INSIDE THE WHITE CUBE: NOTES ON THE GALLERY SPACE, PART I
Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part I
Brian O’Doherty

“The history of modernism is intimately framed by the gallery space …
An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of 20th-century art.”

“…the wall became the locus of contending ideologies and every new development had to come equipped with an attitutde toward it.”

The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not- or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannekins for further study. This Cartesian paradox is reinforced by one of the icons of our visual culture: the installation shot, sans figures. Here at last the spectator, oneself, is eliminated. You are there without being there, one of the major services provided for art by its old antagonist, photography. The installation shot is a metaphor for the gallery space. In it, an ideal is fulfilled as strongly as in a Salon painting of the 1830s.

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