Outside the White Cube: A Short Essay by an Interested Outsider

by Megan Nicely

In his 1976 essay “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space,” an indictment of the hermetically sealed and supposed blank—even mythic—space of “pure” human art experience, Brian O’Doherty poses problems of deportment as intrinsic to modernism. Under this system, as the artwork itself becomes active in our perceptual field, human senses are called into question, thus rendering our own identity problematic. We are unsure where to stand in order to have meaningful relationships since the Eye stands for both the fragmentation of the self and the illusion of holding it together. Vision’s function is paradoxical.

Choreographer Noémie Lafrance addresses these modernist issues in her new participatory work The White Box. She is interested in how audiences both follow movement in flashmob-like mentality and how they choose to participate by invoking their own individual creativity within a set performance structure. Lafrance wants her audience to be comfortable, feel they can make choices, and thereby create their own experience. However, her motivation seems more based in formal principles than personal psychology. She asks how the performers’ actions might elicit responses that choreograph the audience without their necessarily knowing, and how in turn audiences can then become aware of the greater structures to which they contribute. How are spatial arrangements established or broken? In early iterations of this project, Lafrance told me that performers attempted to address this question by repeating certain movements that caused audiences to relocate to particular areas in the space (or refuse to do so), while other gestures followed with the eyes and accompanying head turns created a pattern in the audience that the dancers then used to incite their own performance.

Vision is a powerful identifier whose rule much participatory performance seeks to disrupt with prompts for unpredictable human encounters. For instance, participatory performance artist Karl Frost, who directs Body Research, works to create environments that invite audiences to explore multiple levels of the self by listening to quieter voices, not merely the most outspoken ones. In his piece Axolotl, audiences are blindfolded for two hours while they navigate multiple spaces—the room, social interactions, sensorial and emotional experiences, and objects. Frost calls a “meaningful experience” one that instructs in ways to live better in the world, where agency is less within the performance than in how what is noticed during the event is then practiced beyond its confines.

There are as many kinds of participatory performance as there are artists, but a salient feature of this genre might be waking people up to their own agency by interacting directly with the human need or desire to shape our own experiences. Variation then lies in how this question is answered. When I spoke with Lafrance regarding The White Box before the opening, she stated she wanted to put both the performers and the work at risk. As a piece that changes composition from week to week based on audience feedback, this work is a study in indeterminate structure. Speaking with her after the first weekend she said, “I’m trying to create a system to limit the reaction to what’s happening, and that creates a pattern.” By creating events that suggest audiences look first left, then right, a rhythm is created and then adopted by the dancers. “I’m making them [the audience] dance without any kind on instruction,” and I want them to “realize that everyone in the room is the art, but without their creative input, nothing is going to change.” In this view, groups transform not when individual desire is followed, but rather when shifts cause systems themselves change, and we then notice what was not apparent before. The cube-as-change may then be better understood as a temporal unfolding rather than a spatial experience, and Lafrance seems to recognize this when she says, “Actually, the show is never finished.”

**thanks for all the blog postings, wish I could be there in person!