When O’Doherty compares the gallery space to a church, he does so to emphasise that an ideal gallery should imbue the artworks with a sacred nature, similar to that possessed by holy relics. To achieve ‘the sanctity of the church’, he lists the various ways that galleries are specifically designed to seal off the outside world, creating a space where ‘conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values’. Devoting this space to the technology of aesthetics is a rigorous exercise, so O’Doherty likens this diligence to ‘laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church’, since the vaulted architecture of medieval designs placed fundamental importance on the dimensions of supporting walls, and these construction rules strictly dictated the relationships and ratios between the span, height, and width, of various arches.
2. Summarize in your own words the changes that the “picture plane” (the surface of paintings) underwent during the period of Modernism.
Up until the late 19th Century, it was widely expected that paintings should portray a near-photographic, albeit idealised, level of realism. The Old Masters had recognised that it was necessary to ‘signify the enduring presence of flatness underneath a painting’, so they could maintain a ‘vivid illusion of three-dimensional space’. With the rise of Impressionism this awareness was reversed, and the flat surface of a canvas increased in importance, as paintings became flatter and flatter. Unlike the Renaissance view of paintings, as a window into a world of linear perspective, the avant-garde Modernists acknowledged that paintings were literally just a surface covered with lines and colours, and believed that the form of their picture should follow the function of this flat canvas. This realisation allowed them to maintain the integrity of the picture plane, whilst embracing a two-dimensional space that recognisable objects cannot inhabit, ensuring painting’s autonomy as an artistic medium of purely optical experience.
3. Explain O’Doherty’s concepts of “the eye” and “the spectator” in your own words.
The concepts of “the eye” and “the spectator” refer to the viewer’s methods of experiencing works inside a gallery. In a literal sense, the person is considered to be “the spectator” who inhabits a physical space as they peruse the gallery, visually observing the installations with “the eye” as part of their body. However, O’Doherty further extends this concept into the metaphysical by considering how viewers aesthetically perceive these paintings. Ever since the Old Masters, most artists had created the optical illusion of a three-dimensional space which encouraged “the spectator” to figuratively enter the picture plane and imagine themselves walking inside this deep space. However, the flatness of Modernist paintings broke this illusion, permitting only “the eye” to venture into their two-dimensional space.
4. How is the experience of viewing art and the gallery space itself both transformed when art breaks out of the picture plane (installation, performance)?
Under Postmodernism, the physical space of the gallery ‘joins the picture plane as a unit of discourse’. By extending the spatial energy of the artwork outside of the canvas it encompasses the viewer, who becomes enmeshed with the artistic energy as a collaged inclusion of the work. Essentially, the sculptural illusion of the picture plane has been reversed, such that the spectator becomes fragmented from the real world, and conjugated into an abstracted realm of art, via the medium of space within the gallery itself.
References
Greenberg, C. (1960). Modernist Painting. Forum Lectures (Washington, D. C.: Voice of America).
O'Doherty, B. (1976). Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
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