Between the White Cube and the White Box: Brian O’Doherty’s Aspen 5+6, An Early Exposition

Summary

In the autumn of 1967, art critic and artist Brian O’Doherty guest edited a double-edition of Aspen, a magazine in a box published by Roaring Fork Press. One of the most recent issues had been edited by Andy Warhol and David Dalton, the future founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine. Among its flamboyant contents were a flip-book based on Warhol's film Kiss and Jack Smith's film Buzzards Over Bagdad, a ‘ticket book’ with excerpts of papers delivered at the Berkeley conference on LSD, and a flexi-disc with music by John Cale of the Velvet Underground. O’Doherty's double-edition Aspen 5+6 was, in contrast, a minimalist white box (Fig. 1). It contained a thirty-two-page book with three essays, a reel of films, five vinyl phonograph records with music, interviews and readings, eight card boards that could be glued together to form a three-dimensional sculpture and ten items of printed matter, among them drawings, loose texts and scores. Its contributors were artists, critics, writers, dancers and musicians including Sol LeWitt, Susan Sontag, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham and John Cage. As American critic Irving Sandler commented, ‘In retrospect, [Aspen 5+6] summed up the sensibility of that decade and foretold much of what was to influence artists subsequently’ (1996: 35). They were indeed a prophetic combination of ancestors and contemporaries, who would later be recognised as the artistic and theoretical backbone of poststructuralism and Conceptual art. Moreover, prefiguring the first Conceptual art exhibitions of the later 1960s, the box was a canny curatorial intervention.

At the time he edited Aspen, O’Doherty was trying to develop a poststructural artistic language using installation, drawing and performance. On an artistic level, the question motivating his edition of the journal was how to communicate the broader field of interest surrounding and informing his art practice. He wanted to gather together all the artists whose work he had ‘passed through’ – a kind of artistic ancestry – and connect them with the work of his generation. This comes close to the departure point of the contemporary artist doing artistic research, who ‘distinguishes himself from other artists by taking it upon himself to make statements about the production of his work and about his thought processes’ (Wesseling 2011: 3).