In Response to, "What is the Future of the White Cube"
"For me, both the decline of the White Box as an idealized format for the presentation of art and its persisting legacy in contemporary art spaces are phenomena inextricably tied to the history of performance art and its gradual transition from a staunchly avant-garde movement into an institutionally accepted part of the contemporary art milieu.
The earliest evidence of this entangled history can be seen in the antagonistic stance taken to the museum in the Futurist Manifesto ("We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind") and the famous interventions taken by Marcel Duchamp and F.T. Marinetti to disrupt the sanctity of gallery space (Fountain and Black Square, respectively). At this time, the White Box's primary function as a space for the presentation (and/or sale) of 2-dimenional visual art meant that the clean lines and uninterrupted, sterile void that defined it were venerated for their perfect contrast to the soft surfaces and rich, sumptuous colors of its most prized offering: oil paintings. As the various Avant-Garde art movements continued to move away from this material in favor of the use of industrial byproducts, mass production techniques and performative practices, so continued the interrogation of the mausoleum aesthetic of the White Box. If art was taking life, why would it consent to continue residence in a house of the dead?
By the 1960s, as Fluxus and other performative practices began to gain legitimacy in New York's artistic community, an antithetical kind of presentation space began to appear in theater companies often linked to the visual Avant-Garde: The Black Box. While the White Box likely took its inspiration from the void of white canvas, the Black Box sprung from the potency of the idea of creating an Any Place or a space of pure potential. As such, the Black Box contrasted dramatically with the sumptuousness of the traditional proscenium, rigged for rapid adaptations and skeletal representations rather than overwrought or even realistic staging of theatrical settings. It is no coincidence that Antonin Artaud is often cited as a progenitor of this kind of staging, or that art theorists such as Judith Rodenbeck cite Allen Kaprow’s "Happenings" as a leveraging of the Black Box back into the New York Avant-Garde. From a perspective privileging performative art practices, the aesthetic of the Black Box reconfigures a museum or gallery to showcase performance art as effectively as a White Box showcases oil masterworks.
Fast forward to the present and we witness the proliferation of a kind of art space that has not yet been (but should be) called: the Grey Box. It is, again, no coincidence that this fusion of White Box and Black Box aesthetics occurs not long after performance art crosses from an Avant-Garde art movement into a well-recognized and respected subset of the contemporary art milieu. This Grey Box is best defined, not by a single aesthetic, but by the ability to shift seamlessly between the aesthetic needs of both object-oriented and performative artwork. I run one of these spaces, myself, and Smith&Jones regularly transforms itself from show space to performance space to laboratory to workshop and back again. It even moves out of its own borders to adapt to the nomadic needs of New Media and Situationalist-influenced art practices. Born from a lineage of both White Box and Black Box, the Grey Box has evolved to take its inspiration not from the void or raw potential of its respective progenitors, but from a dynamism demanded by the multifaceted kinds of engagement sought out by contemporary art audiences."
READ the entire INTERVIEW by Rebecca Nison at Hopes and Fears