Patrick Ireland, Five Identities, 2002, Photograph on aluminum, Collection of the artist.

Patrick Ireland, White Cube, 1998, Wood, paint, muslin; Installation at Orchard Gallery Derry, Northern Ireland.

Patrick Ireland, Untitled, 1954/1955.

Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland, Sketch after the Wake (of), 1963/1964.

Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland, The Rakes Progress, 1970.

Grey Art Gallery
New York University
100 Washington Square East
212-998-6780
New York
Beyond the White Cube, a Retrospective
of Brian O'Doherty / Patrick Ireland
April 17-July 14, 2007

Brian O’Doherty emerged in the 1960s as one of the most multifaceted figures in the New York art scene. Born in Ireland in 1928 and trained as a physician, O’Doherty moved in 1961 to New York, where he soon garnered attention in the burgeoning conceptual art scene as both an artist and a critic. In his work, he investigates limits of perception, language, serial systems, and identity, seeking to engage viewers’ minds as well as their senses. O’Doherty has also invented a number of personas—most notably Patrick Ireland, the artistic alias he adopted in protest against the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972 and has used ever since.

The exhibition’s title derives from O’Doherty’s renowned critical essay Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, first published in 1976, which argues that galleries’ antiseptic white walls have helped to determine the meaning of modern art as much as the artworks themselves. O’Doherty/Ireland strives to move us beyond this white cube, emphasizing the spectator’s agency in the experience and interpretation of art. He often works in series, realizing themes in various media. In his Chess and Labyrinth pieces, viewers are invited to ponder strategic movements filtered through perceptual experiences. The Ogham series—named for the ancient Irish script in which strokes replace Roman letters—turns words into serial marks, challenging the minimalist aesthetic and interrogating language systems. Finally, in a site-specific Rope Drawing (#111) created especially for the Grey Art Gallery, Ireland produces a “drawing in the air” that deconstructs the exhibition space, inviting us literally into his art.

Identity
Notions of identity are integral to the work of Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland. Renowned not only as an artist but also as a writer and critic, television host, filmmaker, and educator, O’Doherty/Ireland has invoked variously gendered identities in his art. As he has explained, “We are all capable of infinitely more than our single persona allows us to do in a society and culture which defines the limits of the self.” An ongoing self-portrait, The Transformation, Discontinuity, and Degradation of the Image, 1969–present, illustrates how appearance changes as one ages and provides an interesting counterpoint to Portrait of the Artist as a Naked Young Man, 1953, a very early painting O’Doherty made while attending medical school. In 1972, during a performance and in opposition to the events of Bloody Sunday, O’Doherty adopted the artistic alias of Patrick Ireland. Some thirty years later, in Five Identities, he portrayed all of his variously gendered alter egos in a color photograph. In addition to Patrick Ireland (seen in the photograph as artist/activist, his face obscured by a stocking), also present are William Maginn (an early appropriation of the 19th-century Irish poet and wit), Mary Josephson (adopted in 1973, a pen name under which he wrote art commentary for Art in America and Artforum), and Sigmund Bode (adopted in 1950, a fictitious art historian). O’Doherty himself is also pictured, clad in jeans and a leather jacket.

Rope Drawings
With his first “drawings in the air” in 1973, Ireland began deconstructing gallery spaces—an exercise that informed his theoretical treatise Inside the White Cube (1976). For these site-specific installations, he paints walls and stretches cords across the gallery space to establish sightlines and framings. Space is activated, and our perceptions are set in motion, as walls of color appear to shift, advance, and recede. Viewers may experience this firsthand in Ireland’s site-specific Rope Drawing (#111). Also on view are drawings of previous Rope Drawings, showing variations on and inspirations for this work.

Chess
The artist has been fascinated with chess since childhood. Among his numerous works inspired by the game is Bishops Cross, 1966, in which a glass “X,” embodying that piece’s diagonal trajectories, rests on a mirrored game board. Strategic and cerebral, as well as rigorously geometric, works from O’Doherty’s Chess Series share key characteristics with his Labyrinths. Like the mazes, chess boards involve calculated progressions through space. As the artist has stated, “The tangle of moves accumulating invisibly on the board as a game matured fascinated me, and I drew some famous games until they yielded a superimposed labyrinth of tracks.”

Labyrinths
The labyrinth has been an important theme in the artist’s work since 1967, when he first explored it in drawings, sculptures, and installations. Numerous conceptual colleagues, including Robert Morris and Alice Aycock, have likewise used the labyrinth motif, attracted by its associations with ancient mythology and developing its nonfunctional, architectural forms. Whether entered or not, a labyrinth suggests a perceptual experience involving both mind and body. For his work In the Wake (of) … , 1963–64, O’Doherty drew inspiration from James Joyce’s labyrinthine novel Finnegan’s Wake.

Ogham Sculptures
O’Doherty created his Ogham sculptures between 1967 and 1970. In the ancient Irish Ogham script, which translates 20 letters of the Roman alphabet into strokes, he found an ideal serial system, one that allowed him to unite concept, language, and minimalism. Onto vertical sculptures of polished aluminum or Plexiglas, O’Doherty etched three words — ONE, HERE, NOW — in the Ogham script. “ONE obviously had to do with unity, the Absolute. HERE had to do with position, thus with the ghost of composition. NOW collapsed past and future into the present,” he explains. This ancient language also provided the artist with a visual system that he subsequently employed in numerous abstract drawings and paintings.

Portrait of Marcel Duchamp
Erudition and visual play endeared the young O’Doherty to elder luminary Marcel Duchamp, who agreed to pose for a rather unconventional portrait on April 4, 1966. O’Doherty, a former physician, took his friend Duchamp’s electrocardiogram — for which Duchamp thanked him, in his typical punning style, “from the bottom of my heart” — and then transformed this medical information into several portraits, featuring the heartbeat as a recurring motif. By creating this literal representation of vitality, O’Doherty slyly challenged Duchamp’s belief that a work of art dies when it enters the museum. Indeed, although Duchamp passed away two years later, this living portrait survives him.

The Five Senses
The artist’s background as a medical doctor has clearly impacted his work. As a researcher in the Experimental Psychology Labs at Cambridge University in 1957, he designed experiments to test perception and cognition. An early, key watercolor, The Five Senses of the Bishop of Cloyne, 1967–68, integrates the grid and the ancient Irish Ogham alphabet to explore the senses. The title refers to the 18th-century Irish empirical philosopher George Berkeley, who served as the Bishop of Cloyne, and who, as the artist observes, “fused sensation and object with idea.” O’Doherty worked through these ideas in related pieces such as Study for Five Senses: Hearing, 1966, and Hearing Column, 1966, which isolates this specific sense and diagrams its physiological development.

Recent Paintings
Created during the past five years, the four large, six-by-six-foot paintings in the exhibition grow out of the artist’s continuing fascination with the ancient Irish Ogham script. Although these works appear to be pure geometrical abstractions, they were generated and coded using the sequences of strokes that spell out the words ONE, HERE, and NOW. Similarly, the large-scale Rope Drawing installations and wall paintings, with their endless fields of saturated color, likewise inform Ireland’s recent paintings.

Drawings
“You draw to see what you’re thinking,” O’Doherty explained in an early notebook. Indeed, drawing has been a central part of the artist’s creative process throughout his career. In the many drawings based on the abstract lines of the Ogham vowels, which he began in 1967, he examines a range of linear relationships, bringing together seriality, minimalism, and language. Since the mid-1980s, the artist has concentrated on three main series: Open Cubes, Drawings Around the Idea of a Book, and Scroll Drawings. In each series, he investigates different physical structures by breaking them apart, opening them up, and exploring their potential formations.

Aspen 5+6
In 1967 O’Doherty served as guest editor for the May-June issue of the legendary journal Aspen. A compendium of theory and artworks (film, records, texts), Aspen 5+6 has been heralded as one of the earliest conceptual exhibitions—an “exhibition in a box.” Over the course of one year, O’Doherty commissioned the groundbreaking theoretical texts “The Death of the Author,” by Roland Barthes, and “The Aesthetics of Silence,” by Susan Sontag. Also incorporated are original artworks by Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith, Dan Graham, and Mel Bochner, in addition to one of O’Doherty’s own drawings from the Structural Play series. Adding a new sensory dimension to the journal format, O’Doherty included audiotapes (music by John Cage and Morton Feldman, as well as readings by William Burroughs, Naum Gabo, and Marcel Duchamp, among others) and films (works by Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, László Moholy-Nagy, and Hans Richter).

Structural Plays
Structural Plays are linguistic performances that investigate language and location. In the Structural Play drawings on display, O’Doherty composes short sentences in which words are sequentially emphasized, changing the meaning. Investigating subtle shifts in connotation, the artist expresses what he called the “determinism within certain modalities of order.” In the performances, also schematized in the drawings, O’Doherty adds the dimension of location. He divides the performance space into two three-by-three grids, and, taking turns, Performers A and B recite variously stressed sentences, moving in patterns predetermined by the artist. Although B’s actions always echo or mirror A’s steps mechanically, a conversation-like quality emerges between them. Yet this dialogue is never personal; O’Doherty underscores this anonymity by obscuring the performers in body stockings.

Structural Play: Chess and the Vowel Grids are more complex variations. In the former, four performers are involved in a silent, modified chess game (on the same three-by-three-square grid) in which two players prompt moves from two human chess pieces. In the Vowel Grids, O’Doherty employs the formal properties of the ancient Ogham script to create linguistically significant grids. The five vowels in Ogham alphabet order — A, O, U, E, I — are represented by one, two, three, four, and five lengths, respectively. These lengths, which together add up to fifteen, become the foundation for the fifteen-by-fifteen grid structure, in which two performers walk along the grid “reading” the vowels from the color shifts after each sequence of lengths.

Brian O'Doherty at the wake of his alter ego Patrick Ireland on the grounds of the Irish Museum of Art.

Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland, Structural Play: Chess, 1967, Ink on paper, 29 x 23".

Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp: Mounted Cardiogram 4/4/66, 1966, Ink on paper, 11 x 8-½".

Brian O'Doherty/Patrick Ireland.