There is an artwork made for an art space, which looks like a white cube (but is only really a frame, and has no walls) which contains a number of things. The objects dangle and move around. They are all different. There is a squiggle of black wire, a plastic lemon, a cardboard circle with a white inside circle, a small rock, two 3D spheres of coloured paper, a squiggle of copper-coloured wire, a pink balloon, an apple, a shiny box with a squiggle of LED lights on wire, a traditional-looking wire mobile and a small full-length picture of me with my arms up wearing a t-shirt which says “#jstfu”.
This artwork is being shown in a domestic flat, along with other artworks, and the space has no furniture, or kitchen. So, it is not a flat that is lived in just now. The walls are mostly bare plaster, some are bare brick. The floor is bare wooden floorboards, no lino, no carpet. It has been named as a gallery, but this gallery has no white walls, apart from one. We arrange the artworks knowing how to do it. We consider the arrangement in relation to the space and the other artworks, giving each its own space.
I’ve just finished re-reading Brian O’Doherty’s book, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (expanded edition, 1986). I thought that I should remind myself about the task that someone gave themselves to articulate meaning from the spaces where we exhibit and experience contemporary art. The original 3 articles – I. Notes on the Gallery Space, II. The Eye and the Spectator, and, III. Context as Content, which were published individually in US art magazine Artforum in 1976, stand as the core texts. O’Doherty has also included an additional article, IV. The Gallery as Gesture, written in 1986. He also includes an Afterword where he reflects on the work and ideas that he wrote about ten years earlier, which he now seemed a bit unsure about. I know the feeling. It has been a useful re-read, but the language that Doherty uses seems overly academic for the subject, like he’s trying too hard to be meaningful, philosophical, and sort of ironic and humorous.
I understand what he’s saying in terms of –
“The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art’[1]
and “The wall, the context of the art, had become rich in a content it subtly donated to the art”[2].
But please, keep it simple. Things brought into a selected space become art; as long as there is nothing else in there. But there is now a bit of a conundrum – what with spaces that are painted a colour, God forbid, or have walls which are rough, unplastered with cables hanging out of them, and so not ‘white cubes’. Therefore, can we tell when something is art when it is not inside the white cube?
I have arranged and hung a number of exhibitions in my lifetime: problem-solved the perfection of the gallery spaces, painted many a wall white, moved the artworks around to determine the sweet spot that it needed to be placed or hung on the wall. There was always the pressure to do it the ‘correct’ way, I had learnt to do it correctly. It became a habit. We all realised that it was done the way it should be. It does help artists to know these conditions, so that whatever they make and display is art.
The context of a gallery space is safe ground.
Phew.
The lyrics in Steely Dan’s 1977 song, “Home at Last“, spring to mind –
To complicate matters, the musician David Byrne, in his book How Music Works (2012)[4] explains that the spaces where music is played is really important and gives context to the music being performed. He says that musicians make music to fit these spaces, so the space is where you would hear a certain type of music. Music has a broad range of styles, therefore various types and scales of spaces exist. Also, the walls of the music venue spaces act in a reverse way to a white cube gallery. The music venue walls are recording the sounds (and atmosphere) in the room, they become saturated. White cube gallery walls are rigid, they don’t absorb, they just project from their hard surface.
So, the thing is…
Do we make our art/music as a thing in itself, and therefore is self-defined or do we make our art/music knowing if we put it into a space where things are seen/experienced it will be defined as art/music through the venue and by those who experience it?
Art has an evolving range of the styles and exhibiting spaces where we experience it, but do artists make their work to fit the white cube gallery, knowing it’s where it would be seen as art?
Hence, knowing the context defines what things are. But how and when do we know the context.?
The artwork which I have made for this exhibition has its own white cube. The artworks inside the white cube are safe together, in a group, sharing the space, giving space to each other. They are different shapes and colours. They are all three-dimensional. They are geometric, abstract or realistic.
They all seem to be happy together.
Home at last.
[1] O’Doherty B. Inside the white cube: The ideology of the gallery space. Berkeley: University of California Press; 1986. p. 14.
In my past life I’ve had a number of significant cultural and personal experiences while going about my studies and jobs within the arts and design world. On reflection and going through old photos I have kept I could place myself in these memorable scenarios and make connections with who I am and how these particular experiences inform my interests and how they might form some sort of ‘self-portrait’. It may be that by placing myself beside these people Im looking for recognition of my own work, but it’s more that I was there. I have photos of me in direct relation to these people, directly or indirectly.
I firstly made a series of posters which included just images of me and the other people along with contextual words (place, dates, works), as a series of four. They are like very very short visual essays. Text and image. What else needs to be said?
Anyway, when presenting these works, I have had to mostly tell the background stories about the text and images – are they too obscure? I’m not keen on over explaining works, they are what they are. I work with context, I include and I am influenced by narratives, I find them interesting – the serendipitous connections, new angles and information that others bring to the work, I don’t presume people don’t know what I’m showing them. They may know none of it, some of it or all of it, and add to it.
The context of these works spans a period from 1982 to 1998. I was at college studying product design, then I installed contemporary art exhibitions, then curated exhibitions.
SOTTSASS At art college, I was a product design student. Not an artist or not a maker. We made prototypes of ideas for products that didn’t exist, yet. I loved it. Having had to repeat a year from failing in interior design, I had found my niche. There was problem-solving, thinking of new ways to do things. Making ideas. I designed lamps, knives, clothes stand and I was taught how to render products. We used the spray booth with glee. Making our forms from wood and aluminium, and laying on a sandwich of primers, wet ‘n dry, top colour coat and sometimes clear lacquer. I loved the ritual of the paint job. It was like custom car-ing your new idea. Like those American west coast fetish-finish sculptures. They were like nothing that existed: Smooth. The course was good in encouraging us to explore social and cultural references, which we would use to inspire or communicate our products.
We also made trips out in Scotland. We went to the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, the Caithness Glass factory, Hospitalfield, Arbroath, and McIntosh furniture factory. We went up to Lewis and Harris, all 9 of us, in a hired campervan. Two of us could drive, so we had turns about. Some got to sleep in the van, the others in a tent we had brought with us. We took turn about with this arrangement too. We visited a weaver in Harris, all cramming into her work shed. She said she would pee on the Harris tweed fabric once it was woven. We believed her. We went to London too. Visiting the V&A, Design Museum and the shops in Covent Garden. There was the One-Off studio run by designer and maker Ron Arad. He reused existing products and turn ed them into new exciting ideas. There was the Rover seats, car ariel lamps. I remember the staircase down into the workshop basement made of timber railway sleepers made a heavy bas note when they were tread on – they were performance products.
In September 1982 we also went to Milan, Italy. Only 4 of us went, including our tutor. He knew a previous student, Gerry Taylor, who had got a job with the design company Sottsass Associates, so we had a direct way into what was the Memphis design phenomenon. I was a big fan, still am. I had written an essay about Memphis, and looking back, my early ideas seem to be influenced by their forms, colours and experimental ideas as how products can be. Anyway, we were in Milan, staying in a hotel above some rock club. We met some of the other designers who were working for Sottsass, and were able to go to the Sottsass studio, where we sat waiting to meet Ettore Sottsass, who was across the room from us – but we didn’t, directly. He was busy, we were just students from Dundee, they were designing bus stop shelters for Turin, so time was tight. Our tutor asked us the draw out a few of our ideas in preparation that we might get a moment with him, that was nerve wracking. I drew out a desk lamp that I had designed and prototyped. We were taken into another studio space where we got to meet and share our time with Michele De Lucchi, George Sowden, Nathalie Du Pasquier, and significantly for me in retrospect, Daniel Weil. Weil was a friend of Taylor, and had come to Milan with him. His work was included in the 1982 Memphis exhibition but his association as a formal Memphis designer was not encourage it seemed. His design work – radios, fruit bowls, lamps and clocks were influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s artworks and ‘readymades’. Their creativity came from conceptual art ideas, crossing the boundaries between art and design. This suited me fine, and still does. Interestingly, Weil doesn’t mention his inclusion with Memphis on his Wikipedia biography.
While we were in Milan, Memphis had an exhibition opening for the 1982 Milan furniture Fair, so we got to hang-out and experience all the new products and ideas that they had produced. I had seen a photo of Sottsass leaning against an important new furniture product, the Beverly sideboard. I loved that piece, so a had my tutor take a photo of me trying to take up the same pose as I had seen Sottsass doing.
WILSON It’s 1987, and I’m working at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Mark Francis was the Director and he’s got a great address book of contacts of interesting artists. He brings in John Cage, Jean Michel Basquiat, Nancy Spero and many others. I think I was helping with the Dan Graham exhibition when Mark came down to the gallery downstairs and asked if anyone wants to help install the Richard Wilson work at the RSA.
“I’ll do it!”, I say “Okay, it’s an installation with oil, and they need a wooden platform built in the gallery. Can you help with that?” asks Mark “Yeah, I can do that” I say
The exhibition at the RSA was a show of the Saatchi art collection. It included Warhol, Rothenberg, Stella, Kiefer and Schnabel. Very big names. The RSA co-hosted the exhibition, and at this time Charles Saatchi and his wife Doris Lockhart, had constructed a big collection of mainly paintings and sculptures by American and European artists. This was pre-Saatchi collecting the YBA artists (Hirst, Emin, Lucas etc) and pre the Sensation exhibition times. But Saatchi had just purchased the Richard Wilson 20:50 artwork, and wanted to show it as soon as possible. Saatchi had seen and purchased the work at Matt’s Gallery in London. This gallery was run out of artist Robin Klassnik’s Hackney studio, and had enabled Wilson to make this work there. The Edinburgh exhibition seemed good timing. Also, good timing for me.
I joined another guy Andrew, who was from London at the RSA to start to work on the installation. Richard Wilson and Robin Klassnik were there, planning out how to practically do this. The gallery room was downstairs to the left of the front door. It had windows along one wall, which looked out onto the Mound area, and doors at the far end which had a strange arrangement of steps and handrail in front of it.
“Can we remove this handrail, it’s in the way?” asks Klassnik “I’m afraid not” say the RSA “Why not?” questions Klassnik. “The room needs to be clear to the walls, so we’ll see what we can do, but it might have to go”.
We build a 4-foot-high wooden platform across the whole room. Shaped around the room, and handrail. We use a long water filled hose attached to small ladders and stretched it across the room to check so that the platform is perfectly flat. Richard and Robin then worked on installing the sump oil, so that the dense material would act as a black mirror, reflecting the room in the oil. Very magical.
I didn’t get involved with bring in the oil, which came in the window, but during the duration of the exhibition while everyone else went back to London, I had the task every week to go underneath the platform. The oil was only 4 inch deep on top of the platform, and I had to unscrew a panel at the end of the walkway, collect the oil-filled buckets from under the platform and then slowly empty them back into the oil pool. I felt I was getting to know the work by taking care of it.
Over the years I experienced the work in London at the Saatchi collection in Boundary Road and in County Hall building at Westminster, when Saatchi used that space. It would be good to see it again. I never met Richard or Robin again. I was just the keen hired help to get the job done. I think I maybe saw them across the room, at a Saatchi opening in the 1990s, as the YBA work took over the art scene.
Then, last Saturday, 9th May 2026, I’m at the opening of Jake Harvey and Tjibbe Hooghiemstra’s exhibition at Mark Haddon’s No.31 gallery in Duns in the Scottish Borders. And I look into the mingling crowd there, it’s made up of mainly older artist types, all chatting away. I spot someone I think is Richard Wilson. I go across, he’s with friends, but I just butt in.
“Are you Richard Wilson?” I ask “Yes, it’s me, nice to meet you, who are you? “, he says
I then launch into my memories I had with him and Klassnik back at the RSA, installing his work. Richard was also in the Bow Gamelan Ensemble with Anne Bean and Paul Burwell, who I had also seen in Edinburgh, at a performance of their metal bashing and noise making in the St Mary’s Cathedral in the 1980s.
“Yes, of course, it was amazing. And in Dundee, at the art school just a few years ago, all the Bow Gamelan archive and everything” Richard recalls. “Yes, I saw that too, we were that close then, but now here we are, an unplanned but meant meeting? ” I say.
ERNST In the early 1990s, I was involved with a Max Ernst exhibition which focused on his sculptures. One particular sculpture, titled Capricorn is a bit of an icon, not just for its large size and heavy weight, or its form as a large throne-like seat which depict animal-like king and queen figures, but as a key component for a photograph of Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in Sedona, Arizona where they had moved to, by John Kasnetsis in 1948. The photograph depicts Ernst leaning over the back of the sculpture; just his head, shoulders and forearms are visible. Tanning has reclined on the sculpture with her eyes shut, leaning into the strong arms of the king figure. This original sculpture had been made of concrete, scrap iron, and shells in their Sedona garden. Once they had left in 1957 to live in France, plaster moulds of the sculpture were taken and it was cast in bronze a number of times.
When the Ernst exhibition opened in Edinburgh, in 1990, Dorothea Tanning was present at the opening and we all got introduced to her and she shook our hands. In retrospect, this was quite a moment, having since then, visited a major Tanning retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2019, which gave her the status her own art work deserved. Also, while in Edinburgh, she was keen to buy some Scottish knitwear, so my colleague Susan took her in her car up to the St. Andrews Woollen Mill to buy some cashmere.
Following the Edinburgh exhibition, we organised the exhibition to tour in the USA to Newport Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Indianapolis Art Museum during 1991. My job for the US tour was to arrange the transport of the artworks from venue to venue, and assist with the installation of the exhibition at the venues. The Capricorn sculpture was over a tonne weight, so I was always amazed to go to the venues and see the sculpture had arrived safely in the loading bays of the museums.
For the exhibition and tour, we produced some Ernst merchandise. Posters, cards and t-shirts. I carried a suitcase of t-shirts from Edinburgh to the American museums every time I needed to go to the venue, it seemed to be cheaper than posting them, so I was the courier. I also didn’t get one for myself at the time. The t-shirts have become a rare garment, and over the years, I completely forgot what image was used on the t-shirt. I thought it was just a bare-chested Ernst. So, only over a year ago, Susan told me that she had found two of the original t-shirts, and it was the Kasnetsis photograph of Ernst and Tanning on the front. She wanted to keep the originals, but…
“Do you want us to make a version of the original t-shirt?” she asked “Yes please, I think that would be amazing” I said.
So, after 35 years, I finally got my own Max Ernst t-shirt (see my previous 3 Art Stories text for more).
SIEM In 1997, I was asked to curate an exhibition of contemporary German sculptors. Nicola, who I had worked with at the CCA in Glasgow, gave me this opportunity. The exhibition had already gained some funds and a title, The House in the Woods, but there were no artists selected and no other venues other than the CCA to show it at.
“Sure, I’ll do that” I said nervously, “I think I’m ready for this”, and off I went.
So, I’m in Bern, Switzerland at the Kunsthalle, where Wiebke Siem had an exhibition of her sculptures. They looked like large toys, carpets, wigs, dresses, stones and fur coats, but they weren’t these things. They were sculpture, I was informed. They may look like those things but they are definitely sculptures. They were to be looked at as art, not functional objects. It was easy to misinterpret them as they looked very much like the items they represented, but the materials and scale were not quite right. Maybe that’s the point. Sculpture can be anything. Duchamp’s readymades come to mind. It may look familiar but it isn’t what you think it is. I really liked Wiebke. We talked through which of her artworks could be included in the exhibition. She was a friendly creative contemporary German sculptor, and I needed them, for the exhibition.
On my trip to select and gain permission to include certain artists’ artworks in the exhibition, I went to see Thomas Schütte in Düsseldorf. He was very cool, had a maid and gave me catalogues, confidence and chocolate cake (see my previous 3 Art Stories text for more). He showed me images of works he’d like to include and where I could loan them from.
“There’s a museum in Keil which has some of my work, try them” he advised me.
So, I did. They had The Studio on the Hill work, which was a small red-coloured model, a large piece of green felt material and a very long yellow ribbon. When we showed it, we just put lots of cardboard boxes under the green felt to create the hill and placed the studio on the top with the ribbon cascading down it to create a pathway, to make the sculpture.
I’m glad I convinced Schütte to be in the exhibition. I think I might have said the right things, as he came to the opening in Glasgow, along with Wiebke Siem, and Marielle Neudecker who was also in the exhibition. The exhibition also included artworks by Martin Honert and Stephan Balkenhol, but I never met them; I just loaned their artworks from the Saatchi Collection and a gallery in Cologne. I did try and get other artworks from museums in Frankfurt and from other artists I wanted to include such as Katherina Fritsch, but they wouldn’t have worked as the exhibition needed to tour in the UK – which was another challenge.
Aberdeen Art Gallery signed up early on in the schedule, and I just needed another one to justify the funding. I tried various other venues in the UK, and eventually convinced Ormeau Baths Gallery in Belfast to programme the exhibition.
After all that, I saw the exhibition in Glasgow and Aberdeen but I never saw the exhibition in Belfast. I presume it happened, as I was sent some newspaper cuttings, which I included in my after exhibition report.
I’m sitting on the downstairs deck of the No.1 bus going up the Royal Mile with my mother, heading home from our trip to the Edinburgh department stores. I had just bought the new Kraftwerk album, Autobahn, which was sitting flat on my knees, and I was staring at the cover design of the motorway symbol with anticipation. This music seemed pretty exotic and mysterious to me at the time.
On most Saturday mornings, there was always something my mother needed to buy from these stores: Goldbergs, P.T.’s, Binns, Forsyth’s and Jenners. It was a required excursion, to go ‘up the town’ to these vast stores. They sold everything we needed including school uniforms, underwear, household things… and records. I bought a lot of random records from these stores. The Goldbergs store in particular was a unique experience. It stood on its own at Tollcross with huge sculptures fixed onto its façade. It was also exotic; there were parrots in cages and a top floor canteen. You could go outside onto the roof garden, and find more birds in what seemed like bright-white modernist structures. Very European, not like Scotland in the 1970s, which felt brown and grey, and maybe some orange.
Florian Schneider who was one of the founding members of Kraftwerk, died recently; it made me think of their music and how and where I heard it. To add to my Autobahn record, my Dad used to bring me back records from his school football Easter trips to Germany, so I have some odd German issue releases of Kraftwerk and Neu! albums. I still play them now as they still sound like the future. I’m drawn to the machine-like drumming and the relentless beat. I also admire the musicians’ inventive DIY attitude and direct sound. My own drumming is all 4/4, no infills and intuitive. I learnt to read drumming music at school, to play it correctly but I really rely on my instinct when I play. It makes me feel good.
Iain Irving 