Davi Weber AA- Architecture Knowledge and Writing Marina Lathouri 2.3.15 Exercise #2: Inside / Outside the White Cube White Rectangle Like Brian O’Doherty’s square-shaped book “Inside the White Cube” opened up to reveal a rectangular spread then extruded by the architects, the White Cube’s commanding architecture dominates Mason’s Yard. However, most neighbors do not know the building exists. From Duke Street lined with bespoke men’s suits, Old Master galleries, and antique dealers, only obliquely one may notice the presence of any activity through the passageway. A series of footpaths converge on the cobblestone courtyard that situates the unfamiliar white structure within the amalgamation of multi-hued brick buildings circumscribing it. Detritus, drug addicts, and hotel back of house maintain the “counterculture" atmosphere nearby where John and Yoko first met in the Indica basement gallery, and near the Scotch of St. James where the Beatles, Stones and others played in the 60’s. After a thirty year hiatius without any buildings erected in the St. Jame’s conservation area in central London, in 2006 MRJ Rundell Associates (who the director of White Cube had established a rapport with on another building) constructed the 1,114.8 sq m art gallery on the site of a former electricity sub-station. After University and after having established connections with New York artists, 29year-old Jay Jopling moved to London and opened the first White Cube gallery in 1993. Located near the Mason’s Yard current location in the West End of London, he initially operated out of a small first-floor space within Christie’s auction house on Duke Street in return for attracting contemporary-art-inclined clients. In 1988 the young British artists, termed YBA by Art Monthly in 1996, had already collected and began to exhibit as recent graduates of Goldsmiths in London. In 1991 the Frieze publication launched promoting their careers and by 1992 the YBA’s were becoming more recognized when White Cube began to show individual artists that included Tracey Emin (1993), his friend and roommate Damien Hirst (1995), as well as other well-known international artists. As the son of Baron Jopling, Chief Whip and Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury for Margaret Thatcher 1979-1983, his father may have offered important connections necessary to sustain the new art market. In 2000, Jopling expanded into a 1920s building in East London’s Hoxton Square and the original White Cube closed two years later. In 2006, a £12m, purpose-built art gallery returned White Cube to St. Jame’s where it has remained since. The contested name “White Cube” is a deliberate reference to Brian O’Doherty’s derisive 70s critique of the insular, religiously-pure aesthetic, and materialist ideology of modern galleries. Playing with both modernist hostility and later notions of direct confrontation, Joplin also embraces the “cube’s” abilities to assimilate bizarre works and provide containment for the fictional artist as self-destructive child. In other words, the white-walled-gallery provides the frame or context that makes frameless art “art”. However, reciprocally, O’Doherty observed that the object’s placement in the gallery “frames” the gallery and its role in “artification”. The flattened,
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purportedly non-illusionistic sanctity of the space, offers judicious distance and intimacy that elevates the status of art and gallery space. From Mason’s Yard, concrete walls occlude views of the exhibition, although windows to the reception desk lined with a few curated books for purchase invite an audience. The entrance level gallery proposes the most public room, though it still excludes the outside world in order to maintain a detached space untouched by time, and thus consecrates the eternal nature of the work for posterity. Below ground, the insulated, unshadowed, artificial environment further promotes the transcendental otherworldliness of the cloistered chamber. Submerged, the tension between wall and object emerges as potentialities become more evident. O’Doherty proclaimed, “Modernism’s classic void ends up stuffed with ideas all ready to jump on the first brushstroke.”1 The wall is not neutral and contributes, like the canvas, to conceptual realizations while the building functions overall to displace the spectator through its own abstraction. On the middle volume of the building that preserves the original rectangular shape of the electricity station, strategic windows puncture the walls for selective light into the two-floor-office space with private gallery. At the top of the striated architecture, similar to Herzog and de Meuron’s Goetz Collection, rests a glass box more analogous to the Boros’ glass penthouse that hovers over their collection in the bunker below. From his sleek London operations base, close in proximity to the Royal Academy of Arts, the structured and rather secretive Jopling establishes alliances with his artists and secures his presence in the art world. With a global market, it was less affected by the economic crisis (though Jopling does not disclose financial information) and White Cube has expanded to include a much larger converted 1970s warehouse in Bermondsey (“the Tate Modern of the for-profit art world”2), which opened in 2011 during the annual Frieze Art Fair. In addition, two overseas galleries in Hong Kong and São Paulo opened in 2012, but with four other locations, the Hoxton Square site closed that same year. As the headquarters, the Mason’s Yard location resonates as a confident minimalist object departing from old London while capitalizing on its storied address.
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O’Doherty 1999: 35-36. Higgins 2011.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY (2006) White Cube, Mason’s Yard. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.rundellas sociates.com/media/uploads/2011/01/2460/white-cube-pdf.pdf (25 February 2015). Bailey, M. (2013) Twenty Years of White Cube, The Art Newspaper. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Twenty-years-of-WhiteCube/29361 (25 February 2015). Higgins, C. (2011) White Cube Art Empire Chalks up a Record for Gallery Space, London: The Guardian. Online. Available HTTP: http://www.theguardian.com/arta nddesign/2011/sep/26/white-cube-empire-record-gallery (27 February 2015). O’Doherty, B. (1999) Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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