The White Cube: The Museum of Modern Art

Introduction

White cube was set up by art dealer Jay Jopling , an ex-Estonian and son of a Conservative MP who is married to artist Sam Taylor Wood . It was first opened in a small , square room in May 1993 in Duke Street . Indeed it was the smallest exhibition space in Europe at the time , and yet , for such a small space white cube became , arguably , one of the most influential galleries of the past decade . Situated at 44 Duke Street , St James , one of London 's most traditional art dealing streets , surrounded

by auction houses , old master galleries and specialist art bookshops The central concern of White cube was to create an intimate space in which an artist could present a single important work of art or a coherent body of work within a focused environment . In this regard , the gallery achieved its reputation by being the first to give one person shows to many of the so-called Young British Artist [YBAs]

Even when it moved to its present location at Hoxton Square , it still held on to its unique gallery rule that an artist could only be exhibited once . By this time , white cube had built up an international reputation for showing international artists such as Chuck Close Richard Prince and Jeff Wall but interspersed with this Jay Jopling had also shown , cutting edge , YBAs including Gary Hume , Mona Hatoum , Marc Quinn and Sarah Lucas

Alfred H . Barr . Jr , director of the Museum of Modern Art , MoMA , is credited for transforming the white cube concept into a functionalist ideology that conveyed purity and restraint , hence setting up the canon for modern art . On the other hand , Carol Duncan has attempted to bring out the effect caused by MoMA 's imposition of the masculine gaze to modern art galleries . Indeed her writings have given feminists an impetus to show that the personal is political and hence , women can channel there own experiences to disrupt the masculinity of the museum 's space . Ideally , Carol Duncan challenges the white cube 's functionalist concept of purity and restraint by directing us to begin to think about `female form ' and its cultural significance

The concept of purity and restraint conveyed by the white cubes has its basis in the ideology that representations of the female body can be though to be less of a static object and more as a limit point or set of exclusions , for while an image of the body of a woman can represent all that is pure or worthwhile , it can also embody that which is thought to be the most contaminated and disgusting . It is this objectivism of the female body by male artists ' that Duncan describes as male artists attempts to reach abstraction . The white cube captures this abstraction in such a way that it bars women artists from admittance to its canon She seems to portray the idea that this canon emanates from the view point of a heterosexual male audience whose desires activated the modernism...