> 30 de noviembre de 2009, 17h, Auditorio MACBA, Barcelona

Bartomeu Marí: We are very, very happy, to be able to welcome you at Macba today, and welcome, precisely, an artist who is the author of one of the books that I consider to be most influential for the comprehension of that complex and large body of events, facts, objects and beliefs that we call contemporary art. There is very few of these books that we can read… that we can point as deeply influential in shaping ideas and intentions within what we do and mostly happy that it is precisely the work of an artist, that joins the literature that we consider significant. Probably the most, or best known work by Brian O’Doherty is what took the shape of this book and was originally a series of three articles published in Artforum in 1976, if I’m not wrong, and that later on in the… I think this is in the 80’s, was published in the form of this book that travelled around the world that is beginning to be, or it’s not beginning, it’s already translated into a number, a large number of languages, the last edition was, excuse me, was the French edition that brought together as well the translation of this second book related precisely to continuation somehow of inside the white_cube, the Ideology of the Gallery Space. The work of Brian O’Doherty as an artist also known as Patrick Ireland, has been the object of retrospective recently in New York and in Dublin, the city from which Brian O’Doherty also known as Patrick Ireland for a period of time is original. The conversation probably should start with a very simple question: where did the idea of inside the white cube come from?

Brian O’Doherty: Before I answer that may I talk about the two exhibitions you have upstairs?

M: Please.

B: I’m absolutely thrilled at the John Cage’s exhibition, is the best John Cage’s exhibition I’ve ever seen. You could spend days up at it, and it’s beautifully curated, beautifully presented, and it’s very good for my wife, Barbara Novak, who’s sitting there keeping an eye on me that we see it here in Barcelona. I have a little comment about the other exhibition of Ray Johnson, because one of my alias’ is the woman Mary Josephson; she reviewed an exhibition of Ray Johnson and it was very complimentary to talk about, I think for one of the first times the community that he made in New York through his correspondence school; you are always getting things from Ray Johnson… rabbits, etc. So then he wanted to meet Mary Josephson and he said “I must meet this woman who has written so nicely about me”. So I had a problem, so I wasn’t going to dress up in a skirt, so I said no, she only writes for me, she’s very retiring and she’s very shy, and a bit difficult to meet her, but she thinks you are wonderful. As to where it came from, the idea for the white_cube, came very naturally from clambering around galleries and attaching from my installation, as attaching, making attachments on the ceiling, going into the corners where the sights of such turbulence, special turbulence and corners on the floor. So I said to myself: what is this white box that I am in? So that caught me thinking, and then I remembered some exhibitions that you would go to, this is now the 60’s in New York, and you would see things in the gallery that if you took them outside the gallery they would no longer look like art. So there for the gallery there was a transformer, an aesthetic engine that transformed what was in it. And as an example of that I remember a John Chamberlain sculpture, and it was taken in transit as if was going somewhere else’s… going to another gallery, from one to another. So the sculpture was in the street outside, and then the garbage people came along, and they thought it was garbage, and they took it and dumped it, you see. So outside the gallery, outside this magic transformer, things are different, so then I began to think of the context of ideas implicit in a gallery. And that was the beginning of the series of essays, of whatever you call them. And why did I call it white_cube? Because if I’d said White Box is not very interesting, it doesn’t give an interesting idea, so I thought of something dense that could be penetrated by a thought, a white_cube, so everybody has accepted this phrase, the white cube, even though it’s never a cube. So such is the power of the slogan, a label.

M: Indeed. And in the description of the characteristics of The white_cube, you speak… you write that the gallery space separates the artwork from life, from the world, from the outside, that creates a different, a totally different environment for that art to exist. But what happened to the artists of your generation, of the artists with whom you shared time that precisely escaped completely the gallery space, not completely, however, but escaped the gallery space and went into nature, into landscape, to locate their work? Was that part also of the, let’s call it criticism that was already produced on that white_cube that was isolating the artwork from real life?

B: I think there has been a consistent theme since the 60’s, how do you escape the white_cube? How do you escape the gallery? How do we get away from it? Smithson did that and we see his Spiral Jetty film upstairs and it’s great to see it, and Heizer, Michael Heizer went out, Morris was always threatening to do something outside, did a few things outside, one of them in that city Grand Rapids in Michigan, the Crossed Pathways. So there was a time when the pressure on the white_cube from the inside became so intense that something had to give, so you have to this day it seems to me, would you agree to that? You have the pressure from the outside and the pressure from the inside to escape. The pressure from the outside is also social, let me say this, I think that I found working in the gallery that I tried always to have a wide review of things because art worlds are generally very narrow, they are like monasteries, they’re like the church, they’re like places with limits and various institutions, whether is the church or a bank or financial world, they like to have limits although you see no limits in the United States recently in the banking industry. But I like always to have wider, wider possibilities to do way with the limits and go beyond them. Now, I forget how I started on this…

M: It was a question on the pressure on the outside. Yes, yes.

B: The pressure on the outside and the inside, yes, because working in it I was aware that I have a partner, and the partner is the curator, and the curator has the director, and the director has the trustees, do you have trustees?

M: We do.

B: Trustees, I’m very much against trustees, they’re bringing the financial world, they’re bringing a different kind of reality, and then you have the city that you are in, and then you have the social context, the economic context, so there is an expanding sense I always had that on working in that gallery I’m in a situation where there are different pressures all the way up: the director, I have to deal with the curator, the curator has to deal with me, usually that’s very amiable, I have a very amiable curator here, Christina Kennedy. But then the director has to deal with the trustees, there are pressures. Everywhere there is a pressure to conform, a pressure to break out, what is possible, what is not possible; then the trustees have to defend the museum in the larger world, and the larger world then has its feedback and counter pressure against the museum, so it seems to me that is enacted within the museum pressures, within the white_cube, to get out, artists want to get out and there is a whole pressure to keep them in. So in the 60’s that pressure became such a huge point out, that you had Smithson and Heizer, and Morris, and various others getting out, and they did get out. But I was talking to the French Hubert Damisch, and I was… somewhere rather the white_cube has to give way to something else, I don’t know what it is, but it has to give way to something else. And Katherine David did a Documenta trying to… she said: I want to destroy the white_cube; didn’t quite succeed. But Hubert Damisch said to me: you know, when you are saying this that you want to destroy the white_cube at the same time remember that it is done a great deal so much as has been made possible by the white_cube. So there is this very, it is its walls are saturated with ambiguity, it is good, it is… there are advantages and everything, there are advantages and disadvantages, but the white cube into my mind trembles between so many different ambiguities which a museum director, as a museum director you are in charge of separating out this ambiguities.

M: We are great ambiguity keepers (laughs).

B: We are great ambiguity providers.

M: Yes, absolutely. I began by mentioning the numerous translations of the book, or the books of Brian O’Doherty in which we miss a Spanish and a Catalan edition. We learnt recently that the publication of the book in Spanish is on its way, it’s being translated at this moment, but it has not yet, it does not exist yet in our literary landscape. And in one way would you accept that your book constitutes a very deep or deeply argumented (sic) portrait of that big machine we call the system of art as we get to know it at the second half of the twentieth century? Because as you said the white_cube has been tremendously successful, it’s been… it’s the dominant type of space that most museums even the architectural fantasies like Guggenheim, still is based on the mechanism that you described in such detail in your book.

B: I think that was born home very sharply to me because if the white_cube back then did anything it made the system transparent; people were not aware of the museum, of the gallery as the containing space they just worked within it, it was accepted as such by most artists although there is in Modernism a sort of counter white_cube from the beginning. But it, I, again speaking of trying to see things broadly and mostly artists, I think, limit themselves to their own trade, it often resolves in the exclusion of artists from the social discourse. Now, I don’t mean social discourse in terms of the art, ‘cause art for that is not very profitable, but the social discourse in terms of being a citizen, the artist is also a citizen and I’m very conscious of that. So as a citizen you have a voice, and you have a voice more than you have as an artist in many ways, and those who are so devoted to various political gestures they are not very effective if they are limited to the art itself. It is not, you would end up preaching to the choir, but I think that the white_cube because the response shocked me, it was a huge wave of response and I said: what is this? It surprised me completely. And so therefore it struck a nerve, and when you strike a nerve it’s interesting, several people came up to me and said: I was just about to write that (laughs). And then you know you struck a nerve, but I was, and still am very concerned about the machine within which we artists live, and there’s not a machine I’m happy with for the most part because it is driven in large part by comers, and Lucy Lippard once adapted Emerson and said: Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, and things have a price, and we are all at this stage of our existence, in terms of post-modernism, etc., we are aware of the fetishisation (sic) of art, we are aware of the corruption of money, I deeply believe that the art world is if not in decadence it’s always, it is always threatened by decadence because money produces decadence in my view, I like to have it but it still produces what I think is decadence. I was concerned to see the whole system, to see the dealer, you need the dealer, an artist needs the dealer to be seen, otherwise he or she is silent, you need a writer to write about it, you need a gallery to show it, you need as I say the critic, and you need the museum where it can lie in state; but I will by the way I should add that the white_cube in 1976 should have appeared much earlier, because I wrote it and get a few lectures on it, may I go ahead on this?

M: Sure, sure, please, please.

B: And I said it into John, into John Coplans’ who also by the way wanted to meet Mary Josephson; and I should tell that little story ‘cause I wrote something, I was in editor in America, I’ve done many, many things in my life, I was in editor in America for three years until I got the money to buy our apartment, and so I had Mary Josephson write about Warhol, and John Coplans was very taken with this ‘cause he was mentioned in the complimentary way, even though he was the editor of Artforum, which was the opposition, you see? “I must, I must meet Mary Josephson, I want to send her to Paris to cover that”. And so he would not leave me alone, and he kept this up: “Where is… I’m kind of you, you shouldn’t do this… you must let me see her, this is not fair”. So I’d said to my wife, Barbara, what on earth shall we do? And she said: well I have a Mary Josephson for you. And she got one of her colleagues at the University, where she teaches at Columbia, and I had her call John and said again the same thing, she’s very shy, she only writes occasionally for me because we are very close, maybe we had an affair. So in sending that in, in 197…, I think it was in 1975 that I put it into Artforum, and they put it away. They paid no attention.

M: They didn’t publish at first…?

B: No, they paid no attention; it was there for almost a year. Then something interesting happened, there was an ad, you may remember this, in Artforum, what was the name, Barbara? The dildo, the woman with the big, Lydia…

M: Linda Benglis.

B: Linda Benglis, and she … this ad which was accepted by Artforum, where she is wearing a big dildo strapped on to her; and some of the editors at Artforum, including Rosalind Krauss were so outraged by this that they all on mass resigned ,and the only, which is very odd for sophisticated art people to be frightened by a dildo, anyway, it was left John Coplans and Max Kozloff, two friends of mine, alone and so they then went through: “What do we got, have we anything to publish for the next issue. Oh! We have this thing by O’Doherty? Let’s do that. (laughs)

M: And did you write the three… like say what is now the book in one shot, they were not, they were published in three articles for space problems? Or editing?

B: No. When they had the response, they said “Do you have another one?” And I had another one, and then said “We want another one”, and so then I took time to do the other one, and then the fourth one was later under another editor at Artforum.

M: I would like to read later on a couple of passages that I took from a book that I found, at least they attracted my attention, but before going into that I wanted to stay a little bit of this idea of citizenship or responsibility that you spoke earlier in order to… that to ask you to tell us a little bit of one of your multiple facets or sides of your personality and your work which was dedicated to the… what you called, I think you called it the civil, when you work for a public institutions (sic) and help creating artists spaces or on the contrary which is certainly another of the multiple faces not only names of Brian O’Doherty.

B: Yes. I was broke in… about ’65 to ’69 I was broke. And at that time Barbara missed a year, she wasn’t well, so I do not recommend being broke to anybody, it does not improve the character at all, there is no moral virtue in it; so through the unrequited passion of a famous woman poet, I found myself as an advisor, a quasi-director part time, they paid by the day, I wouldn’t take a full time employment, I was paid by the day, and I needed the money. I don’t know, you must have it in Spain, the Arts Council, the government…

M: We’re beginning to have it in Catalonia.

B: Well, always ahead in Catalonia. So I took this job and it is very unlikely that an artist was in the position of government power, and it was the late 60’s and the early 70’s, a very interesting time, and that gets back to what you were saying earlier about the pressure from within the white_cube. Now, the pressure was intense then because artists were doing what the gallery people would consider a crazy thing, is like going to the land, like Smithson and Heizer, like I remember some artists wanted to dig into the floor of the gallery and they would wanted to break through the wide walls, and across the commercial galleries wide walls are virginal, they must not be, they must not be abused. So at that time artists were doing in the installation was… installations were really coming along then, and performances, and videos coming along, photography was becoming important for the first time in New York as a separate area. And so I was fortunate because I would talk to my colleagues and they were beginning to do something very interesting, they were beginning to create their own organisations and artists spaces as we then called them, would be administered by artists, or somebody the artists trusted; and P.S. 1 in New York was one of the first, with Alanna Heiss, and another one was 112 Greene Street, with a wonderful guy called Jeffrey Lew. Jeffrey was frequently on asset, and he was one of the most coherent people I’ve ever met on asset. And he was, there are many of them…, there were in Detroit, there were in Chicago, so I said: here is an opportunity to put the federal government, the power of the federal government, behind artists who wish to do things on their own, and who are suspicious of the gallery that does not allowed them to do what they want to do, or who don’t have galleries. So we managed to create a category called Alternative Spaces, and the director of the agency at that time was a woman whose name should be remembered, is Nancy Hanks; and Nancy Hanks, I owe her a great deal because in many ways she helped mature me, and teach me political skills. And that movement went on for a long time, some of them still survive, but now this survive as filmvideo organisations, and the radicalism of the 60’s survives in the filmvideo organisations, the counter cultures still survives, the independent voice, because it was at that time that the Portapak camera came out, and for the first time an artist could, or a filmmaker could present their own work. So we created this network of screens, this network of galleries all around the country. I don’t want to exaggerate, but it was a… I think it was a factor in number one, breaking down the monopoly of the commercial galleries, which didn’t like it ‘cause it lessen their power over the artist, and I think the commercial galleries love their power over the artist which is why I don’t have a gallery, I tried to survive without one. And secondly, it made the system transparent, because they were outside the system, and they could see around it perhaps.

M: And would you say that the alternative to the white cube is or would be the Black Box?

B: white_cube/Black Box? Very interesting, because in many ways hasn’t the Black Box happened with video and film? It’s happened already.

M: Yes.

B: So it’s there, and I think it’s definitely one… because you know, the old idea which still survives of the gallery with framed quarters of space behaving in a very mannerly fashion and laying against the wall has, has, had difficulties surviving it seems to me, you don’t see too many exhibitions like that anymore, do you? Do you think so?

M: No, no.

B: But you see a lot of, I think… photography installations and film are very much against the white_cube, I think the piece that you handed out and translated talks about that.

M: The piece in the exhibition…

B: No, it was The White Chapel thing.

M: Yes, yes. But, and do you think is there a grey area between the white cube and the Black Box or…?

B: There is, but I don’t quite… well, it is…What do you think? I mean it’s a conversation…it’s your turn….

M: It would be….it would be very interesting that there is a grey area and not a pure dichotomy of white or black, but it is true that it is difficult to locate where would that be. One thing that maybe, if not the grey area, it’s another type of area between the white_cube and the Black Box, is that …is that the way in which sound has appeared into the surface and the language of art and has invented the cubes and boxes that we have for art; and sound is an old component or an old material for artists and not only seems John Cage started doing things with it but as we were… as we know... from the very early twentieth century sound and phonetic poetry and song, is… experiments with sound is basically to have been done by artists in many different ways. How would sounds…?

B: May I ask you a question?

M: Sure.

B: Yeah. You told me a wonderful story about Raoul Hausmann, and… when we had lunch, and I think it’s a wonderful story to share about the voice of Hausmann and your history with Hausmann, I think that’s… since this a conversation I can ask you to say that, if you would, it’s very interesting.

M: Ok. No, no, ok. It’s a, to make a long story short, I began to be interested in art through researching the work of Raoul Hausmann in Ibiza between 1933 and 1936, in where he produced, he worked on the vernacular architecture of the island. Later on I was invited to curate the retrospective exhibition of Hausmann that took place in Valencia at IVAM in ’94, and travelled later to France and Germany; and for this retrospective I had asked Christopher Phillips, who is a specialist on photography, twentieth century photography, and on those years he had published a great essay called, I think it was “The new vision”, no, that was the title of a piece by, of a writing by Moholy-Nagy, but he curated and wrote about a great photography collection from the early twentieth century that was given to the Metropolitan. And I invited him to write about the history, the Raoul Hausmann’s photography, and he wrote a text on Raoul Hausmann’s phonetic poetry; saying that in his work… his work could be explained by a specially, by the, what he was trying to do with his own voice, and with sound, that was the most relevant invention he had really brought up, but that the rest of his work…

B: I knew nothing of the sound and Hausmann, I knew nothing of this.

M: No. That is… and for me that is important because it talks about the Avant-garde of the early twentieth century in a way that he goes far beyond the formal inventions of the pure visual art and therefore all of those techniques, or all of those materials that go beyond the purely visual in a way may represent an alternative or a critique of the white cube, and I have a text…

B: That’s very good. I like that…

M: and I have, I would like to write, to read a passage from the book, I hope I can make it in my very bad English, and I hope… that precisely talks about the eye how the white_cube is determining how the eye behaves. And it goes like this: There’re two kinds of time here, the eye apprehended the object at once, like painting, then the body bore the eye around it, this prompted a feedback between expectation confirmed, on the brackets checking, and hit hard to a subliminal bodily sensation. Eye and spectator were not fused but corporated (sic) for the occasion; definitely, tune eye was impressed with some residual data from its abandoned body, the kinesthetics of gravity, tracking, etc. The spectators of the senses always there in the row where infused with some of the eye’s fine discriminations. The eye urges the body around to provide it with information, the body becomes a data gatherer. There is heavy traffic in both directions on the sensory highway, between sensation conceptualised and concept actualised. In these unstable reproachments (sic) lie the origins of perceptual scenarios, performance and body art. The empty gallery then is not empty, its walls are sensitized by the picture plane, its space primed by collage and it contains two tenants with the long term lease. Why was it necessary to invest them? Why do the eye and the spectator separate themselves out from our daily persons to interrupt and double our senses? What brought you to the formulation precise of this nearly sideboard desk characterisation of the spectator within The white cube?

B: I think, it’s back to something you were saying earlier when you talk about language as potentially anti the white_cube, which I agree with completely and I think of… who is the Great Russian?

M: Klebnikov?

B: Klebnikov. Which I wish I knew more about Klebnikov, he seems like a brother somewhere, but I think it gets back to what you were saying about the eye or the language being and taken a stick to the formalist vision. And I think the eye is the epitome of the formless vision. The eye that reads form, that evaluates composition, that perceives visuality (sic). Now, before calling that alienating which to a degree it is, I would like to say that visuality (sic), and reading visually is a casualty of the postmodern, in my view, that you meet young art historians who know all about Roland Barthes, know all about the German Frankfurt people, but they can’t read art, they can’t read formally. Now, Formalism took a terrible beating with Post-modernism but in doing so I think we abandoned or let go, a tool that is part of our black pack, part of our equipment and it should not be dismissed completely, even though Formalism cannot apply to a great deal of their art, that is a formal art, anti-formal, or irrelevant Formalism. So I think the eye for me was the alienating, the epitome of the alienating effect of pure Formalism insulated within and sound in our relationships, insulated further in the white_cube. Now, the spectator I took as the everyday visitor, the kind of dumb person that we all are when we totter into a gallery and we look around…you know, this is to me the spectator who is not very bright, who does the best he can, who has to call them The eye, if it doesn’t have one, and it also to my mind is very much associated with collage; we had a little discussion earlier about collage, and I think we disagreed about it in some way. I took… far from a fight for me, but I felt that collage would take something from the real world, and slaps it against the picture, or builds an assemblage on the floor with it. It’s to me a sort of, in terms of the social hierarchy of genres that we have the formalist epicurean, very well bred, socially a distinction…, distinguished, probably quite wealthy; while the collage is a mongrel, collage is in the real world, it is sloppy, it is a, it is a, much… much lower social level because it deals with dirt and slums, and whatever you… tries to transform them. But… so… it… to me the… you had there, I was trying, I think, to make this hierarchical distinctions in the perception of art, and I think there is a profound alienation in how we experience art, for does it have, does it have to be in the museum before we can see it? Do we have to… how shall I put it? Do we have to reject it before we can assimilate it? There’re all kinds of comedies of manners associated with this business than I would like you to do a thought so in collage ‘cause we didn’t presume them for too far.

M: Well, my, my… intuition was coming from seeing collage as a form of critique to the white cube, before the white cube existed.

B: Yes, it is, it is, I agree.

M: And that is precisely what makes it interesting; it’s a space or it looks for space which has nothing to do with the white cube, and if we look at a very good example of a collage in the form of an exhibition which is the first Dada fair of 1920, which precedes a lot of what later will be, will take the form of the…, I think they would call Neo Dadaist, the people around Fluxus, and so on. At least they took pretty much that spirit, and tried to work with another machine of perception and of values that was not the white_cube, because precisely that is, if one thing the white_cube translates is precisely a set of values associated with types of art, and finally it’s a moral convention. And I thought, my question probably would be going towards to the difference and opposition of certain types of avant-garde, the dirty avant-garde of collage as opposed to the clean modern project of Mondrian, for instance, and there is something I don’t know how to formulate it, probably it’s another reading of Modernity that resurfaces in our times between the dirty…

B: The clean and the dirty, the raw and the cooked, yes?

M: Yes, somehow, not, not, yeah, but obviously that, that is, that is I mean we made a long historical journey through the twentieth century towards the twenty-first century which we are still completely immersed, and we have not much security in knowing how will it… where will it bring us. But, by what you were saying earlier, I guess Michael Fried was not your best admired author at the…

B: Not for us, no.

M: time.

B: Not for us. Very brilliant man, but not for us at that time.

M: Of course, but was it probably… could you say that this line from Greenberg to Fried really defined or, let’s say, nailed down the conditions and the moral consequences of the white cube?

B: Sadly, I would say yes. But to go back to Fluxus and the point you made, I think that I haven’t thought of that, is very true that Fluxus was seen as very much counter the eye, very much against the tradition that was embraced by the Museum of Modern Art in New York which is a Formalist tradition, a clean tradition; and the high road from Cézanne to Matisse, Picasso… that is the high road that is still try to maintain. The other movements are entertained and recorded in the Museum of Modern Art but not very enthusiastically, it is a Formalist, basically, a Formalist institution and interestingly enough your point about Neo Dada is exactly write in terms of its reception by the abstract expressionists, etc. We were on the high level of moral and ethical probity while, as you called them very well, the dirty tradition was the anti… the anti-tradition. Now, that anti-tradition had very few voices in New York in the 60’s, but one of them was, I’m trying to remember his name, Gene Swanson, Gene Swanson…

M: Swenson

B: Thank you. Gene Swenson…, there were two very interesting counter-culture, counter-establishment people in New York, one was Gregory Battcock, who did all the anthologies, who met a very sad death, he was murdered; and the other was Gene Swenson who died in a car crash. I remember… I mention him because he wrote a book called, a polemic called “The two traditions”, and in which he tried to establish the dirtyism (sic), may call it for the purpose of this conversation, he tried to establish Surrealism, Dada, etc, as a counter-tradition of equal importance to the Autobahn, the formalist Autobahn, in which everything is past all the succession of movements, etc. I remember actually, Gene Swenson, he used to walk up and down outside the Museum of Modern Art with a placard, and on the placard was a question mark. So he was putting a question mark in front of the whole Museum of Modern Art. And I remember going to an exhibition with Duchamp, and Duchamp said to me “Who is that? What, what is he doing?” And a funny one could understand what he was doing, but it was Duchamp, so I explained who Gene Swenson was, because Duchamp was amused. That was the time, and it’s interesting that in this conversation this division is coming out, because that was the time we had dinner, I think, at Duchamp’s, and then we all went to this exhibition of I forget what it was, but Marcel’s (unintelligible) she was “Teeny”; she was once married to Matisse’s son, right? So I, what was it? Yes, that Tom Hess, who was the editor of Art News, which was the organ of the abstract impressionist movement, had written a piece called “J’acuse Marcel Duchamp”, just like this French…, what was his name?
Unknown: Zola

B: Zola, in which he accused Duchamp of perverting the…, I presume he wanted to drink the poison cup, but it was very interesting to me that he was upset by this, he is now 80 years old or something like it, as I am now, and he was upset, and I thought that this time is an icon, the second half of the century belongs to him, and I was surprised that he was upset. But he said, you know, you would think that at this stage of my life, at this stage, it’s not necessary anymore, but anyway I’ve got off the subject, but the subject is “The two traditions”, and Gene Swenson is the figure who should not be forgotten.

M: But I wanted to bring another subject of conversation which is, it’s called Aspen. Brian O’Doherty curated, one can say so, at this time we were saying…
B: Very true. Curate is excellent.

M: You were saying working as an editor but I think Brian curated the number five and six of Aspen magazine, which is one of these publishing projects that also demonstrate or make understand how the art changes and in which moments the art changes. I would like to ask for your experience for curating (sic) that Aspen magazine which was in 197…

B: 1966/67, I worked for a year on it. My friend, Morton Feldman, we were together every day, we had lunch every day together at a burger place on Third Avenue, we lived closed to each other on those days, and my wife and Morty and I would have lunch together. And Morty would say to me”You guys from out of town, you know, you are smarter than us New Yorkers, you learn the cold of New York quicker than we do”. I said “I’m not too sure of that”. He said “Well, you know I really believe that when you come to a place where you are going to live your life and you practice your profession, that you have to pass through it”. I said “What do you mean pass through it?” It was clear what he meant, he meant that you must know where you come from, to know where you go, and what aspects of the past that you go to school and so that you formulate your own identity, your own creative identity. So, this was interesting because I had already at that time said I need to elect my ancestors, and I need to place my colleagues and myself in the present, pointing towards what future we may go to. So I assembled, is really an assemblage of… there were… it’s a very cheeky, a very cheeky business because I took some works from the greatest names, I took William Burroughs’, I commissioned Roland Barthes to do…

M: A very important text by the way…

B: The death of the author.

M: Absolutely.

B: I got Susan Sontag to write on “Silence”; I got the historian, George Kubler, who wrote that marvellous book that we would all read, ”Shape of time”, but a reading at a certain time is very important, but the group is really…

M: I am reading that book now.

B: That’s a great book.

M: Yes, absolutely.

B: And I assembled… one of my great supporters was Tony Smith; he was always saying “That fellow would do something”. That’s very nice when you are young, and I went around with my… I said “I’m going to assemble a box”. Because Aspen was supposed to be in a box. It was never in the box, it was always in a thin thing, so I said I make a box, I make a minimal box, a white box with two units, what you call them? Two marshals. And, so I then got my little tape recorder and I hunted people down; and I went to find Richard Huelsenbeck, he was living in New York, and he was a doctor, a psychiatrist under the name of Dr.Hulbeck. Now, I was interested in vowel poems at that time and in his “Phantastiche Gebete”, he had vowel poems, so I said “I must talk to him”. So I went around… he was very gloomy, he was very serious and so I said I would like you to read you a vowel poem, so he read: A, A, O A O E A O! Very good, very good. And then I did a lot of vowel poems myself but they were screaming and shouting, and my friends used to have to put up with them in the 60’s anyway. I’m young and I’m saying… like a young man, and I say: What are you doing? What are you doing this summer? I never forget this answer he said: I fly back to Germany in the iron coffin. So I said: Ok. But I got everybody; I got Merce Cunningham who had written a wonderful piece about the heartbeat, some aspect of it; I got Duchamp to read some text from “Á l’Infinitif”; I got… Oh, I got everybody. So many… and I placed them in certain orders, in certain situations, whereby innumerable readings are possible. I got films by Morris and Rauschenberg; and Hans Richter who was in the same gallery I was in ’66; Moholy-Nagy “The Light Machine”. So the popular way of approaching it was reduction, people… Susan and “Silence”; Richter’s beautiful “Rhytmus 21”, and then excess: Rauschenberg’s “Linoleum”, contrasted to Morris’ piece with the, you know the one…

M: Yes.

B: I forget what is called…. And then I got three of my colleagues, that we were all seeing a lot of each other, I got Sol LeWitt to do his first serial project; I got Mel Bochner to do a beautiful, a really wonderful piece with layers of tissue based on the grid; I got Dan Graham to do his poem, which you know, which is published everywhere since then. And I had one of my own pieces which was Structural Play, and I, so I divided that into movements, quasi-movements, six movements: structuralism, constructivism, I called Dada the tradition of paradoxical thinking, and then another category; and the last category was between categories. And Morton Feldman, Morty saw this and he said: I like that, I like between categories. So he wrote a piece called Between Categories; and he was a very brilliant man, Morty. And then I had three themes, and I think one was Time, one was Language, and the other was Silence, something … if I’m correct. So there is a very complicated and very audacious venture which was completely anti-greenbergian. That also had a curious response, because I don’t know how many were printed, some people got paid, some people didn’t get paid, I didn’t have the money to pay them. But most people who received that and told through the way, because this was New York in the ’66-’67 and it was very poppy in New York, that’s what the public liked of art, they embraced pop and it was very hip, you know that sort of pop, hip stuff; and the obscurity is a minimalistic aesthetics or the beginning or the conceptual footwork and the paradoxical and ironic thinking was not to their taste, so most of those I’m told were thrown away.

M: Most of the edition was thrown away.

B: Thrown away.

M: Incredible. We have collected all the issues of Aspen magazine, we’re preparing an exhibition of it in the end of 2011, which I think on the one hand at least number five and six contains most of what we would like to consider ourselves doing these days; but in general it’s a great threat, quote and quote to… not threat, it’s a great exercise to find a display, just to display Aspen magazine as an exhibition, because I think you were conceiving it for a user, for a reader, for what probably Roland Barthes describes very well in his essay, which is again one of the Seminal Essays, where they explain a lot of the shifts that we try to do, as well as what happened in most ways in The death of the Author.

B: I wonder that you see to be in people hands, because it was the first conceptualist exhibition, excuse me, outside the Gallery, there’ve been only one previous exhibition, Mel Bochner did an exhibition of the new School of Artists Notebooks, and that was the first, I think it’s fair to say, this was the second but was the first one outside the gallery.

M: Yes. A last question that I would like to ask you in this conversation is that you tell us a little bit of the birth, life and death of Patrick Ireland. Patrick Ireland left us in 2008 but was born in 1972.

B: Yes, he was. I’m happy that you ask me that, because I think in Catalonia this would be understood better than in most places. I’m Irish, I’ve born in Dublin, my mother’s family was involved in the revolution against British Rule. My uncle and their cousins were, if you like to call them terrorists from one side, or if you like to call them freedom fighters from another, but I grew up at these stories, and my family captured a British general, and they captured him in my grandfather’s house. And there’re lots of stories… there, which we won’t go into, but we all have stories of revolution and horror. And they’re still some of them quite fresh here in Spain which I understand. I’m not a terrorist, I cannot throw bombs, I cannot… I don’t want to kill people, no more than anybody else. So what could I do when thirteen unarmed peace marchers are shot to hand in the northern city of Derry by British paratroopers during a peace march, as I said? So I said all I can do… I can make art about it, because if you make art you preach to the choir… who does it reach? And nothing like Guernica or Goya’s 3rd of May, well, that may happen again… I think, so I said I can change my very substance, I can change not the art but I can change the person who makes the art, and that person would then be a living symbol of the oppression against the minority people in Northern Ireland. So I will take the name Patrick, which is obvious, because when working class young men go to London they’re semi-affectionately called Paddy, Paddy, and then there is a… Ireland. Now, Ireland is like Britain’s bad conscience, for hundreds of years Ireland has provided the best of English playwrights from Farquhar, Congreve, Sheridan... to Shaw, Oscar Wilde; they’re all Irish, except Shakespeare. But I said Ireland… they don’t want to hear about… and the Irish had been called the empire’s white Negros. So I said I would be Patrick Ireland. So I have to get and born. So I had a performance in Dublin with two young artists that I admired, Brian King and Robert Ballagh, and I changed my name in this performance, I won’t go into it, in which I wore a mask, etc. To have my new identity inscribed, and this was done before witnesses, etc. Then the miracle happened, and it’s a miracle, that is a ray of light in this harsh world: Peace in Northern Ireland, a peace always fragile, but peace. And the Loyalists and Nationalists, Protestants and Catholics are not killing each other. So I said… I was told to have their civil rights it’s come to pass; the British Army is leaving so it’s time to bury Patrick Ireland. So I talked to this wonderful lady who’s sitting here (Barbara Novak), and she was very enthusiastic about the idea of burying Patrick Ireland, ‘cause I didn’t know where to bury him, and I had a death mask, a life-death mask I call it, made by a wonderful… Charles Simmonds. Charles Simmonds, a wonderful artist in New York, and he did the death mask for me. And the director of the museum, Spanish Enrique Juncosa, and I often said that had it been an Irish director I doubt if he would have supported this mantra. So in a symbolic gesture as a sign of reconciliation a coffin was made, the plaster body was made, the death mask was placed in the coffin, and five young artists, one of them is sitting here, Brandon Early, along with one of the original artists who was present at the Name Change in ’72, carried the coffin, and there were…, I said nothing and there was a ceremony in which five poems were read in five languages, including a poem in Spanish by Lorca, read by Enrique, and a poem written for Patrick Ireland by Pam Belty (unintelligible), and then a favourite poem of mine of Mallarmé which has some medical things in it, we won’t go into it why I like it; and then a poem in my language which is Irish, which is to me a language that gives you access to a hidden Ireland, because the British, the first thing you’d do, you would know about this in Catalonia, the first thing you do is you destroy the language and then you destroy part of the identity; so, whatever community that you wish to assimilate. So, then there is something called keening; If you have ever heard of keening it is you probably if you’ve been watching television and seeing what’s happening in Iraq and watching women wailing. There is in Ireland a tradition called keening which is professional mourners who express grief, and that’s chilling, it’s blood chilling. So I found a young artist, Alannah O’Kelly, who had made… revived the skill and that was extraordinary, I still hear it. So then Patrick was buried and I said, the only thing I said was thank you for peace, and then we have a wake. Oh yes, in 1972 when I changed my name I said that all works by Brian O’Doherty will now be signed Patrick Ireland until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights. Now, I may finish here. If I may… I got a call, I didn’t call… he came to my studio I refused to see him many, many times, some man from the north, from Belfast … and I didn’t want to see anybody from Belfast because I said if he wants to meet Patrick Ireland he is probably a terrorist. So he turned out not to be a terrorist, he came and tracked me down, and he said I want to honour the man who was behind us in 1972 when nobody else was, that’s an exaggeration, of course there was plenty of people behind them, but it’s flattering. So we brought my wife and myself over to Belfast and I met people who had been imprisoned, in the Maze prison, in the H-block. And in an extraordinary moment he brought us over to the… what they called the Titanic area, is that West Belfast or East Belfast? East Belfast, and there we met some of the former terrorists and they both were trying to make common calls to improve things for their children in this troubled Northern Ireland. So I said: how on earth did you get together? How did that happen? And this man has now become a great friend because the first thing he did was seduced my wife, he was very clever; you get the wife you get the husband, right? So he said: Well, I asked that to Bill Clinton. I said: How do we get together? How do be bridged this gap? And Clinton said: Have an economic conference. They would all come to the economic conference.

M: Of course. It all comes out to an economic conference.

B: It does, doesn’t it?

M: Absolutely.