Studio and Cube: On The Relationship Between Where Art is Made and Where Art is Displayed

by Brian O'Doherty

When does an artist's creation become art, and where? Does it occur in the solitary confines of an artist's studio or does itrequire the context of an art gallery's white cube? What is the relationship between these two culturally charged spaces? How does the site of art's presentation shape the meaning and determine even the very possibility of its existence? Studio and Cube is author Brian O'Doherty's long-awaited follow-up to his seminal 1976 essays for Artforum , republished in 1999 as Inside the White The Ideology of the Gallery Space . That critically acclaimed volume dissected the abstract, white space of the art gallery, calling it "the archetypal image of twentieth century art." In Studio and Cube he expands his interpretation to include the artist's studio, tracking the relationship between the artwork and the artist from Vermeer through late modernism. O'Doherty reflects on the differing work spaces of Courbet, Matisse, Rothko, Bacon, Warhol, and many others. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of art and the environment in which it is produced. Studio and Cube is the first in the series of FORuM Project Publications produced by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, at Columbia University.

80 pages, Hardcover

Published February 15, 2008

About the author

Brian O'Doherty is an Irish art critic, writer, artist, and academic. He was born at Ballaghaderreen in County Roscommon in 1928, and grew up in Dublin. He studied medicine at University College Dublin, and did post-graduate work at Cambridge University and at the Harvard School of Public Health. He has lived in New York for more than 50 years.