Refusing the categories of the mid-1960’s New York art world, Brian O’ Doherty invented new paradigms that are still being explored today

Brian O’ Doherty (1928-2022) passed away on Monday of natural causes at his home in New York, leaving behind a staggeringly extensive legacy as an artist, art critic, novelist, filmmaker, and poet. O’ Doherty was a connoisseur of both/and long before the current art generation extended their endeavors into multiple hyphenated activities. He pushed the envelope on questions of authenticity, identity, and gender through his assumption of multiple identities, and invented such paradigm-shifting concepts as “white cube”, and “alternative art space”. Indeed, his “Inside the White Cube” (1976) essays forged the conceptual framework for Institutional Critique thanks to their groundbreaking questioning of the modernist gallery’s exclusion of the body, time, and history. When I guest-curated O’ Doherty’s early performance works at The Kitchen in 2021, in-house curator Lumi Tan paid homage to how the institution’s ongoing existence, like many other “alternative spaces” in New York was partly a result of Brian’s visionary support as director of the Visual Arts and later Media Art Program at the NEA.

Having initially relocated from his native Ireland to the US in 1957 to do postgraduate medical research at Harvard, O’ Doherty subsequently embraced a career in visual art, following his early passion. Starting out in Boston and moving to New York to take up the position of art critic at the New York Times (1961-64), O’Doherty became a renowned and prolific art writer, who could lend his artistic-led eye and poetic turn of phrase to almost any style, genre, or period of work. Leaving this prestigious position to focus on his art practice, O’Doherty delved into experimental performance, drawing, installation and mixed media works, making his art alongside post-Minimalist peers like Sol Le Witt, Dan Graham, and Eva Hesse, among other close friends like serial musician Morton Feldman. Indeed, he championed their work and provided some of the sightlines of these movements through his editorial/curation of the “exhibition in a box” Aspen 5&6 (1967), which, as Irving Sander described, “summed up that sensibility of that decade and foretold much of what was to influence artists subsequently.”

O’Doherty’s personal artistic concerns overlapped with these later-renowned artist friends, yet he broke the mold by bringing into his art practice questions of identity and creating experimental language-oriented works in the non-existent territory of post-minimalist performance. Born and raised in Ireland, a country whose postcolonial cultural and political complexity was a rich source of thought for O’ Doherty, he engaged with language, not only in terms of narrativity and articulation, but also in terms of doubleness, of breakdown and of failure. He was the first to publish Roland Barthes’ iconic Death of the Author text in 1967, before post-structuralism existed. In parallel, O’ Doherty’s “Structural Plays” (experimental post-structural performance works), moved through and beyond post-Minimalist boundaries, taking up the ancient Irish Ogham language to infuse modernism with an excluded Other. The son of a native Gaelic speaker, O’ Doherty approached language with a sense of double consciousness and a deep understanding of the slippages and slipperiness of language, and by extension of the notion of the authentic self.

In further works, O’ Doherty pushed the rigidity of gender boundaries – writing art criticism under a female persona “to free [him]self from limiting malehood”, while editor of Art in America in the ‘70s, and much later investigating how fluid identities were more acceptable in the 18^th century than the present in his deftly crafted novel, The Crossdresser’s Secret, which centered on the real life of a gender-fluid spy, the Chevalier d’Eon. (One of his other novels, The Deposition of Father McGreevy was nominated for a Booker award.) Highlighting the political agency of artistic identity, O’ Doherty adopted the artist’s name of “Patrick Ireland” in 1972 to demand Civil Rights in Northern Ireland, following the murder of civilians during Bloody Sunday, a name he would not revoke for 36 years. These “gestures” (a self-invented genre) sit alongside drawing-based and installation works, among them his 100+ “rope drawings”, an artistic response to the exclusion of the body in the white cube. O’Doherty’s works are held in museum collections worldwide and are currently being celebrated in a survey exhibition at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (until 2023). His writings have most recently been anthologized in Liam Kelly, ed. Brian O’ Doherty: Collected Essays (2018), Thomas Fischer and Astrid Mania, eds. A Mental Masquerade (2019), and Brenda Moore-McCann, ed. Dear …: Selected Letters from Brian O’ Doherty, 1970s- 2018 (2019).

O’ Doherty exited a world whose current generation is arguably more in sync with his embrace of disciplinary multiplicity, complex identity, and performative language dissolution than the post-Minimal generation he is most associated with. He is survived by Barbara Novak, his wife and creative intellectual companion, and a renowned art historian, as well as playwright, artist, and novelist in her own right. All who knew Brian O’ Doherty will miss his kindness and humor, and a mind so sparkling to the very end that it seemed he might live forever.

Lucy Cotter