Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space – Some thoughts and feedback

In this article, Brian O’Doherty refers to the relationship between picture and frame. There are two types of relationship between the frame and the image, absolute border and blurred border.

For this process, the stability of the frame is as necessary as an oxygen tank to a diver. Its limiting security completely defines the experience within. The border as absolute limit is confirmed in easel art up to the 19th century. When it curtails or elides subject matter, it does so in a way that strengthens the edge. The classic package of perspective enclosed by the Beaux-Arts frame makes it possible for pictures to hang like sardines. There is no suggestion that the space within the picture is continuous with the space outside it. —— Brian O’Doherty

These and certain pictures focusing on an indeterminate patch of landscape that often looks like the “wrong” subject introduce the idea of noticing something, of an eye scanning. This temporal quickening makes the frame an equivocal and not an absolute zone. Once you know that a patch of landscape represents a decision to exclude everything around it, you are faintly aware of the space outside the picture. The frame becomes a parenthesis. The separation of paintings along a wall, through a kind of magnetic repulsion, becomes inevitable. And it is accentuated and largely initiated by the new science- or art- devoted to the excision of a subject from its context: photography. —— Brian O’Doherty

Jiachen and I have chosen to use a screen for this work, and the black border of the display is in fact a very clear absolute boundary. But in terms of the pictures themselves, neither my choice of Chinese Song Dynasty landscape nor Jiachen’s choice of French impressionist artist Georges Seurat’s work all not with absolute boundaries. The road, trees and mountains on the left of <Landscape in Four Seasons – Spring> extend leftwards indefinitely, and the trees and lawn in the upper right corner of <Esquisse d’ensemble> extend forward indefinitely. We should choose a way to present this work that softens the edges, such as projector. By projecting the image onto a white wall, the painting and the wall become one, blurring the boundaries and allowing the painting to extend infinitely. As Brian O’Doherty says in his article, Impressionist work is perfect for blurring and stretching boundaries.

Early photography recognized the edge but removed its rhetoric, softened its absolutism and turned it into a zone rather than the strut it later became. But one way or another, the edge as a firm convention locking in the subject had become fragile. Much of this applied to Impressionism. Where a major theme is the edge as umpire of what’s in and what’s out. But this is combined with a far more important force, the beginning of the decisive thrust that eventually altered the idea of the picture, the way it was hung, and ultimately the gallery space: the myth of flatness, which became the powerful logician in painting’s argument for self-definition. The development of a shallow literal space (containing invented forms, as distinct from the old illusory space containing Unreal” forms) put further pressures on the edge. The great inventor here is, of course, Monet. —— Brian O’Doherty

At the beginning when we prepare the equipment we mentioned screen or projector, at the time we thought either screen or projector would be fine. In fact, we should have firmly chosen the projector.