Brian O’Doherty, Paradigm-Shifting Artist and Author, Dies at 94
Brian O’Doherty, who pushed the envelope on questions of authenticity, id, and gender by his assumption of a number of identities, died this Monday, November 7 on the age of 94. He left behind a staggeringly in depth legacy as an artist, artwork critic, novelist, filmmaker, and poet, together with such paradigm-shifting ideas because the “white dice” and the “different artwork house” — concepts that cast the conceptual framework for institutional critique by their questioning of the modernist gallery’s exclusion of the physique, time, and historical past.
Born in 1928, O’Doherty relocated from his native Eire to the US in 1957 to pursue postgraduate medical analysis at Harvard, however as an alternative embraced a profession in visible artwork following his early ardour. Beginning out in Boston and transferring to New York to take up the place of artwork critic on the New York Instances from 1961 to 1964, O’Doherty turned a famend and prolific artwork author who may lend his artistic-led eye, voracious mind, and poetic flip of phrase to virtually any type, style, or interval of labor. He ultimately left the function to concentrate on his artwork follow, delving into experimental efficiency, drawing, set up, and mixed-media works and making artwork alongside post-Minimalist friends together with Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, and Eva Hesse and the serial musician Morton Feldman. He supplied a few of the sightlines of those actions by his work on Aspen 5&6 (1967), a “journal in a field” that prophetically honed in on yet-unfolding inventive considerations.
Whereas his private inventive considerations overlapped with these of his later-renowned artist mates, O’Doherty broke the mould by bringing into his artwork follow questions of id, and by creating experimental language-oriented works within the non-existent territory of post-Minimalist efficiency. A local of Eire, a rustic whose postcolonial cultural and political complexity was a wealthy supply of thought for O’Doherty, he engaged with language not solely by way of narrative and articulation, but in addition in its potential for doubleness, breakdown, and failure.
He was the primary to publish Roland Barthes’s iconic “Dying of the Creator” essay in 1967, earlier than Submit-Structuralism took off. In parallel, O’Doherty’s “Structural Performs,” experimental efficiency works, moved by and past post-Minimalist boundaries, taking on the traditional Celtic Ogham language to infuse modernism with elements of the pre-colonial tradition it excluded. The son of a local Gaelic speaker, O’Doherty approached language with a way of double consciousness and a deep understanding of the slippages and slipperiness of language, and by extension a mistrust of the notion of the genuine self.
In additional works, O’Doherty pushed in opposition to the rigidity of gender boundaries. As an editor of Artwork in America within the Seventies, he penned criticism below a feminine persona “to free [him]self from limiting malehood”; a lot later, his deftly crafted novel, The Crossdresser’s Secret (2013), explored the acceptance of gender fluidity within the 18th century by the actual story of the Chevalier d’Éon, a spy who lived as each a person and a lady. (One among O’Doherty’s different novels, The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999), was nominated for a Booker award.)
Highlighting the political company of inventive id, O’Doherty adopted the artist’s title of “Patrick Eire” in 1972 to demand Civil Rights in Northern Eire following the homicide of civilians throughout Bloody Sunday, a moniker he wouldn’t revoke for 36 years. These conceptual “gestures” are deepened by drawing-based and set up works, together with his greater than 100 Rope Drawings, a response to the exclusion of the physique within the “white dice” that typical exhibition areas resemble.
“Now we have now reached some extent the place we see not the artwork however the house first,” O’Doherty wrote in “Contained in the White Dice: The Ideology of the Gallery House,” his groundbreaking vital essay first revealed in 1976. “A picture involves thoughts of a white, splendid house that, greater than any single image, often is the archetypal picture of twentieth century artwork; it clarifies itself by a means of historic inevitability normally connected to the artwork it comprises.”
O’Doherty sought methods to reintroduce durational time, lived historical past, and the bodily physique into the gallery, difficult the paradigm through which “eyes and minds are welcome however space-occupying our bodies aren’t.”
Past his artwork and writing, O’Doherty was an important early supporter of different areas and artwork practices in his function as director of the Visible Arts Program and, later, the primary Media Artwork Program on the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts. Throughout an occasion celebrating his early efficiency works held at The Kitchen in 2021, workers in-house curator Lumi Tan paid homage to how the establishment’s ongoing existence, like many different “different areas” in New York, was partly due to his backing.
O’Doherty’s works are held in museum collections worldwide and are presently being celebrated in a survey exhibition at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein till 2023. His writings have most not too long ago been anthologized in Brian O’ Doherty: Collected Essays (2018), A Psychological Masquerade (2019), and Pricey …: Chosen Letters from Brian O’ Doherty, Seventies-2018 (2019).
O’ Doherty exited a world arguably extra in sync along with his embrace of disciplinary multiplicity, complicated id, and language dissolution than the post-Minimalist era he’s most related to. He’s survived by artwork historian and artist Barbara Novak, his spouse and lifelong artistic mental companion. All who knew Brian O’Doherty will miss his kindness and humor, and a thoughts so glowing to the very finish that it appeared he may dwell perpetually.