Brian O’Doherty was born in Ireland in 1928, originally studied medicine in Dublin in the early 1950’s and moved to the USA in 1957 to complete medical studies at Harvard. From 1958 to 1964 he worked, at first in television in Boston, and later for three years (1961-64) as art critic for the New York Times. He was also editor-in-chief of Art in America and a reporter (for six years in the 1970s) on art and architecture for NBC's Today program in the US. He lectured widely in Europe and America and gave the Lowell Lectures at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Franklyn Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas. He was also a recipient of the College Art Association's Mather Award for Criticism.
His art criticism remains among the most respected in the field of art writing and has had considerable influence. A convincing example of this is his series of essays, originally published in Artforum, then published as a book, Inside the White Cube. These essays became intrinsic to art discourse in the U.S., Europe and South America, and have been translated into many languages - first into German, most recently into French and Spanish. ‘White Cube’has become an everyday phrase used to denote the antiseptic white gallery space within which art is customarily shown.
O'Doherty's most ambitious work is probably American Masters: The Voice and the Myth, on eight American artists, including Edward Hopper and Mark Rothko, long time friends of the writer. Other chapters on Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Stuart Davis, have been widely referenced.
His Collected Essays were published by University of California Press in 2018. Always interested in cultural matters and the vernacular, these essays cover, as well as individual artists, Rothko, Warhol et al, such topics as the politics and aesthetics of heart transplants, the aesthetic of the microscope and the signs of Las Vegas. He had a particular interest in film (O'Doherty was once director of the film program at the National Endowment for the Arts) and the collection includes essays on experimental film, his friend Hans Richter and Orson Welles.
As an artist living in New York he became part of the Conceptual art movement. Here there was a rejection of sensory craft skills, in favour of ideas and thinking, and O’Doherty played his role, ‘at least as an assistant midwife’, at the birth of conceptual art. In his series of rope drawings and structural plays: networks, mazes, labyrinths and grids are deployed. In his 1985 installation Purgatory, for example, he transposes ‘word’ lines from the labyrinthine and arabesque complexity of Joyce’s non-sentences in the dreamtime of Finnegan’s Wake into a three dimensional rope drawing.
As well as the pantheon of Irish writers, O’Doherty had immersed himself in French symbolist writing and the New York circle to which he belonged was interested in the French new novel, the structure of which tends to be minimalist in its emotional direction rather than coaxing emotion. Both Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes were included in his 1967 project Aspen 5/6 which was dedicated to Stephane Mallarmé. This was the first English language publication of the influential post-structuralist text The Death of The Author commissioned by O’Doherty from Barthes. The French version was published in 1968.
With O’Doherty the Aspen magazine takes the form of a white box as ‘exhibition’ space containing in a variety of media works including inter alia - film (Hans Richer), music (Cage, Feldman), literature (Beckett, Borrows), dance (Cunningham), sculpture (Smith), O’Doherty himself and one of his aliases Sigmond Bode.
Over the years he accommodated multiple selves, sounding out from multiple viewpoints. In 1972 O’Doherty ritualistically changed his name to Patrick Ireland (to be adopted when working as an artist) in a performance in Dublin. The name change was provoked by the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry, Northern Ireland that year. With the IRA ceasefire holding and the embedding of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland in 2008, he buried his alter ego Patrick Ireland, perhaps even more ceremoniously than at his birth, in the grounds of IMMA, Dublin.
In 1992, in another switch of role, O’Doherty published his first work as an novelist The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. The intriguing dyadic problematics of the ‘regarding/seeing’ phenomenon percolate through the pages of this novel, a fiction based on a real medical case. In 2000 his novel The Depostion of Father McGreevy was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The word and the eye formed an ever developing binary in O’Doherty’s art practice and in his writing.
In 2012 O’Doherty was awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. The award cited his originality, brilliance and the accessibility of his prose. It emphasised his ability ‘…to advance the public understanding and appreciation of the visual arts in a way that is grounded on scholarship yet appealing to a broad range of audiences’.
It may be noted O’Doherty and his wife Barbara Novak took part in the AICA congress Art and Centres of Conflict – Outer and inner Realities in Northern Ireland in 1997 and he also presented a paper at the AICA congress Critical Evaluation Reloaded in Paris in 2006.
It was Lucy Lippard, a close associate, who in the 1960’s advocated another crossover - that writers should become artists; artists become writers and curators. I know of no other person who fulfilled her liberating call with such purposeful interconnected outcomes, justifying the New Yorker’s declaration some years ago that Brian O’Doherty was ‘one of New York’s most treasured artist-intellectuals’.
‘Brian O’Doherty - Collected Essays’ ed. by Liam Kelly was published by University of California Press, 2018