How Did the White Cube Gallery Space reflect a Modernist ideology?

Brian O’Doherty’s seminal essay series ‘Inside the White Cube’ catalysed the ubiquity of the term that has now become so common in the lexicon of the contemporary art world. Defining the typology of the ‘modern gallery space’ characterised by white walls, sterile lighting and spatially ordered artworks, O’Doherty argued that the ‘white cube’ places objects in a timeless space where viewers could enjoy a purely optical, but depoliticised, engagement with works of art.

The notion of Modernism must be interrogated; it is a relatively recent concept created by Anglo-American critics to describe twentieth-century literature written in English. Despite recent books by Peter Bürger and Jean François Lyotard, it has very little currency in Europe or in Latin America (where modernismo means something quite different). O’Doherty revealed the inner contradictions of the white cube, criticising the highly controlled context of the modernist gallery, by explaining how it can devour its contents. This article will use O’Doherty’s text as a consistent reference point in the discussion surrounding concepts of modernity, the history of the White Cube and its illusion as a ‘blank canvas’.

The aesthetic project of the ‘modern museum’ divorced objects from their original contexts. This was seen in the Stedelijik Museum which was stripped of its original 1895 decoration in 1938, as red bricks were painted white and the wainscoting removed from the gallery walls, the base of which was covered with jute and painted white. The most notorious example of this was the Museum of Modern Art in New York which embodied the flexible white space enclosed and hermetic. This approach was pioneered by Alfred Barr, the director of the museum between 1929-43. The gallery had become a church like space, the ‘outside world’ an interloper, the elitism of the salon and the bourgeois collection manifested in a different manner. Context had disappeared, the viewer extracted and aesthetic was pushed to the foreground. The underlying fiction of this whitewashed space is not only that ideology is held at bay, but also that the autonomous works of art inside convey their meaning in uniquely aesthetic terms, that it belongs there because it is there. The White Cube reflected a modernist ideology by virtue of its existence, embodying not only a physical space but also a historical and ideological construct, informed by and informing the artworks within it.

Art Forum Newspaper Excerpt

As Grunberg commented on the whitewash of MoMA:

“The white, neutral and ideology-free gallery space constitutes the physical materialization of MoMA’s selective amnesia. More than anything else, the ‘white cube’ epitomized the attempt to escape from the realities of the external world, belying modernism’s original claim for the integration of art and life.…The physical confinement and limitations imposed by the installation reveal MoMA’s selective appropriation of modernism.”

Barr decided to remove art from our preconceptions – he wanted to shape the autonomy of the art and the artist. He also believed that audiences should be encouraged and feel free to develop their own connections to a piece of work without external influences that a ‘deep understanding could only emerge out of long hours of personal aesthetic communion with the art’. The negation of the exterior world became, and remains, an essential part of MoMA’s politics of presentation. The paradigms of modernist aesthetics have penetrated not only the works of art but also their presentation – distance and autonomy is practised in art and its installation, a high fetishization of the entire experience is a defining feature of the white cube’s modernist agenda.

The white cube does not exist as a tabula rasa, it is, as Filipovic stated, an indelibly inscribed container, far more than a physical tectonic space. Particular to the White Cube is that it operates under the pretence that its seeming invisibility allows the artwork best to speak; it seems blank, innocent, unspecific, insignificant.

Ultimately what makes a white cube a white cube is that, in our experience of it, ideology and form meet all without our noticing it. It is an emblematic gallery and exhibition space, as well as an ideological field surrounding, of western modernism. As O’Doherty writes ‘the ideological field surrounding the white cube belongs as much to modernism as to the market relations of art.’ MoMA was an outpost of modernity, belonging to an age of corporate capitalism. As Duncan and Wallach state, more than any other museum MOMA developed the ritual forms that translated the ideology of late capitalism into immediate and vivid artistic terms – a monument to individualism, understood as subjective freedom.

White cube exhibitions entangle the viewer in a space at once physical and intellectual, but also profoundly, ideological. Mieke Bal has argued that exhibitions assign specific subjectivities to the various agents involved in their production and reception; the first person – the museum – tells a narrative to a second person, the audience, about a third person, the collection on display. This semiotic understanding of the display is particularly relevant when discussing the White Cube and the discursive means employed in the displays within it.

The first person is the dominant voice within the white cube gallery, O’Doherty writing that we have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first. He goes on, ‘it (the white cube) emphasises the formal qualities of the pieces precisely because it attempts to withdraw itself it also dominates the works.

Returning to Bal’s theory, the role of the audience in the white cube’s relationship to modernist ideology is one in constant limbo, unsure of its place in relation to the museum space and the artwork on the wall. The museum visit is scripted, the visitor becomes a spectator, arriving with modernism and leaving having unconsciously enacted a performance or a ‘ritual’ as Wallach and Duncan coin it. The white cube exalts precisely the values and experiences it apparently rejects by elevating them to the universal and timeless realm of spirit, the second person fading away, their role obsolete within the transcendental museum space.

White Cube Gallery Space

The historian Christopher Whitehead posits display as ‘a form of representation and as a political public production of propositional knowledge intended to influence audiences and to create durable social effects.’ This was apparent in both the 1930’s MoMA exhibition, the display embodying qualities that were meaningful to its vision as well as the display of art in Hitler’s Germany.

Barron draws attention to the 1937 exhibition Grosse deutsche Kunstausstellung in Munich, displayed in the vast white space of the Haus der Kunst. The eugenically pure and sterile artworks, displaying bucolic German landscapes with Aryan bodies populating the towns, were neutralised, innocuous despite the egregious motivations that lay behind their selection.

The show was juxtaposed against the cluttered, haphazardly hung avant garde show of degenerate art that opened the following day in an archaeological institute. The aestheticization of politics found its home in the White Cube, the totality of the art and the architecture affirming the power of the ruling elite. Of course, the climate and intention behind Munich and New York differ yet the two exhibitions reveal the White Cube’s versatile ability to appeal to a varied appetite of western notions of modern art, of ‘newness’.

Enforced ideas that wall organisation matter, that artistic production must be framed in a way that is universal in its rationality and ordered guise makes the promise of democratisation and accessibility redundant when they can be applied so broadly and so dangerously. Aesthetically the sterilisation of the gallery space have problematic connotations that link to cleanliness, morality and whiteness – of a cleansing of the past post World War One that emphasises the expulsion of difference.

The white cube was a transitional device that attempted to bleach out the past and at the same time control the future by appealing to supposedly transcendental modes of presence and power. It enables an unconscious read of the art on the walls, acting as an image of the society that supports it, proving an ideal chamber for the Nazi rhetoric surrounding the ‘ideal modern citizen’. If, therefore, the White cube has never been truly neutral, then it is intentionally coercive and is not, or is no longer, a space in which the infrastructure and imbalances of the artworld conveniently fade out, as such loses the ability to be defined as modern. **The White cube carries its own ideology, one that is elitist and authoritative, a space that dictates the act of aesthetic contemplation, inoculating even the most insidious artistic narrative. Neutrality, order, rationalism and importantly, extraction from a larger context all reveal the white cube agenda to be principally concerned with ideas of western modernity. Rooted in Alfred Barr’s notion that there is a linear, evolutionary history of art, infamously depicted in the frontispiece of the exhibition Cubist and Abstract Art. In Cubism and Abstract Art, Barr provided the first compelling model of formalist discussion and stylistic ordering for early-twentieth-century art. This evolutionary depiction of art serves only to favour predominantly the white male, forgoing the strife and social change that encouraged the development of new art movements, as well as sterilising the actual artistic intention of the artists that were actually recognised within the display.

This was true for Wassily Kandinsky, who reputed the overtly formalist bias that Barr placed on the display within the exhibition. Kandinsky objected to being considered as part of the march towards a full determination of abstraction, the omission of the incredibly important religious content behind Kandinsky’s work resulting in a radical misunderstanding of it and the process by which he created. Significant art objects were stripped of their ambitions outside of esthetic conformity, Cubism and Abstract Art immortalising one particular model for freedom in art. Meyer Shapiro criticised this idea of the dialectic of realism and abstraction as two purified absolutes separated from experience, essentially criticising the basis of Barr’s modernism: ‘there is no pure art, it is shaped by experience, and non-aesthetic concerns, no one can truly understand the history of art without some knowledge of its background.’ Modernity as a construct, one embodied by the white cube, has obscured, omitted and manipulated entire bodies of cultural history and narratives along with the people that created it.

Kandinsky, Symposium

The White cube is one of ‘modernism’s triumphs’ a western conceit constructed to uphold some of its most cherished values, including what Zabel called the common presumption that ‘Western modern art is… modern art, that modernisation is Westernisation. Within the White Cube there is a pretended autonomy of the art from social conditions, which is symptomatic of a broader devaluation of history. We recall Grunberg’s commentary on MoMA’s ‘selective appropriation of modernism’ as an important part of the discourse. As Shapiro stated, ‘the myth of abstraction and ‘modern art’ had been smuggled in to suggest its freedom from historical circumstance.’

The White Cube thus reflects a certain archetype of modernist ideology, one that privileges western notions of a ‘democratic display’ despite the pervasive narrative that the white cube acts as a ‘blank canvas’.

Written by Olivia Bruce