Alternatives to the White Cube
about what a White Cube represents and how to fight against it
The White Cube is not a site, it is not a room, it is not an exhibition space. The White Cube is an ideology. It is a presentation scheme. It is norms of behaviour. The White Cube is an experience, a certain social relationship between artworks, artists, audiences, curators, collectors and cleaning staff materialised in architecture, decoration and aesthetics.
The White Cube can exist on social media, in private homes and even in public spaces. The White Cube does not have to be white, it can be any other color, it can be made of bricks, adobe or glass as long as the internal relationships to the cube are the same: a clean, hygienic, quiet and distraction-free place.
Inside the White Cube there is a distance between the artwork and the audience. Everything is coldly calculated to increase the perceived value of the artworks. Zero distractions. Zero spontaneity. Zero improvisation. The White Cube is the best way to encourage the wealthy public to purchase artworks.
Inside the White Cube, art must speak for itself, it must remain decontextualized from what is happening “outside” the art world. The White Cube makes this easy, since inside the White Cube, wine is drunk and delicious gourmet tapas are eaten.
The White Cube confines and limits the effect art. Inside the White Cube, there is only “art for art’s sake.” Artists who just want to be artists. Curators who don’t want to ruin their reputations. Collectors who want to ensure that their investment is being protected.
The White Cube is thought of as the de-facto, self-evident, and most obvious standard for representing works of art. This standard limits the kind of experience that art can offer and the kind of relationships that the public can have with works of art. That is, the White Cube is the easiest, safest, and most legitimate way to display works of art.
The White Cube offers no danger, no guts, no courage. For O’Doherty, the White Cube exists because the bourgeoisie wants to appeal to the immortality of beauty and to its own bourgeois tastes.
For Paco Barragán, the White Cube is the german-european legacy of minimal Bauhaus apartment designs for the wealthy. This standard later migrated to the MoMA, Guggenheim and TATE.
The White Cube exists as a monument to bourgeois whims and tastes. Within the White Cube these objects will be protected, restored, revitalized and live forever under institutional protection.
Here we explore some experimental alternatives to think about the space and relationship of the exhibition of works of art:
1) Galleries as “Laboratories”
A “gallery” is not only a space to exhibit art, it can also be a study center, a community center, a workshop, a space to play and meet. The gallery can be a moldable and flexible space. Art can complement the space and invite reflection.
A laboratory is a more intimate, participatory and educational space. Art on the walls not only imposes a passive relationship with the audience, but invites participation. The gallery should stop being the premeditated “home” of art. Art can exist in any space, at any time. It does not need incandescent light to focus attention.
A laboratory is modular, flexible and open, it can be shaped to whatever format and it can appeal to a new temporality and experimental. Within the laboratory the participants react against what is actually happening in the world.
2) Public Art
Many artists, disillusioned with the confines of the gallery, moved into public space, not only within cities, but also in wild places. Art can be found in specific sites, among the earth, the ruins, the trees.
Installing works of art in public spaces, on the one hand, establishes that art does not only belong within the confines of the museum, but that public space itself can also be a place of admiration and reflection, not just of transit and consumption of goods.
The danger happens when a public space goes viral, is privatized or is gentrified. This disempowers a space’s popular and comunal power. Art must always flee the tentation of becoming a simple “market-based event”.
3) Abandoning Art
An alternative to the white cube is to reject all its power. This means that a kind of art is produced and imagined that cannot coexist with the White Cubes. These fabulous experiments exist on their own, they cannot be confined or categorized or represented within institutional White Cubes. These works exist not to be exhibited, but to be lived, witnessed, participated in, inhabited. These works are not interested in being seen as “works of art”, rather they exist to trigger sensibilities and to intertwine with spaces and audiences that do not necessarily belong to the art world.
You can abandon the artworld and keep making art. Art does not belong to the artworld. Nothing is stopping us from experimenting and co-live with our community outside of the parameters of a “scene”. We must demolish the white cube in our heads.
4) Everyday Spaces
One way to insult the White Cube is to transport it to inhospitable or unexpected places: a restaurant, a public bathroom, a school, a farm, up a tree, a hole in the street, an apartment, inside a bus, etc. Recognizing that art can exist outside of galleries is to create counter-narratives about the inhabitation of art. When everything can be transformed into a White Cube then the White Cube loses strength and legitimacy.
5) Self-Managed and Community Spaces
The White Cube maintains power relations internal to the people who manage it. There will be curators, collectors, directors, purchasing managers, cleaning staff, students doing internships or artists working for free. The White Cube normalizes all of these relations: relations based on financial inequality, on unpaid work, and on the sexism, racism and classism necessary to maintain the art world.
An alternative is to build art spaces where these power relations of the White Cube are aggressively rejected, either by establishing fair wages, creating a community board of directors, making decisions horizontally, celebrating local art, creating programs for young artists to excel, etc.
Alternative and self-managed spaces can offer a different way of managing art and culture. Let us remember that a scene being aesthetically avant-garde does not mean that the scene is progressive. That is, the underground scene can also reproduce the logic of the White Cube.
The best alternative to the White Cube ideology is a counter-ideology. Countering the White Cube is not necessarily a new way of designing spaces, but rather a way of relating between agents and actors. The Anti-White-Cube means a transparent, fair, participatory, communal, experimental scene that exists to address the most important issues of the present, and not to facilitate the commercial transit of dead and decorative objects.
We must begin to ridicule the lack of creativity that exists in the proposals of White Cubes, there is a whole world to discover. If you are interested in reading more about the origin and function of the white cube, we recommend the work of: Paco Barragán and Brian O’Doherty. Both make a historical review of the origin and legacy of the White Cube.