White Cubes Research Articles

Refiguring Museums. Investigating Tensions in Exhibition Spaces

Understood as active in the mediation of knowledge and values, museum spaces have become a growing field of investigation in the course of the spatial turn within the museum studies. In this special issue, we focus on the transformation of museum space. To this end, we introduce a specific theoretical framework, the refiguration of spaces, which aims to think spatial transformation in a non-linear, multiscalar and multiple way: The basic assumption is not to presume a sequential historic transformation of spatial figurations of museums – from chambers of wonders, through universal museums and white cubes towards interactive museums – in which a new type always replaces the previous one, but rather to draw our attention onto the dense juxtaposition of these figurations, which continue to be drawn upon, competing to reshape museums, and informing our spatial understanding of the museum of the future. In this editorial, we firstly (re)trace the different spatial-aesthetic figurations of museums and work out the limitations of a transformational framework. We introduce then the refiguration theory and its potential, before presenting the seven contributions of the special issue and synthesising their findings about the conflicting and shifting multiple spatialities of museums. We end our editorial with a speculative reflection about the futures of refiguring museums.

Re-thinking Drag: From Night Clubs to White Cubes

Re-thinking Drag: From Night Clubs to White Cubes

DIY Music and Contemporary Art Spaces: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Transmission and the Art-Music Nexus in Glasgow

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between contemporary art spaces and ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) music in Glasgow. It demonstrates the continuity and interconnectedness of DIY music and art practices by considering the transition of galleries from ‘white cubes’ to music venues and spaces for social interaction. Following a brief overview of Glasgow’s urban renewal and cultural regeneration, it traces the emergence of the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) and Transmission and provides an outline of their organisational structure and policies. It then explores ethnographically how they have facilitated the cross-pollination between DIY music and contemporary art after the 2008 financial crisis. Approaching art galleries as social spaces that provide a platform for DIY musicians invites a holistic understanding of the reciprocal relationship between DIY music and contemporary art institutions in Glasgow. Therefore, the article considers in turn how these spaces were influenced by the ethics of DIY music. The malleability of contemporary art spaces and their relationship to the DIY ethos demonstrate that cultural policies should aim to strengthen the existing grassroots communities that form the bedrock of the city’s cultural scenes. This necessitates a move beyond the labels ‘post-industrial’ and ‘creative city’, thus decoupling cultural activities from the discourse of urban competition and Glasgow’s economic goals.

Introducing the “New Observationists”: Demystifying a potential tool to revolt in mobile exercise of visuals

This is a paper on art and portable dissent that focuses on drawings, paintings, and graffiti by three prominent Indian artists secretly enthralled by the Kolkata and Bengal of the late 1960s. The focus is on avant-garde agit-visuals or an extension of social sculpture (Beuys) that reappear on house walls, white cubes, notebooks, posters, and travel diaries as a wet narrative that rescues social resistance. Despite a hidden dilemma, they generate a different audience by incorporating the local in cross border, keeping an unambiguity intact while bridging nonconformist art movements. The paper goes on to analyse how art has historically been recognised as an instrument of critical reflection, generally emerging as a dominant form against the despotism of a particular social class. They could be called "degenerate art "1 of the 21st century, as they (graffiti) illegally occupy walls. They were not commissioned or made, but survived decades of purge and reinforce a historical time that includes the dystopia of a surveillance society and the tumult of a physically recorded space. This paper will also explore how nonconformist art forms seek to dominate a dialectical discourse on art and resistance in a space infected by consumption. Overall, the implications of art will be discussed in order to understand its practise in terms of mobility and displacement, beyond form and colour in coordination with resistance.

Capturing interfaces between museum architecture and exhibition design: a critical inquiry into museum space concepts

ABSTRACT When we make museum exhibitions, we always do this in a particular architectural space. The question of how we deal with the aesthetic interrelations between museum architecture and exhibition design is, however, a contested one. Whereas some museums completely integrate architectural interiors and (permanent) display design, other museum interiors function as more ‘neutral’ containers, taking the shape of ‘white cubes’ and ‘black boxes’. This article will investigate how the interfaces between museum architecture and exhibition design can be traced in current museum space conceptualisations. By focusing on three approaches to museum space that have been highly influential during the last decades, space syntax analysis, narrative approaches and the concept of atmosphere, this article will explore how museum space conceptualisations have integrated versus separated architectural and exhibition spaces, and how they have managed to capture the material interfaces between them.

Proximate interiors: When exhibition design activates museum architecture

In recent decades, the ocularcentrism of museums has been challenged by the design of immersive, multisensory exhibition environments. In many museums, these environments are placed within ‘white cubes’ and ‘black boxes’ that provide a (supposedly) neutral space for exhibition making, and in the case of historic museum buildings, materially rich but non-neutral interiors are sometimes covered by visual backdrops and projections. This article will explore how exhibition design can, instead, work actively with the architectural museum interiors. Based on analysis of two exhibitions at Copenhagen museums, it will explore the potential of exhibition design that taps into the material particularities of museum interiors, thereby strengthening the museum visitors’ sense of being present within the museum space. The article will draw on the concept of atmosphere (Gernot Böhme), while also making critical inquiry into the concept’s ability to capture the material proximity effects of exhibition design that activates architectural museum interiors.

‘Creative City’ R.I.P.?

‘Creative City’ R.I.P.?

A MORE DEVASTATING VERSION OF THE RAVEN PARADOX

Hempel's famous Raven Paradox derives from Nicod's criteria for confirmation and the Equivalence Condition, the unintuitive conclusion that things like white roses, green T-shirts and ice cubes confirm the raven hypothesis ‘All ravens are black.’ By a small rearrangement of the Equivalence Condition, I show that we can also derive the conclusion, which sounds even more intuitively intolerable, that observation of black ravens fails to confirm the raven hypothesis. We are left with the contradictory result that black ravens both confirm and do not confirm the raven hypothesis.

Substitutions, and: That Almond Dessert

Substitutions, and: That Almond Dessert Adrienne Su (bio) Substitutions Balsamic, for Zhenjiang vinegar.Letters, for the family gathered. A Cuisinart, for many hands.Petty burglars, for warring bands. A baby's room, for tight quarters.Passing cars, for neighbors. Lawn-mower buzzing, for bicycle bells.Cod fillets, for carp head-to-tail. Children who overhear the language,for children who speak the language. Virginia ham, for Jinhua ham,and nothing, for the noodle man, calling as he bears his poledown alley and street, its baskets full of pickled mustard, scallions, spice,minced pork, and a stove he lights where the customer happens to be,the balance of hot, sour, salty, sweet, which decades later you still crave,a formula he'll take to the grave. [End Page 86] That Almond Dessert We must have known it as Almond Float, thanks to Joyce Chen.Indeed, it floated in the fruit cocktail, the maraschino cherriesas treasured as the tender white cubes that have so many names I no longer know which we used, the nomenclature muddled furtherby my later learning to say xingren doufu, which translatesto Almond Tofu, a reference not to what it is, but to how it appears. For similar reasons, or to clarify for guests, we sometimes called itAlmond Jell-O, despite Jell-O's omission, to this day, of the flavor.Meanwhile, restaurants may have offered it as Almond Junket for its likeness to the English dessert made from milk and rennet,junket having come from the Latin iuncata, reed basket, in whichcheese was made, and from which the Italian soft cheese giuncata gets its name, all of which is not inaccurate because—contraryto what they say about the Chinese and dairy—there was milk in ours, too.This potentially put it closer to pudding than tofu, but its silky texture evoked the most delicate bean curd, which may be whyit was also known as Almond Curd, which confusingly impliesthat almonds can curdle, that somewhere lies an Almond Whey. In any case, pudding lacks shape and makes a poor referencefor a Chinese audience. Perhaps to erase all cultural confusion,the dessert also went by Almond Lake, as anyone can comprehend a body of water in which something cool and almondyis suspended. Looking back, Almond Junket is the only namewe never used, surely because it sounded like an illicitly funded cruise or evoked the notion of junk, which made us feelforeign, pertaining to trash. But now fruit cocktail is what getsconsigned to the heap, canned foods being spurned unless you seal and boil each jar yourself. And something about a sweet finalealigned with gratuitous travel enchants, promising a destinationremote and novel, or remote and familiar, like ancient memory. [End Page 87] Adrienne Su Adrienne Su is the author of four books of poems, most recently Living Quarters (Manic D Press, 2015). Recipient of an NEA fellowship, she teaches at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Recent poems appear in Gargoyle, the New Yorker, and Poetry. Copyright © 2017 Middlebury College Publications

Recalibrating the white cube as a hub for social action

ABSTRACTA new form of practice is developing in which cultural organisations are transformed from white cubes to hubs for social action and learning. Focus extends from the showing of art to its creation, and the empowerment and agency of communities through enactive learning. In this model the arts organisation acts as a catalyst for collaborative action and enquiry involving academia and a wider ecosystem of communities and stakeholders including the public, artists, digital creative industry, maker spaces and local government. The new model entails embedding of research, innovation and arts practice within the arts organisation itself. We illustrate the approach with examples of projects spanning mental health, physical disability, young people, veterans, children and parents, which have had a real impact on health and well-being of our communities.

Video Art: “A White Cube” or “A Black Box”?

Video art is a hybrid, combining features of both contemporary art as well as screen arts. It brings together different ways of perception working both in a manner of a movie which transfers the viewer into virtual daydreaming (Matthew Barney, Steeve McQueen), and in a manner of a painting or sculpture which gives a viewer some intense corporal experience (Tony Oursler). Accordingly, there are two ways of presenting video art: in a white cube and a black box. In 1970-s video art used to be presented in white cubes of contemporary art galleries where they nailed the screens right to the wall. In a white cube video comes into the viewers sight together with other items in display, therefore a show-piece comes into contact with other ones in a spectators minds eye. Moreover, a white cube gives visitors an opportunity to be in charge of their time of viewing, which implies, that the white cube perception appears rather chaotic and the final cut of a video in the spectators mind becomes unpredictable, what is characteristic of video. In 2000-s when both video and film technologies got replaced by the digital one, all the moving pictures started to resemble one another. A well-lit room of a white cube was not appropriate for high definition videos, whereas a black box is usually associated with a cinema hall and consequently a video presented in such a cinematic manner makes a viewer unconsciously expect to see a cinematic piece of art. Video today is an indispensable figurant of any significant exhibition of contemporary art and it is defined as an artistic (not cinematic) media. Traditionally video is being exhibited in a white cube of a gallery; however, there is now a distinct tendency to present video art in a black box, that is in a cinematic way. As a result its getting harder and harder to distinguish video art from experimental cinema. Nowadays the very strategy of presentation of video may help this media to retain identity or to lose it.

Post-War Modernism: Maxwell Fry's buildings at the University of Liverpool

This paper considers the architecture and design process of Liverpool University's Veterinary School and Civil Engineering building, designed by the modernist pioneer architect, Edwin Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) in the period 1955–60. The architecture of Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War marked a departure from the modernism associated with the International Style, ‘white cubes’ and ‘primitive functionalism’, and there was a move amongst architects and reports in the architectural press that sought to review architecture through the agendas of ‘expressive’, ‘formal’ and even ‘vernacular’ design. Both of Fry's buildings initially appear as subscribers to the functionalist doctrine, adopting a sombre, even aloof exterior, but a closer inspection reveals that they are not just the routine, clichéd modern buildings that became so prevalent and scorned throughout the 1950s. They demonstrate some of the wider concerns architects had at that time, namely: monumentality, the use of art and murals as a means of conveying meaning, and a concern for context within a functional-vernacular tradition. These notions were also astutely tracked through the architectural journals along with ‘formalism’ (leading to Brutalism) and perhaps most significantly through Nikolaus Pevsner's determination to bind the English picturesque tradition with the lineage of Modernism.

Blind Men and Hypercubes

In [1] Diaz-Barrero posed the following question: Suppose we have a cube with edge equal to n, built of n white cubes of edge one. The surface of the cube is painted in black. A blind man splits the cube. What is the probability that he be able to rebuild the original cube? The answer is that the probability asked is very small. In this paper we compute this probability and generalize the procedure to general structures in higher dimensions.

Myeloid cells extravasate and infiltrate late carcinoma lesions.: Movie 23_1.

Myeloid cells extravasate and infiltrate late carcinoma lesions. Two myeloid cells (green, marked with white cubes) that already have infiltrated the cancer cell masses (blue) are largely immotile while a third cell extravasates from a blood vessel in the right side of the field and infiltrates the tumor (following points A-J). The video shows an area from the late carcinoma shown in Movie 4 at higher magnification. The movie is shown first with and then without marking. Large tick marks are 20 mm apart. From Ewald et al. (2009) Chapter 23 in: Live Cell Imaging, A Laboratory Manual. 2nd edition. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. pp. 419-439.

The Shape of Things to Come. Building for the Arts in Ireland

Ireland's built infrastructure for the arts has changed dramatically in the past fifteen years. While this has created new opportunities for exhibiting, it has also given rise to difficulties in terms of funding, programming and creating an audience. Should new arts spaces be drivers of economic regeneration ? Should they meet local or national needs and agendas ? Ireland has a strong tradition of artist-run initiatives, and our buildings for the arts reflect both our history and contemporary ambitions. Some are in renovated historic spaces, while others reflect a growing architectural confidence. How do these different spaces alter the way we see the art inside ? And should we see art in white cubes or sculptural spaces ; should spaces for the exhibition of creativity themselves be creatively constrained ?

Tiling a Pyramidal Polycube with Dominoes

The notion of pyramidal polycubes, namely the piling-up of bricks of a non-increasing size, generalizes in R^n the concept of trapezoidal polyominoes. In the present paper, we prove that n-dimensional dominoes can tile a pyramidal polycube if and only if the latter is balanced, that is, if the number of white cubes is equal to the number of black ones for a chessboard-like coloration, generalizing the result of [BC92] when n=2.

White cubes and red knots

White cubes and red knots

Effects of intralist activity on free-recall performance

On an intermediate size problem, either white cubes were used on both training and test trials, or irrelevant color cues were introduced at the outset of test trials. Analysis of the first test trial data indicated no effect of color on the frequency of transposition responding. Analysis of total test data (18 trials) indicated that color, as a within-trials variable, interfered with transposition.