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How Venice and New Media Art Are Making the White Cube Increasingly Obsolete

Architecture, ambient sound, natural light and even the bodies moving through a show can transform what might otherwise be a simple exhibition of artworks into a site of spatial storytelling.

Every two years, the Venice Biennale stages a series of curatorial exercises in direct dialogue with the city’s heritage, reminding us how much more powerful and successful site- and context-specific projects are than anything mounted in a white cube—not just in their capacity to grab attention but also in their capacity to generate sensorial and imaginative engagement. In biennials, art is not simply a selection of objects staged in a supposedly neutral space, where the curator or the artist articulates a thesis or narrative. Instead, it becomes a form of dynamic storytelling, in which the history and architecture of the place, the context in which it is situated, the spatial flow and sensory characteristics and the objects themselves contribute their own specific qualities to the establishment of a final meaning.

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The white cube is a utopian idealization… a neutral container that is never neutral, since the system of power and the institutional or market authority it embodies attributes a different message and symbolic power to an object that could be perceived differently in another context. Michael Asher alluded to the failure of the white cube with his legendary intervention at Pomona College in 1970, when he altered the gallery architecturally and acoustically, removing the boundaries of that controlled space to open it to the imperfections of exterior light, air and street noise.

In his recent book The Failure of the White Cube, art critic and curator Paco Barragán argues that this modern formalist pandemic has spread across the world over the past century, from MoMA to the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, from the Louvre Abu Dhabi to M and the Dib Bangkok International Contemporary Art Museum, “all adhering bravely and uncritically to the formalist Western bourgeois white cube ideology.”

From his deep historical analysis, we learn how the terminology first originated in the early days of modern German museology around the turn of the 20th Century, when scholars traditionally referred “to die Weiße Wand or white wall, never to the white cube!” It was Brian O'Doherty’s catchphrase that caused a furor after it first appeared in 1976 in the pages of Artforum, in the essays later collected as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.

The cleaned-up format developed progressively, from the Vienna Secession in Austria to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the Bauhaus in Germany, before establishing itself as the dominant standard when Alfred H. Barr Jr. adopted it for the new MoMA. All those projects shared the illusion of representing “the embodiment of the supposed democratic museum,” as Barragán puts it, in a world where access to art has long remained primarily elitist.

Today’s 21st-century white-cube display is still essentially Barr’s model, Barragán argues: white-painted walls without a plinth, or with only a small white wooden plinth; artworks sparsely hung at eye level; sculptures placed on white pedestals; artworks isolated to enhance an exclusively formalist reading; symmetrical displays and works aligned from the middle; artworks lit from above; the presence of technical or explanatory labels; no windows, to bar the outside world; wooden floors; and an absence of benches.

Engaging in this fearless critical deconstruction of the white cube, Barragán exposes how its physical container reduces and reframes non-formalist art as a neutral, sanitized and unproblematic entity.

If the white cube remained largely unchanged and unchallenged until the 1990s, more recently a combination of shifting audience behavior and psychology, as well as the very nature of new-media art, which is becoming more popular and naturally expansive, has been constantly pushing against this “neutral” box, revealing its limitations. As Claire Bishop argued, if painting or sculpture is conventionally encountered from a stable position, installation art presupposes a spectator who enters the work spatially and psychologically, moves through it and experiences it over time. With any installation, vision is no longer isolated from sound, touch, spatial orientation and bodily awareness. The final meaning of the work, and its role in the space, unfolds not only through what is seen but through the conditions under which it becomes visible.

If Rosalind Krauss in the 1970s began to speak of sculpture as an “expanded field” rather than a monument, this can now be extended to the moving image: no longer contained by the cinematic screen or defined solely by filmic or visual duration, many of today’s most powerful works operate between cinema, sculpture, architecture, performance, sound and installation. An exemplary case of how the latest forms of artistic practice require us to think more in terms of choreography and script than traditional exhibition display is offered in Venice by “Canicula,” the latest chapter in a trilogy of site-specific, video-based exhibitions produced and organized by Fondazione In Between Art Film, supported by the Bulgari family, at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto in Venice.

Mounted in the former Venetian hospital complex, the exhibition presents eight new site-specific video installations commissioned from an international group of artists who are redefining the possibilities of moving-image narratives, including major names such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang and Maya Watanabe. Taking its title from the Latin canicula, meaning “dog days,” now used to describe the hottest period of summer, the entire show is a complex orchestration, a contemporary opera unfolding across the architecture, where the works, as much as the use of light, their physical supports and the overall design of the atmosphere and experience, determine the final impression and reading.

The exhibition is conceived as a dramaturgy, notes Leonardo Bigazzi, who co-curated it with Alessandro Rabottini and brings years of experience with video art, having founded and directed Lo schermo dell’arte. The experience begins as soon as one enters the church: taking time is fundamental to how the entire exhibition can be read, and the character of the place, historically associated with contemplation, encourages visitors to lower their voices and slow down.

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