The National CollegeArt and Writing
A Labyrinth in a Box: Aspen 5+6
Mary Ruth Walsh
'In retrospect, it [Aspen 5+6] summed up the sensibility of that decade and foretold much of what was to influence artists subsequently.' Irving Sandler
In 1967, Aspen 5+6, a magazine in a box, was edited, or more properly compiled by Brian O'Doherty. Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan had assembled the two previous issues. Aspen 5+6 is the first self-contained, portable conceptual exhibition in a box that dispenses with the gallery. The gallery is the box itself. The only early conceptual exhibition at this time was Mel Bochner's Christmas exhibition at the gallery of the School of Visual Arts, New York. Xeroxed copies of artists' notes and drawings from their sketchbooks were displayed in four identical books presented on four pedestals. In her Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966-1972, Lucy Lippard notes another early conceptual exhibition at this time at Seth Siegalaub's gallery in 1969. She recorded it as 'the first exhibition to exist in catalogue form alone' (Lippard, 1973, p. 79). In the thirty-five years since Aspen 5+6 was published, conceptual art has remained a constant (although unfashionable at times), and its relevance to present-day art practices is striking.
The box and its contents, while it is a work of art itself, question the role of its impresario. Is Brian O'Doherty the author, the curator, or the artist - or all three? His presence is sometimes masked and indirect. The text that introduces the exhibition is from a book called Language as Placement (1928) by one Sigmond Bode. S. Bode, however, is one of O'Doherty's aliases, also used in a poem published in Dublin in 1957. The extract from the fictitious book provides a rationale for the 'exhibition' in a box. 'It should be possible to construe a situation in which persons, things, abstractions, become simple nouns and are thus potentially objectified […] conjugated in such a way that their positions imply "verbs" in the spaces [silences] between them'.1 We are advised that this 'invisible grammar' of the box's contents 'can be read within and between categories'. The box, as we shall see, has six categories or 'movements'. 'To identify such a grammar, to read such a language, [Sigmond Bode forewarns] constitutes a test for the reader'.
What prompted this unusual exhibition was the offer from Phyllis Johnson, the publisher of Aspen, to edit an issue. O'Doherty grasped the opportunity and spent a year assembling what eventually became the historic double issue, 5+6, which O'Doherty called his 'one-man show for that year' (Ireland, 1999, Lecture, Hugh Lane Gallery). Whereas the preceding issues were very flat boxes (1/2 inch thick) in magazine format, O'Doherty's Aspen is a pristine white box measuring 8 by 8 by 2 inches, bisected so that the box when opened forms two identical halves, which the recipient can arrange in several ways - longitudinally, symmetrically, asymmetrically, or vertically as miniature monoliths reminiscent of Tony Smith's (whose work the box also contains). The modules allow the recipient to ad-lib his or her own combinations.
The small scale and simple design of the box is paradoxical in relation to the vast and complex exhibition it contains. The box contains four •mm films, five records, a sculpture model, and printed matter. The printed matter is presented on 8 by 8-inch square sheets and booklets. This arrangement has unmistakable echoes of the grid, which Rosalind Krauss relates closely to the conceptual art of the sixties. The grid can be read in many ways. Patrick Ireland (the identity Brian O'Doherty took for his artwork in 1972 following the Derry massacre) describes the grid in all its contradictions as the
'grandchild of perspective and the Renaissance. It's supposed to be indexical of all that is rational, but I think it's as mad as many logical things turn out to be - artificial, hysterical, subsuming its own version of chaos. It's rigid but flexible, a measure of scale but scaleless, it's flat with imitations of depth, democratic about space but really absolutist, stamped with rigidity but alert with permutational virtuosity. It's a container that contains itself, that is both form and content' (Ireland, Orchard Gallery, 1998, p. 21).
Pulling the conceptual grid of Aspen's contents together forms a quasi-chessboard of 8 by 8 squares, exactly echoing the box's measurements. This analogy may prove helpful in exploring Aspen 5+6, since its conceptual 'moves' are complex and like the black and white colours of chess; its operations are conducted through a dialogue of opposites. The box - if we call it a thinking box, as well we may - presents six 'movements' as categories. They are placed on the contents page in two registers: 'constructivism', 'structuralism', 'conceptualism', 'tradition of paradoxical thinking' (presumably referring to Dada), 'objects' and 'between categories'. The latter is a title the composer Morton Feldman - also an inhabitant of the box - immediately borrowed for one of his compositions (Ireland, Elvehjem Museum, 1993, p. 39). Below, these are refined into three 'themes': 'time [in art and "history"]', 'silence and reduction' and 'language'. These three may be used as tools to decipher the hidden language of the box, the contents of which, as O'Doherty puts it, are 'disposed […] according to several layers of a conceptual framework, using historical documents/ artworks [ancestors] and contemporary documents/artworks to create a field from which several readings can be made' (Ireland, Elvehjem Museum, 1993, p. 31).
The repeated references to language point to the dedication of the box to Stephane Mallarmé, which may well set a certain tone for the reading of Aspen 5+6. Mallarmé (if we call him a 'noun' after Sigmond Bode) occupies a space between arbitrary chance and imposition of numerical order. Simultaneously he deals with words and white spaces surrounding them. In exploring words and space, Mallarmé represents a shift in the conception of the poem from purely an arrangement of words to the blank spaces - silences - between. His use of gaps, blanks, silences, forms a rhythmic movement not unlike a musical composition. 'The intellectual framework of the poem conceals itself but is present - is located - in the space that separates the stanzas and in the white of the paper; a significant silence, no less beautiful to compose than the lines themselves' (Kern, 1983, p. 173). At a reading by Mallarmé of his own work, Paul Valéry was present and heard 'embodied silences, whispers and insinuations made visible [, and saw] a new language that seemed to shine out of the paper like stars' (Kern, 1983, p. 174). The five records in Aspen 5+6 provide a theatre of readings (from Robbe-Grillet and Beckett to Burroughs and Duchamp). They offer what Roland Barthes called 'the grain of the voice'. And considering the strategies employed in Aspen 5+6, the election of Mallarmé as an 'ancestor' seems inevitable.
While Mallarmé suppresses the author for the sake of the writing, Roland Barthes went much further in his immensely influential essay for Aspen 5+6, The Death of the Author. Indeed the thirty-two-page pamphlet of essays commissioned by O'Doherty from Barthes, Kubler and Sontag are in exact symmetry with the box's three themes - language, time and silence. Barthes' contribution is a key work within the context of the box. In his essay he does away with the myth of the author's autonomy and reinstates the status of the reader:
'Once the Author is gone, the claim to "decipher" a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author [or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom] beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is "explained", the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that, historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic […] in a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, "threaded" [like a stocking that has run] in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated' (Aspen 5+6 Section 3).
Barthes' notion of the work's reception rhymes in several ways with other components of Aspen 5+6, particularly with Duchamp's emphasis on the viewer who completes the artwork in his The Creative Act (1957), and Feldman's listener who occupies what the composer called 'a plane of attention' (O'Doherty, 1974, p. 225) in such a work as his The King of Denmark. This was especially recorded for Aspen 5+6 Barthes, whose spatial metaphors for reading are invigorating, projects a text into dimensions where the reading will be as varied as the reader's immediate experience. 'There is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now' - two of the three words, it will be remembered, Patrick Ireland translated into ogham, and to which he devoted some thirty years of drawings and paintings. Other commentators (Ashton in 1968 and Alberro in 2001) who have sought to track the analogue runs and cross-references with which Aspen 5+6 abounds, have found helpful Barthes' comment that 'everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered ' and the image of the 'stocking that has run'.
Among the books that were read in 1967 by artists and art historians - and by O'Doherty and his friends (Ireland, 1999, Lecture) - was George Kubler's The Shape of Time (1962), in which Kubler argues (convincingly) the need to see art and its changes in terms of very long duration, thereby undercutting the formal art history then still current, with its lists, schools, and styles. 'Many have thought that to make the inventory would lead towards such an enlarged understanding' (Harrison, 1992, p. 736). Kubler challenged not only the method of classification but also the language itself:
'Schools and styles are the products of the long stocktaking of the nineteenthcentury historians of art. This stocktaking, however, cannot go on endlessly; in theory it comes to an end with irreproachable and irrefutable lists and tables. In practice certain words, when they are abused by too common use, suffer in their meaning as if with cancer or inflation' (Kubler in Harrison, 1992, p. 736).
The inventory highlights our focus and adherence to the object; 'Like crustaceans we depend for survival upon an outer skeleton, upon a shell of historic cities and houses filled with things belonging to definable portions of the past... The oldest things made by men are stone tools. A continuous series runs from them to the things of today'(Harrison, 1992, p. 736).Kubler's observation of series - an important early conceptual idea - stretches across time, frustrating a linear historical reading.
The essay O'Doherty commissioned from Kubler for Aspen 5+6, Style and the Representation of Historical Time, is dense, sometimes to the point of obscurity. This prompted O'Doherty to 'box' each paragraph to concentrate the reader's attention. Thirty years later however, the essay is the 'sleeper' among Aspen 5+6's many riches. Its wit and humour are signalled in a cautionary epigraph:
'Humans surely are not unique in their capacity for identifying different events as being recurrent. Other animals also project their organic needs under the same guise of identity among successive stimuli. G.A. Brecher showed in •••• that the snails read space into succession. As an art historian, I am overly familiar with the notion of style, which is another way of imposing space upon time and of denying duration under the illusion that successive events are similar events. To spatialize time is a faculty shared both by snails and by historians' (Aspen 5+6, Section 3).
Kubler's text, in three distinct parts, returns again and again to the notion of duration and repetition, and the relation between repetition and change. 'Actions repeated undergo change [and ...] To suppose identical actions by the same agent, we must admit the idea that time is reversible, which is contrary to experience'. He continues:
Since place and agent differ for successive actions, however similar they seem, the actions themselves are necessarily different. The one quality of time never noted, is its absolute power to erode and erase identities between actions. These identities are created only by the abstracting mind, engaged in making time tangible by arresting it (Aspen 5+6, Section 3).
The third in this remarkable trinity of essays, also commissioned by O'Doherty, is Susan Sontag's The Aesthetics of Silence. She articulates, unavoidably using language, which she describes as 'something shared and something corrupted' (Aspen 5+6, Section 3), the idea of reduction and the silence, the zero that lies beyond language. She parses the variety and valences of silence: satisfied silence, silence as renunciation, superior silence, provoking silence, punishing silence, permanent silence, loaded silence (with aggression or comfort), metaphoric silence, but goes far beyond such taxonomy, quoting two of her colleagues 'in the box': John Cage ('there is no such thing as silence'), who points out that in a soundless chamber he still hears his heartbeat and the coursing of the blood in his head; and Beckett, whose entropic desire is for an art consisting of 'the expression that there is nothing to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express' (Aspen 5+6, Section 3). From where, Sontag asks, does this obligation derive? 'The very aesthetics of the death wish seem to make of that wish something incorrigibly lively' (Aspen 5+6, Section 3).
The artist creating silence, she suggests, inevitably produces something dialectical and she postulates 'a full void, an enriching emptiness'. Closely aligning her idea of silence and perception, she 'sketches out new prescriptions for looking, hearing etc. - specifically, either for having a more immediate, sensuous experience of art or for confronting the art work in a more conscious, conceptual way.' Sontag senses an urgency and spiritual restlessness in art that 'through its advocacy of silence, reduction, etc. […] art commits an act of violence upon itself, turning art into a species of auto-manipulation, of conjuring - trying to help bring new ways of thinking to birth'. 'As the prestige of language falls, that of silence rises' (Aspen 5+6, Section 3). The revolt against language is a search for a revision or a new language and Sontag cites the (mainly French) examples of Mallarmé, Alain Robbe-Grillet, William Burroughs, Beckett and Duchamp, all of whom, in one medium or another, share with her the space of the white box.
Sontag's rich discourse, which continually tests the ideas it generates, is of course conducted in the medium of her inquiry, language itself. The self-consciousness that this necessarily invokes (as words mirror and obscure themselves in the labyrinths of past usage) becomes one of the most stirring parts of her inquiry. '[…] speech, [she says,] provokes further speech. But speech can silence too'. A circular progression through silence and language can be identified with arresting time, inducing varieties of awareness, of consciousness - and self-consciousness. She then meditates on historical time: 'In a little more than two centuries, the consciousness of history has transformed itself from a liberation, an opening of doors, blessed enlightenment, into an almost insupportable burden of self-consciousness' (Aspen 5+6, Section 3). An excess of self-consciousness can lead to impotence and silence. Most frequently, Sontag views these matters from the perspective of the artist whose
'art thus transmits in full the alienation produced by historical consciousness. Whatever the artist does is in [usually conscious] alignment with something else already done producing a compulsion to continually re-check his situation, his own stance with those of his predecessors and contemporaries. Compensating for this ignominious enslavement to history, the artist dreams of a wholly ahistorical and therefore unalienated art' (Aspen 5+6, Section 3).
Do the three texts elucidate the art proffered in Aspen 5+6, or does the art illustrate the texts? The relationship is, of course, as with many other dialogues in the box, reciprocal. The artworks and commentaries included in Aspen 5+6 exhibit distinct polarities. O'Doherty has frequently spoken of the dialectical spine on which he hung movements and themes, an armature of opposites that can be summarised as excess and reduction. These opposites run through the box's many media and art forms: the novel (Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet); music (Cage and Feldman); film (Richter/Morris and Moholy-Nagy/Rauschenberg); poetry (Butor and Graham). The box's cross-references prompt numerous other readings: What relationship does Burroughs' collageing in Nova Express have to Rauschenberg's practice? Does the theory of dance advanced by Cunningham have anything in common with the text and motion of O'Doherty's structural play? And to what degree does the psychological identity of opposites dissolve the polarities set up within the box, which ultimately become a shifting mindscape of contingent relationships? To take one example: why, we may ask, are Hans Richter's Rhythm 21 (1921) and Robert Morris' performance, Site (recorded in 1964 by the avant-garde filmmaker, Stan Van der Beek) on the same 8mm reel?
Richter's Rhythm 21 resulted from an intense period of experimentation in which he and his colleague, Viking Eggeling, wished to add the dimensions of time to painting by using film. Richter, whose career negotiated between Dada and purist geometry, took as a model the structure of Bach's fugues, a fugue being a piece of music in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and taken up and developed by others. This can be experienced in Rhythm 21 in terms of the screen, which is always a space of time. Richter described his temporal interests as 'the fast, the slow, the backwards, the forwards - in space - so I eliminated completely all forms. I used the simple projection screen, the movie screen, pressed it together, extended it again, horizontally, diagonally, and so forth' (Gray, 1971, p. 131). O'Doherty commented on 'the complete control of syntax, the exact coincidence of intent, means and results […] The repertory of movements are simply Richter's linguistics of movement actually realised' (O'Doherty, 1968, Hans Richter, unpaginated). Richter's serial occlusions of the screen, the growth and reduction of vertical/ horizontal rectangles and bars, the fiction of depth so ingeniously indicated, put a space in motion that describes time.
In Morris' Site, the artist, wearing a mask of his own features to distance himself from the work at hand, manipulates a series of 8 by 4 plywood rectangles which partially, sometimes fully eclipse the screen in a series of vertical and horizontal movements. In removing one rectangle he reveals a woman (Carolee Schneeman) posed as Manet's Olympia, a surprise that might be related to the brief appearance of two oblique bars in Richter's strict horizontal/vertical universe. Morris skilfully rotates the large board, turning it over his back 180 degrees, stands it edgeways, and lets it fall. finally, he returns to his posed Olympia, covers her with another board. The dialogue of occlusion and revelation, of rectangle and edge is in its formal effect unmistakably similar to Richter's Rhythm 21, which also struck Morris when O'Doherty showed him the Richter film. Yet each work came from an entirely different psychology and culture. As filmed, Morris' work 'speaks' to the Richter in its occlusions and elisions of the screen. Its Manet quotation may well rhythm with the spirit of some of Richter's Dada activities. The form of Morris' work also includes its slow, mildly ritualistic pulse. Each of the two works provide the other with an asymmetrical mirror, reflecting coincidences and overlaps as well as startling differences that asks questions about the context out of which the two works came. Does Richter's work answer to Duchamp's comments on the spectator in The Creative Act; to Gabo and Pevsner's manifesto ('space and time are reborn to us today' Aspen 5+6, Section 4)? O'Doherty, one can assume from his choices - what he called his 'election of ancestors' (Ireland, Lecture, 1999) - was concerned to establish a paternity of ideas that would build a bridge between European and American avant-gardes. Who were to be the children of such ancestors?
O'Doherty's answer lies in his selection of his immediate colleagues, most of them at that time (1967) not widely known. Morris's film can be said to relate to O'Doherty's Structural Play (both, by the way, are examples of the very few performance works in the vicinity of minimalism). Morris' Site can be used to illustrate one aspect of the LeWitt and Bochner contributions. The time in the Morris is real time. Both LeWitt and Bochner construct time through building (Bochner's Seven Translucent Tiers) and through exhaustive permutations (LeWitt's Serial Project 1). To these pioneering and influential ventures, Graham's 'poem' adds an appropriate linguistic coda.
The ingenuity of the box is such that to fasten or isolate one artwork or project is to rearrange the system of relationships within its components. Perspectives shift, analogies touch, chimeras appear and disappear. The dense, provocative networks of overlaid systems in the box are so rich and complex that they are self-supporting. A quotation from one of O'Doherty's notebooks (La Jolla Museum, 1977) goes 'To look in the mirror and see no reflection'. O'Doherty, as if on cue from Barthes' essay The Death of the Author, seems finally to absent himself from his own creation. Derrida might be speaking of the spaces within the box when he says:
'Let us space. The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chaining are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutinating rather than by demonstrating, by coupling and uncoupling, gluing and ungluing rather than by exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric' (Kamuf, 1991, p. 1).
The release from discursive rhetoric enables the work to open into a medley of views, using the conceptual tools of time, silence and language. The breadth and richness of material from these multi-perspectives created in Aspen 5+6 opens up the notion of art history. Furthermore, philosophical ideas, as expressed through language, form some of the more profound aspects obliquely referred to in Aspen. These issues transgress the internal and external labyrinth. The theoretical alchemy within this box creates a shifting matrix that cannot be delineated, labelled or 'boxed-in,' and the work remains constantly open.
Regrouping all those who are present in Aspen 5+6 into the 'movements', as outlined in O'Doherty's contents, produces another set of opposites, ahistorical time via the 'themes' and historical time via the 'movements'. Both views of history are valid, even when viewed from these opposite perspectives. The dialectic in Aspen 5+6 is the medium in which time, silence and language are suspended. These three 'themes' have been the main concerns of twentieth century art practices and continue to be vital in the twenty-first century. A view through the ahistorical 'themes' has the effect of melting chronological links and it perhaps comes closer to the artists' intentions than pinpointing stylistic similarities. This new multiple perspective frees the spectator from a single linear, historical reading and opens the past and future into a kaleidoscope of ideas.
1 Within Aspen 5+6, none of the texts are paginated. Further references are therefore superfluous. Only the box's sections are given when appropriate.
Bibliography
ALBERRO, Alex, 'Inside the White Box', Artforum, September 2001, pp. 170-174.
ASHTON, Dore, 'New York Commentary: The Book: Aspen Magazine; William Copey's S.M.S.', Studio International Journal of Modern Art, May 1968, pp. 272, 273.
BURROUGHS, Williams, Nova Express, New York: Grove Press, 1964.
BUTLER INSTITUTE of AMERICAN ART, Patrick Ireland: Gestures Instead of an Autobiography, Ohio, 1994.
ELVEHJEM MUSEUM of ART, Patrick Ireland: Labyrinths, Language, Pyramids and Related Acts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993.
GRAY, Cleve, (ed.), Hans Richter, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
HARRISON, Charles and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory: 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.
KAMUF, Peggy (ed.), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.
KERN, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.
KRAUSS, Rosalind, E., The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1985.
KUBLER, George, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, London: Yale University Press, 1962.
LA JOLLA MUSEUM of CONTEMPORARY ART, Patrick Ireland: Rope Drawings, January 28th - March 20th 1977
LIPPARD, Lucy, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966-1972, New York: Praeger, 1973.
O'DOHERTY, Brian, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth in Modern Art, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1974.
O'DOHERTY, Brian, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San Francisco: The Lapis Press, 1986.
ORCHARD GALLERY, Patrick Ireland: Language Performed / Matters of Identity, Derry, 1986. Text by Patrick Ireland.
SIRIUS PROJECT, Patrick Ireland: One, Here, Now, The Ogham Cycle, Cobh, Co. Cork, 1996. Text by Alexander Alberro and Peter Murray.
Interviews / Lectures
IRELAND, Patrick, Lecture, Hugh Lane Gallery, Irish Art Historians first annual lecture, 19th March 1999. Organised by Brenda Moore McCann.
IRELAND, Patrick, Interview, Gorey, Co. Wexford, 10th September 2000.
