ESSAY: Unboxing the White Cube

Despite the critiques of art world elitism, the absence of galleries during the pandemic has made Sarah Swan's heart grow fonder.

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Perhaps as a way to cope, I’m keeping a pandemic list. I’ve titled it Things We’ve Lost, adding to it whenever I hear something unique. In the New York Times, for instance, Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest in Texas, writes beautifully about the sacrament of communion: “I miss seeing hands after hands cupped open to receive.” 

One of my friends yearns to flirt at house parties. For another, it’s swimming. A neighbour tells me she wants to engage in “the free, unselfconscious groping of fruit” at the grocery store. I miss galleries. Real ones. A scene has been replaying in my mind, over and over, since Canadian galleries started in March to close temporarily: light switches flip off, white room after white room goes dark, rows of famous paintings fade to black.

Some galleries, including the Winnipeg Art Gallery, are starting up again, albeit controversially. Crowds, even carefully managed, make many people nervous. As I write, the Lehmann Maupin gallery in Seoul is filling with ultra-wealthy masked visitors. The art world has been shaken, and it’s not yet clear which excesses might remain. But, if nothing else, the closures have provided an opportunity to reflect on the gallery itself – the floors, the walls, the ceilings, and on what, exactly, was lost when the doors were locked and everything moved, ever so swiftly, online. 

Before the pandemic, my interest was focused on the ways many institutions, especially in Canada, are reimagining aesthetics in the name of decolonization. Like many others, I’d become convinced that the crisp, white walls, formidable foyers and cold sterility of blue-chip galleries was a Western construct with roots in elitism, even racism.

To support this view I read, and reread, Inside the White Cube by American critic Brian O’Doherty. His collection of essays, published originally by Artforum in 1976, examines what the context of the modernist gallery does to the art object and to the viewer. “Never,” argues O’Doherty, “was a space designed to accommodate the prejudices and enhance the self-image of the upper-middle class, so efficiently codified.” The gallery, he continues, is designed to suggest “eternal ratification of a certain sensibility, but only for the caste or group that shares that sensibility.” 

But with the onset of the pandemic, my objections to gallery aesthetics have been eclipsed. Simply because I cannot, I long to visit a gallery – a sprawling one with polished floors, glowing white walls and room after room of knock-out Rothkos and Motherwells. That desire, totally at odds with my aesthetic position, is raw and persistent – a little ache throbs anew every time I pay a half-hearted visit to a virtual exhibition or online viewing room. Clearly, I took galleries for granted.

I live in Yellowknife, a small city that feels like a large town. There is no white-walled gallery to speak of. In the Northwest Territories, the art world proper doesn’t really exist. Here, fine Indigenous crafts like beading and moose-hair tufting are displayed in gift shops or on foldout tables at craft sales. Our best commercial gallery resembles a cabin. It’s called the Down to Earth Gallery, and as the name suggests, you don’t need  a pricey high-falutin’ MFA to feel at home inside.

Though there is real artistic talent here, bad paintings of the Northern Lights abound. I laugh though, whenever I visit the Big River Gas Station, near the small Dene community of Fort Providence. Big River displays local art next to tables of greasy-lipped folks chowing down on fried chicken. As my eyes shift between expert carvings and slices of pizza congealing under heat lamps, I realize this gas station, amidst its perpetual swirl of horseflies, is, at least philosophically, close to a decolonized gallery. There is no socio-economic threshold to cross. It is warm, communal. Regional languages are spoken, young children are welcome, non-canonized media are the norm. The sophisticated patterns, for example, in the porcupine quillwork of Fort Providence artist Lucy Squirrel are legendary in the Territory. I have learned, since moving here several years ago, to retrain my eye, to value and celebrate creativity even when it’s not haloed with the white cube’s aura of status and importance. Art belongs to everyone, after all, not just the Western art world. 

Yet amidst the pandemic’s restrictions, I miss the art world and its shared sensibility, elitist or not. Art history needs to be rewritten. We all know this. But now I miss the cadence of that oft-told story, its echoes of the cadences of Old Testament lineages, organized sequentially in well-lit rooms – Impressionism begets Fauvism, Fauvism begets Cubism. Conceptualism and Minimalism beget Postmodernism. Is it okay to love those rooms, despite all the artists they’ve failed to remember? 

Truth be told, I haven’t been to a big, white-cube gallery since 2015, when my husband and I visited New York. We spent entire days inside MoMA, the Met, the Brooklyn Museum.  I find myself contrasting that rich experience with the thin parody that is art during this pandemic: art mediated by digital technology.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve watched as paintings and sculptures flattened, shrinking to fit the confines of my tablet or phone. Tones and textures are diminished, and the finest subtleties – ink filling the tooth of the paper, say, or whispery brushwork – erased. 

“Art,” says American critic Jerry Saltz, “isn’t just a static thing to be looked at but an object that does things.” Those things, those emanations and force fields, feel terribly weakened now by the tyranny of the screen. Even Instagram, which has democratized the art world, exposing us to artists we would never hear of otherwise, is ultimately a mere titillation – a hint of the pleasure we might take from seeing that art in person. If you’ve only viewed a painting on a screen, you have not seen it. 

I’ll never forget that that trip to New York. My spine tingled. My mind sparked. When I finally came to the room of Cy Twomblys, tremors of joy! Here were the soaring scribbles I’d been waiting to see, the loosest of loops, dangling like beautifully deranged handwriting. And the Agnes Martins! I don’t remember which particular untitled grid brought me to my knees. But that painting made me want to weep. And I would have, but for the shame of crying in public. Was it possible, when gazing at those intersecting lines, that my spirit met hers? Later, I read Nancy Princenthal’s 2015 biography of Martin, looking for words to frame my experience. I found them. “Martin had the vision to try and make a map of the proportions of the undistracted mind,” Princenthal writes. I had wanted to weep because in the clutter, stress and tension of my own mind, Martin gave me a clearing, a place to rest. 

In his White Cube essays, O’Doherty describes a time when paintings were hung edge to edge. Paintings were windows then. They offered deep views into vistas, worlds. But when art went abstract, they offered only surface, radiating outward. Austere, well-spaced presentation on a neutral wall became necessary for, well, traffic control. 

In galleries, as in the most austere of churches, O’Doherty writes, we do not speak in a normal voice. Galleries are ritual spaces. We do not bellow or sing, fall asleep, brush our teeth or make love. Nor do we eat fried chicken or gas up the truck. In galleries, we are not bodies living real life. White cubes promote the myth, he says, that we are primarily spiritual beings with the eye as the centre of the soul. Maybe so. But in these days of pandemic restrictions, I want to leave the house. I want to leave the clutter of daily life, for a higher, cleaner, contemplative place. Scrolling through images on the Internet from the confines of a messy, noisy living room, feels increasingly wrong. When will borders open? How soon can I fly to New York? I concede O’Doherty’s points. But I’m a convert. I believe. I need that white-cube myth to be true. ■ 

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