“Inside the white cube we don't speak in a normal voice, one does not laugh, one does not eat, drink, lie down, or sleep, one does not get ill, go mad, sing, dance, or make love... Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is devoted to the technology of aesthetics. Art exists in a kind of eternity. While eyes and minds are welcome, space occupying bodies are not. Emotions are turned into a consumer product” — Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube. This was made as a collaboration with Guy de Lancey and Brian O'Doherty and all three of us share authorship, ownership and a fear of losing touch with reality.
Adam Broomberg and Guy de Lancey collaborated with Brian O’Doherty to create a virtual gallery space in which his words, originally published in 1986, are chilling in their contemporary relevance.
Here, none of the laws that govern our daily lives apply: gravity, morality, bodily, functions, geographic space or chronological time. Like in his original text Brian invites us to consider the architecture of the white cube; and by extension the moral, political and economic codes embedded in the virtual worlds we now increasingly find ourselves living in.
