Why Always the White Cube?

Chelsea, a once highly industrialized district, has become an ideal place for many contemporary art galleries because of its large and airy spaces that used to house massive warehouses and factories. These structures commonly feature simple, undercoated interiors with white walls, skylights on the ceilings that offer natural illumination, and polished wood or neutral grey concrete floors. In a few articles in 1976, art critic Brian O’Doherty termed these buildings “the white cube” and described them as “the archetypal image of 20th century art.”[1] According to O’Doherty, the “white cube” provides “a pure and absolute space seemly conceived solely for the undisturbed presentation of art.”[2] Continuingly preferred by galleries throughout Chelsea as well as other areas, this mode of display has become the most typical look of contemporary art complexes. Yet, here comes a question: is the “white cube” an omnipotent venue for art? Examples from several Chelsea galleries may provide hints of how this “white, ideal”[3] space influences the display of artworks.

Sprawling the massive space of Hauser & Wirth Gallery is Monika Sosnowska’s mammoth new work, Tower (Figure 1). Molded in 1:1 scale of the steel framework underlying the glass curtain wall of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago masterpiece, the Lake Shore Drive Apartments, the Tower appears torn down, twisted, and squeezed under Sosnowska’s hands. The order and refinement embodied in van der Rohe’s neat matrices are subverted by the stretches and curves flowing through the entire 110-foot-long piece, which indicates the falling and dying of modern architecture. Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition venue for this sculpture seems to coincide with it formally and conceptually. The black structural beams of the gallery, geometrically joined and welded together, are overlooking the distorted carcass from the ceiling, appearing to recall the past power and prosperity of the International Style and American capitalism it had represented for. Moreover, the open, spacious hall allows the artist to extend an open-ended dialogue by engaging viewers in varied ways to inhabit and observe the work. Standing in the corner of the gallery, visitors get a full view of this architectural skeleton. Wondering around, they gain shifted perspectives—a tightly coiled tunnel on one end, while unfurling and stretching lines on the other. Through the process of changing their positions, visitors find their own approaches to this work. In this exhibition, the venue’s white cube like interior helps enhance the strength of the artwork.

Figure 1: Tower, 2014, steel, paint, 332.7 x 3223.3 x 668 cm / 131 x 1269 x 263 in, photograph by Hauser & Wirth Gallery.

Figure 2: Tomma Abts’ abstract paintings in the David Zwirner Gallery, photograph by David Zwirner Gallery.

Yet in the David Zwirner Gallery, the show of Tomma Abts’ abstract paintings (Figure 2) appears to be a bit visually confusing. Admittedly, there are controversies going on between the works and the space. Guided by intuition and arriving at the composition over varying periods of time[4], Tomma Abts creates a hallucination of space in her paintings, “which each involves shapes that overlap each other and blur any differentiation between foreground and background as well as positive and negative space.”[5] The complexity in her works, more or less, contrasts with the simplicity and refinement of the gallery they inhabit, and opens an interesting conversation between in- and outside of the paintings. However, the gallery’s huge space fails to articulate this controversy. For the paintings become too tiny to see when visitors stand in the middle of the room to get a full view of the space. They will in turn lose the white, cubic image of the gallery if they stand close to get a “‘face-to-face’ encounter”[6] with the paintings. It would be better to place these works in a relatively small space where viewers are able to feel the strength of the venue and works simultaneously.

Figure 3: Our Friend Fluid Metal Installation view, photograph by Rob McKeever.

The third example is Our Friend Fluid Metal (Figure 3) by Nancy Rubins in the Gagosian Gallery. In order to demonstrate “the inexorable proliferation of man-made refuse,”[7] Rubins salvaged dozens of cast-aluminum playground animals and reassembled them into huge, sculptures with cables. Growing into organic forms, these gigantic assemblages are imbued with the ideas of both obliteration and revitalization: their building cells, the dilapidated playground critters, recall people’s memories of their lost childhoods; while their tree-like shapes indicate the burst of new lives. In the space of the Gagosian Gallery, a constellation of four sculptures of varying scale have been arranged into a carnivalesque scene, with the largest piece breaking out of a wall and suspended overhead, while other smaller works ballooning into the air from the ground.[8] Celebratory as the layout is, the rich and layered stories embodied in the works haven’t as fully revealed themselves in this purified “white cube” as in an outdoor park or playground; possibly because this environment, to some extent, has isolated them from their original contexts.

Technically, none of the galleries above are actually the same “white cube” as O’Doherty described in his articles, but they all share it as an ideal. The analysis above shows that the exhibition spaces that are developed around this ideal do demonstrate strength and advantages, yet their unified appearances seem to fall short of accommodating and contextualizing different types of works, especially those that are site-specific.

Of course, the look of an exhibition space depends on a variety of factors­—the geographical location, the purpose of the venue, the cost of maintenance, etc—which would make some galleries look less cubic and white. But beyond these variations, some changes that are against this “white cube” ideal have been made in the museum world. For example, the angular walls and intertwined interior structures make the Denver Art Museum itself a spectacular artwork and provide visitors with an aesthetically challenging image of the exhibition space. Whether the design of the space could be too bold or not, it does show that there are choices other than “the white cube” in an exhibition venue.

With an increasing number of commercial galleries in Chelsea turning their front rooms into a museum-like space, and with more intimate interactions taking place between artworks and the exhibition space, there will many new possibilities waiting for us in those “white cubes”.

[1] Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the white cube: notes on the gallery space, part I”, Art forum XIV, no.7 (1976):24-30.

[2] Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the white cube: notes on the gallery space, part I”.

[3] Christoph Grunenberg, “The Modern Art Museum,” Contemporary Cultures of Display. Edited byEmma Barker. London: Yale University New Heaven& London, 1999.

[4] David Zwirner Gallery, “Tomma Abts,” accessed September 18, 2014, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/tomma-abts-2/?view=press-release.

[5] David Zwirner Gallery, “Tomma Abts,” accessed September 18, 2014, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/tomma-abts-2/?view=press-release.

[6] David Zwirner Gallery, “Tomma Abts,” accessed September 18, 2014, http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/tomma-abts-2/?view=press-release.

[7] Gagosian Gallery, “Nancy Rubins: Our Friend Fluid Metal,” accessed September 18, 2014, http://www.gagosian.com/artists/nancy-rubins.

[8] Gagosian Gallery, “Nancy Rubins: Our Friend Fluid Metal,” accessed September 18, 2014, http://www.gagosian.com/artists/nancy-rubins.