white cube: intellectuals without ideas
by orlando on jul 21, 2004, 22:53
‘eclipse: towards the edge of the visible’
we are told we can look at things differently, but what are we being asked to look at? and to what end? orlando examines the white cube with a hammer...
the white cube exists as a temple for the concept, starting from one ideology, perfect samples for the conceptual without progression.
hatoum’s arm slowly rotates across a circular floor based structure, repeatedly raking and erasing sand. we perceive the movement in time but the movement is nothing more than the stillness of the movement. genzken’s hinged concrete doorframes, immobile, open, give us some kind of reference towards movement, indicating the action of time but not moving in space and acting towards time.
the body is a complement to its surroundings, neither acting nor reacting. the body constitutes part of an environment where there can be no reaction or action of contemplation. the state of contemplation happens at the moment there is a feeling of strangeness... situations when the body reacts instinctively or by conditioning towards objects have something to do with their instrumentality. our response to gonzales-torres’ dual clocks is no different towards clocks in our everyday life. we assume the function and observe the idea. the sterile gallery space drives our attention towards displaced objects like slominski’s pipe with chewing gum, asking what is the concept that allows them to be present. but without any potential for instrumentality there is no tension in our perception. by means of art as well as music the passions enjoy themselves, and there is nothing onto which to project our striving.
pieces here are not to be contemplated, they are pieces to be thought about, presenting space and time in the same way as a mathematical formula.
the white cube is not going beyond its original concept, working more like a museum of conceptual art, determined by conceptuals and the duchampian logic. we are all creatures of duchamp, but it’s up to us to overcome his dogma. at the end of the day art is something that goes beyond idea... art is coming back to the visual, to the emotional, to the perceptual, a perceptual which is not merely conceptual.
duchamp, the haiduk, has been misinterpreted as if by errant disciples. at the moment he created the anti-art, he didn’t mean to make art out of anti-art, he wanted to deconstruct the institution art through the idea. conceptual art is nothing more than the conception of the world as it is, not a contemplation of the world... so if the world is there, if the things are there, it’s already inevitable that we perceive them... but how do we contemplate them??
art no longer existed when duchamp placed a urinal inside the art space. from the very beginning duchamp said ‘this is not art, this is anti-art’. he gave up art to become a chess player, he wanted to contemplate the beauty of the idea, to look at a phenomenon by looking beyond its superficial shape, towards the challenge of making things unpredictable - whereas the conceptual idea is dictated to us, defined by language, and extremely delimiting. anything that is conceptual is the manipulation of an idea, devoid of aesthetic. and before him, rimbaud had at 21 years of age given up symbolic poetry to become a (failed) arms dealer and slave trader.
duchamp’s analysis, like nietzsche’s ‘god is dead’ and marx’s ‘religion is the opium of the masses’, was mistaken as a manifesto. these were not directives to destroy religion, they were discussions about the consideration of sacred things, about the cultivation of ideologies in general. the notion that duchamp’s worth lies in that he took ready-made objects from every day life into art is a falsehood that embraces a false dichotomy between art and life. life has always been found in art, and vice versa. at the moment you accept that art or culture is ‘whatever’, what can be art, apart from a concept?
inside the white cube we discern a pattern - of deconstructivist thought, floating around from the end of the 19th century - once more being mistaken as a manifesto.
remaining in the same process of development is redundant. all kinds of ideas are finite, they have a beginning, which comes out of some kind of tension, a middle, and an end. at the end you either come up with a new idea, and realize the idea was merely an idea, or you go back to the beginning and remain trapped in the same dialectic, having failed, as nietzsche writes, to put the idea on ice. placing walls in the middle of the road, wrapping up buildings, and putting urinals in the gallery space, simply repeats the duchampian formula.
it is a commonplace to remark that duchamp criticized barriers between art and life. we realize there are no barriers between art and life, so why do we have to keep emphasizing a dichotomy that we know is false? to remain in this mode, to remain inside the white cube, represents the decadence of intellectuals without ideas.
