheik, 2009). Marten’s seminal film uses the image of the white minimalist structure as a symbol to represent a monumental alienation; being built on colonial exploitation. This shift in content and container reveals the veracity of the aesthetics attempt to remove all artwork from context. Therefore, sound artworks which are constructed and installed within specific contexts, and cannot be removed from them, poses an important challenge to the white cube’s aesthetic. Sound based artworks are therefore logically incompatible with the metaphysical white cube as any sound artwork installed into a white cube gallery will create a dialogue with the space that will shift the white cube from a container to content, and the space will therefore fail to be removed from the work.
Associations between the over sterilisation of modern architectural spaces and racism were explored in Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, associating the origins of wanting to remove shadows from ‘clean white spaces’ with outmoded ideas around darker pigmented skin being a signifier of uncleanliness, but he also writes about appreciation; how our experience is dulled by the brilliant white lights we install in our homes and galleries. For example, where he writes ‘Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of Gold,’ explaining how gold, a material globally associated with value, cannot be experienced properly under an artificial white light, but instead that in dim rooms, it serves as an illuminator for its unique property of reflection and its true beauty emerges when reflecting the warm glow of candlelight (Tanizaki, 2001).
This idea of experience being altered in and by the physical aesthetic of the white cube is reminiscent of a concept in painting called the brunaille. Because the brilliant white tone of an empty canvas can throw off the artists tonal values and perception, a highly diluted coat of usually burnt umber is applied in a wash, neutralising the brilliant whites to a mid-tone value. Perhaps the interrogative brilliance of bright white walls and light is in actuality obscuring engagement in the illusion of visual art.
This criticism of the white cube’s brilliance reflects the metaphysical white cube’s rejection of relationality where information about a work is prioritised over the human experience of it, further alienating the viewer from the visual artwork.
The rejection of time from the art gallery reflects our ocularcentric culture, however its acceptance within the gallery space would lead to a more grounded and sensory diverse experience.
Ocularcentrism is a term coined by architect and writer Juhani Pallasmaa and can be understood as the consequence of privileging vision above our other senses to the point of a cultural neglect of the other senses (2012). Pallasmaa writes that while visual art has produced thought provoking structures, ‘…it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world’. (Ibid). It is the experience of this idea of rootedness which he denotes as the collective goal of all meaningful art, to facilitate a completeness in our human experience. Pallasmaa describes the eye as the sensual organ of separation, compared to the ear as the organ of proximity or skin as the organ of contact, there is a certain distance that is maintained within visual arts that is not present with our other senses. The white cube, both in its rejection of sound and its imaginaries, suppresses our feeling of closeness to works of art, instead preferring a visual experience that is isolated from our bodily presence
O’Doherty explains that it is as if one must have already died to enter, ‘Indeed the presence that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion’ (2000).
As oppose to our senses of touch, smell and sound we might use to interact with immersive works, we can only experience visual art through an imaginary ideation.
The realm of imaginaries is an important platform to understand the conceptual frameworks of institutions, for example the ‘second white cube’ as an imaginary, but also the social imaginaries within which members of a society interact with these institutional imaginaries. Foucault calls this platform the ‘hypothetical plane’ in which we can examine and break down imaginary concepts as if on an operating table. It is upon this table, he goes on, that language has intersected space since the beginning of time. (Foucault, 1989). The physical white cube can be understood as an attempt to fulfil the values and principles of the second white cube. Danish art historian Theis Vallø Madsen has remarked that he sees ‘…the characteristics of the white cube in our imaginaries of cyberspace’ (Holmboe, 2020). Further than this, one might say that the principles of the second white cube can be better realised in cyberspace. In a digital world time and affect can be completely removed, removing not just the decay by immortalising the works but removing the aesthetics of the physical space. Also, where our physical universe is somewhat limited, cyberspace is unlimited in a process of continuous expansion. The aesthetic of emptiness associates far better with the suprematist abstraction of a blank screen than it does with the bold image of a rigid room painted with blank white walls. Also, as we are developing more into a post-digital world, where digital assets are becoming increasingly valuable, blockchain technologies develop to regain what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘aura’ of original artworks, that which is lost in an image’s reproduction. Perhaps this spells the inevitable future of the white cube, that it will evolve into the digital realm and further isolate the viewer from the sense experience of an artwork.
By removing artworks from time, one also removes them from its vicissitude of change. The hyper-sterilised aesthetic of the art gallery instils a feeling of displacement in its visitors, which comes from this fear of change, as if each visitor hastens the onset of decay in an artwork. The attempt to sterilise the gallery space is embodied in its glass showcases, numerous signs throughout the gallery space warning off touching and flash photography, laser alarm systems and expected silence. Though many of these can be understandable precautions to protect works from vandalism, their presence within a space whose aesthetic emphasises emptiness draws aesthetic attention towards them.
All of these aspects contribute to an architecture which isolates the visitor from the experience of the work. Pallasmaa then writes of architecture as that which articulates our experience of this rootedness and that which strengthens our sense of reality and self. Sound based works are in conversation with the architecture that encloses it and therefore bring out the aesthetic implications of the space, opening the viewer’s eyes to the space around them and including their presence in that conversation. Time enables the viewer to develop within the gallery space, a change that is only made possible when viewership is encouraged rather than defended. To the white cube however, time represents decay and the potential for the minimalist illusion to fade.
The gallery space is haunted by time.
Derrida’s ‘Hauntology’ proposes an alternative model of time to the linear and constantly progressive one we assume. Instead, hauntology describes time as if crumpled and therefore layered and in which the past is a spectre that lives through the present and future of our culture (Derrida, 2006). While the white cube attempts to remove artwork from time, a hauntological perspective might respond that it is inescapable; and this is revealed by the ways in which the gallery space remains haunted and therefore in time. The purpose of art galleries put simply is to create ‘spaces of experience’ (Cline, 2012) and it is this very aspect of spatial experience which is haunted. The inescapability of sound haunts the listening experience, as well as the inescapability of periphery which haunts the visual experience.
These hauntings can best be understood through John Cage’s famous work 4’33 (1952), compromising of four and a half minutes of composed ‘silence’, the composer was inspired by two separate experiences the year prior.
The first was Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951). Cage described these paintings as airports for light, particles and shadow (Cage, 1961), responding to the sensitivity and relational aesthetic of these ‘empty’ panels as a realisation that the experience of any work of art can be altered and affected by its surrounding context, denoting that visual art interacts with the surrounding architecture through reflected light, shadows and particles in the air. This then also has a direct application to the aesthetic values of the white cube. The experience of visual works is affected by its periphery, the surrounding architecture both visually but also in how light, shadow and particles interact with the space because of it.
The second and major inspiration for 4’33 was when Cage visited Harvard’s anechoic chamber. He expected to find a truly silent room devoid of noise, instead however, he began hearing the echoes of his nervous system and blood circulating through his veins. This realisation, that wherever there is living audience there is sound, inspired his famous quote ‘There is no such thing as silence.’(Ibid). It is this, that is the core of Cage’s 4’33. By which the coughing of audience members in an auditorium ceases to become a distraction from the art, but the content of the art itself, a perspective that we all contribute to this generative soundscape of audience and ensemble, in performance.
Cage’s revelations in curating sound may be further understood in applying Xenakis’ theory of sound as a granular energy. Xenakis’s model proposes that all sounds ‘represent an integration of corpuscles [grains] of elementary acoustic particles, of sound quanta.’ (Solomos, 2016). In other words, the term sound is an abstract noun that describes a radiation of vibrations that passes through the air around us. Any individual ‘sound’ is therefore a representation of many smaller vibrations which he calls grains.
Further, because sound is formulated in space, even the purist ringing of a sinewave becomes modulated and given character in the air between speaker and listener. Because sound is merely vibrations passing though air, these modulations can be caused by any number of things that might affect the air: grains in the room, temperature, echoes, wind etc. However, sound cannot exist inside a vacuum, it requires a medium for the vibrations to pass through, therefore it is because of the physical factors, that sound can be heard at all and cannot be taken away from our experience of it. Just as Cage drew focus to in his ‘silent’ performance, so too does Xenakis present the incredibly relational physicality and experience of what we call sound.
This granular model of sound is in fact similar to the hauntological model of time, sharing in its attitudes against linearity. All these things in fact, time, space, sound and art are epistemes, developing granularly through time and our experience of them can only be understood within a certain context of time. These dialogues of these granular energies continuously haunt the ontology of the world which cannot be removed from an any institution’s imaginaries, so long as humans bear witness.
In its attempt to assign value to artworks it constructs an environment that removes the tenets of time, relationality and context from them, placing them within an aesthetic object which overpowers the artwork. The white cube was a successful response to art trends at the time and remains so in its minimalism and adaptability. The current aesthetic of art curation removes artworks from time, place and culture and places them within an institutional building with an emphasis on removing things from the experience of the work. But perhaps what is required for art, is a body which prioritises the experience of the work within the time and culture that it was created within. An aesthetic which is built on facilitating experience rather than isolating it.
Bibliography
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- Cage, J. (1961). Silence: Lectures and writings. Book. Wesleyan University Press. Accessed December 28, 2021. Available from:
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