Godfre Leung

Scholarly monograph, in progress, on three works of sound-based art from 1985, each of which uses a commercial reproductive audio technology as its medium: Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover, Yasunao Tone’s Music for 2 CD Players, and Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon. Playback rethinks the digital turn through the perceptual terms of the compact disc, focusing on the expectation of infinitely identical playback and the effects of that expectation on phenomenologies of attention and temporality.

This dissertation concerns the logic of the 'white cube' exhibitionary paradigm from the perspective of the changing conditions of artistic exhibition in the postwar era. Specifically, its inquiry concentrates on moments in the careers of four artists: Ellsworth Kelly (1949-'55), Yves Klein (1957-'62), Blinky Palermo (1969-'72), and Daniel Buren (1969-'72). Taken together, the four chapters that make up this dissertation each analyze an aspect of its titular white wall--respectively: pictoriality, value, architecture, and institutionality. The premise of this dissertation is that a formal, pictorial logic that underlies the exhibition of paintings on the conventional white walls of art galleries and museums--one continuous with the conventional terms of the transportable, frontal easel painting--holds within it a set of ideological assumptions about art, the work of art, and culture that govern a specific and highly determined mode of aesthetic experience. I call this mode of experience the 'white cube paradigm.' This paradigm, as read through the works of artists that consciously engage with and disrupt its premises, relates not just to the literal encounter between viewer and work of art, but furthermore to art's implication in the forces of commodity capitalism, urban planning, and advanced media--that is, the forces of spectacle. This dissertation presents an account of postwar art that diverges from the dominant narrative, wherein Minimalist sculpture represents the historical 'crux' between Abstract-Expressionism and Institutional Critique. Instead, it analyzes the postwar pursuit of a new kind of aesthetic experience that, contrary to the Minimalist position, follows not from an obliteration of the work of art's ideational frame, but an engagement with both the conditions of artistic exhibition and the formal and ideological terms of the autonomous modern easel painting.

University of Rochester
Program in Visual and Cultural Studies
2011