A few days after Brian’s death, I dreamed about a bookcase, lined with white books, whose spines bore black printed titles spanning several disciplines. From afar it looked impressive and beautiful but also somewhat conventional, like an art movement tamed by art history. When I reached for a book, however, I found that this object was not a book at all. Made of wood, its back had been cut into a staircase-like shape that slotted in turn into the backs of three other “books,” each of different widths and weights and cut into a unique form, so that together they clicked into place like a traditional Japanese wood join. It struck me that one could not just take a book out and replace it anywhere, at will. Rather, its position was significant and had to be remembered, with respect for the nature of the entire constellation.

On waking, I understood this bookcase to be a metaphor for Brian O’ Doherty’s life’s work, which we might think we “know” from that black-and-white book, Inside the White Cube, which transformed how we think about the gallery space, creating the armature for Institutional Critique. But the dream invites us to look beyond the familiar and recognize that Brian’s vast creative output as a critic, an artist, a novelist, a filmmaker, and a poet is interlinked. It shows us the need to approach his practice as such to fully unpack its significance. This task is beyond crediting Brian as a polymath or listing his various activities side-by-side. It is about recognizing how Brian’s work forges new genres as its functions across and between existing disciplines. As one takes any element of Brian’s work into one’s hands, one must look and re-look, read and re-read, until little by little, one unpacks the radical experimental nature of every aspect of his practice.

Brian was of course a beautiful and prolific writer, who turned over words as easily as an oar turns a wave. To read Object and Idea: An Art Critic’s Journal or Brian’s Collected Essays is to encounter his warm, erudite, and poetic brilliance as he veers seamlessly between Conceptual art and Lee Krasner’s paintings, between Orson Welles’s films and LA culture. Yet the dream image reminds us that his writing and artmaking were one practice, not two. Arguably, none of his critical insights could have been made without his up-close-and-personal experience of being an artist. Notice how one’s understanding of even his most familiar Inside the White Cube essays

shift, when we realize that they were written when Brian was in the process of climbing up and down ladders making his first “Rope Drawings” in space and, in the process, starting to think in embodied ways about the gallery.

In the same period, Brian made a wooden book, painted white with acrylic, its title, Book: Art Since 1945, pressed in type onto its surface, which surely inspired my dream image. With the support of a lawyer, he submitted it to a publisher to fulfill a no-longer-wished-for contractual obligation to produce a book. This was a playful, even humorous gesture, yet it manifests Brian’s deeply-felt refusal to separate art and writing. Like The Critic’s Boots, a sculpture made when he left his position as art critic at the New York Times to focus on his artmaking, it highlights the performativity of the artist-function and the writer/critic-function alike. It invites us to reimagine an art world with always-changing roles that better reflect human creativity.

Brian saw the performance of self as being inherently tied up with language, and he created a series of language-oriented performance works entitled “Structural Plays” (1967–70) to further explore this. Enacted on grids, they share the visual vocabulary of Minimalism and Conceptualism, but remarkably, they center the precolonial Ogham language, challenging modernist paradigms. He acknowledged the decolonial impetus of this gesture in our discussions around re-enacting these early works in 2021. Having grown up in postcolonial Ireland as the son of a native Gaelic speaker, O’Doherty approached language with a sense of its doubleness, breakdown, and failure. In Vowel Chorus for Five Voices (1968), performed live for the first time at the end of Brian’s life, the vowels (“primal utterances”) are performed gutturally until language erodes, returning sound to the body.¹

Some of these performances extend into questions of identity and gender in ways that feel especially resonant in the current moment. While Brian is often credited for his crucial early support of performance and time-based arts as director of the Visual Arts program at the National Endowment for the Arts, he also worked to support LGBTQ artists’ movement from the fringes of the artworld to its center, and to “eradicate gender and racial disparities in the distribution of grants, drawing ire from government officials and NEA staff alike.”² His youth in a repressive Ireland fueled this advocacy of equality and freedom of sexual orientation and gender expression.

Indeed, Brian adopted five additional artistic identities, including a female art critic persona, Mary Josephson, who was created to overcome “limiting malehood.” Publishing “her” work in “his” role as editor of Art in America in the 1970s, Brian staged a covert dialogue between these gendered selves, with Josephson an outspoken feminist. His second novel, The Deposition of Father McGreevy (1999), set in an Irish village, is a piercing reconfiguration of this sexual, gendered social order that duly earned him a nomination for a Man Booker prize. Brian investigated gender fluidity in his stunning novel The Crossdresser’s Secret (2014), which centered on an eighteenth-century spy, the Chevalier d’Éon, who lived his life as a man and a woman. These are still under-examined aspects of his work.

Brian’s insistence on fluidity and multiplicity means that things are never as they first appear in his work. His drawings have dual functions as scores; his seemingly abstract paintings can be read through the strokes of Celtic Ogham writing and are, in this sense, texts. One of his adopted identities, borrowed from a nineteenth-century Irish poet, returns as a character in his second novel. It requires some effort to take any one of these works and turn it over in one’s hand until one recognizes its playful interconnection with other aspects of Brian’s work, inevitably finding some kind of radical subversion in the process. If games are being played here, they are serious ones aimed at deconstructing an art world infrastructure that still upholds rigid role-playing and categorization of creative output. When I shared my personal struggles with this policing of creativity, Brian was reassuring but unwavering. “Embrace your many selves,” he said. And in the silence of his absence, those words echo back. They point us to the task ahead, to embrace his many selves, and in doing so, perhaps find our own.

Notes:

1. See Undoing Language: Brian O’ Doherty Early Performance Works 1967-70, The Kitchen, New York, 2021 https://vimeo.com/720113513

2. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, ed. Word, Image, Institutional Critique: Brian O’ Doherty, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017, p. 87.