Building sites in the expanding field

Building Sites In The Expanding Field is a two-part research project that examines,
through art practice and theory components, relations between institutional critique and
white cube gallery conventions at the start of the twenty-first century. The project
responds to commentaries by critics such as John Roberts, David Beech and Stewart
Martin, in which notions of participation, sociability and conviviality – modes of
interaction identified by the curator Nicolas Bourriaud with relational installation – are
framed as the institutional framework of the work's articulation. My project, in contrast,
examines the relevance of earlier modes of institutional critique to this post-relational
moment; it is intended also to bring focus to my own practice of architectural
intervention. The project's core problematic is the way in which the ubiquitous frame of
display known as the white cube gallery continues to inform gallery design and thus
shapes the parameters of artistic reception and critical art practice. My thesis is that the
architectural frames of gallery spaces continue to support an ideological construction of
artistic reception as a mode of encounter indebted to the legacy of minimalist art and set
apart from the instrumentality of capitalist production and consumption outside the
gallery's walls. I argue that critical intervention within gallery architecture can prompt
people to critically question the relation between the roles or identities they adopt in
these spaces and the function that the spaces themselves perform. To this end, I examine
historical debates that have linked institutional critique and architectural intervention
with notions of allegory, focusing particularly upon the contributions of Michael Asher,
Brian O'Doherty, Rosalind E. Krauss, Benjaimin H. D. Buchloh and Craig Owens, and
presenting recent post-relational debates in relation to the legacy of the white cube
gallery. The key contribution of both the practice and theory components of my project
is my critical analysis of the legacy of the white cube gallery beyond the moment of
relational installation, as a context open to re-appropriation through allegorical readings
that draw forth the processes of its socio-historical construction. Whilst legacies of
critical postmodernism figure in post-relational debates staged recently in journals and
magazines such as Third Text and Art Monthly, my project draws explicit links between
contemporary modes of artistic display and critique, and this moment.