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Beyond the White Cube  By
Lindsay MacDonald
From April 17 to July 14, The Grey Art Gallery at New York University was home
to an exhibit called “Beyond the White Cube,” a retrospective
created by Irish-American artist Brian O’Doherty.
Previously shown at The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, the collection featured
work spanning 50 years of O’Doherty’s career, and was presented
under his alias Patrick Ireland.
O’Doherty adopted the name to protest Bloody Sunday, when the British
Army shot and killed 13 civil rights marchers in Derry in 1972, and pledged
to sign his name as Patrick Ireland “until such time as the British
military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are
granted their civil rights.”
The concept of identity has had a strong influence throughout
O’Doherty’s career. In his piece The Transformation, Discontinuity,
and Degeneration of the Image, 1969–present, O’Doherty uses
photographs to show the shifting identity of an individual throughout
the process of aging, and in juxtaposition, his painting Portrait of the
Artist as a Naked Young Man, 1953, is a self-portrait at a singular point
in his life when enrolled in medical school.
O’Doherty, who moved to New York from Ireland in 1957, is well known
not only as an artist but as a critic. The exhibition derives its name
from his essay Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space,
½rst published in 1976. O’Doherty reasons that the walls
of galleries have influenced the perception of art just as much
as the works themselves.
He began creating rope drawings in 1973 as a way to deconstruct gallery
space. His Rope Drawing (#111), which he created for this exhibit, is
a combination of painted walls and cords stretched across space, which
the viewer must physically climb through in order to see the work in its
entirety.
It is another attempt by O’Doherty to create art that actively involves
the spectator in the experience of interpretation.
His 1967 piece, Labyrinth Drawing, Isometric Projection, engages the viewers’
perceptions both mentally and through the suggestion of physical enactment.
Throughout his career, O’Doherty has returned to the idea of labyrinths
in his art. This idea extends into his chess drawings and sculptures,
such as Chess Set, 1966, made of anodized aluminum, glass, and gouache
on mirror and board.
 “The
tangle of moves accumulating invisibly on the board as a game matured
fascinated me, and I drew some famous games until they yielded a superimposed
labyrinth of tracks,” he explained.
Also included in the exhibit are the large, six-by-six-foot paintings
of Ogham script, an ancient Irish form. Within these paintings, O’Doherty
spells out ONE, HERE, and NOW through a code of strokes translated from
the Roman alphabet.
“ONE obviously had to do with unity, the Absolute. HERE had to do
with position, thus with the ghost of composition. NOW collapsed past
and future into the present,” he said.
“You draw to see what you’re thinking,” O’Doherty
explains, and to the active spectator, his artwork demands to be thought
about. |
