Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks by Fintan O'Toole

Author:Fintan O'Toole
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-908997-02-9
Publisher: Royal Irish Academy
Published: 2016-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

Aspen 5+6 looked both forwards and backwards as an anti-formalist, multi-authored, interdisciplinary multimedia exhibition. The juxtaposition of the beat prose of William Burroughs’s ‘Naked lunch’ with the austerity of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Text for nothing #8’, or the Dada poetry of Richard Huelsenbeck with that of Michel Butor, left it open to each viewer to play with these and other contributions. O’Doherty’s contributors included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, George Kubler, Merce Cunningham, Morton Feldman, John Cage, László Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp.

From his own generation O’Doherty included Robert Morris and Tony Smith, one of his own minimal language plays (‘Structural Play #3’), Mel Bochner’s ‘Seven translucent tiers’, Sol LeWitt’s ‘Serial Project #1’ and Dan Graham’s ‘March 1966’. These, and Barthes’s seminal essay ‘The death of the author’, were all first published in Aspen 5+6.

On commissioning Barthes, O’Doherty remarked: ‘He got it immediately. My notion that art, writing etc was…a kind of anti-self.’ For the critic Irving Sandler, Aspen 5+6 ‘summed up the sensibility of that decade’.

Aspen 5+6 was also a novel form of manifesto at a critical time when LeWitt and others were writing about their ideas on conceptual art. The shift of emphasis from omnipotent author/artist to viewer/reader, promulgated by Barthes’s essay, is echoed in Duchamp’s lecture ‘The creative act’ (1957), recorded for Aspen 5+6. It is made explicit in the introduction, ‘Placement as language’ (1928), by ‘Sigmund Bode’, one of O’Doherty’s earliest pseudonyms, ‘born’ in Dublin in 1949, when he was still a medical student. The date 1928 playfully recalls O’Doherty’s own date of birth. This anti-authorial strategy also features in Beckett’s ‘Text for nothing #8’: ‘all I say will be false and to begin with not said by me’.

In both concept and form, Aspen 5+6 radically defined a new language for art open to new media, collaboration and a revised role for the viewer as active participant.

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