O’Doherty to grace the stage for lecture

Brian O'Doherty made a portrait of famed artist Marcel Duchamp with an electrocardiogram, not a brush. O'Doherty's portrait only uses the electrocardiogram graph, printed out of a machine on now aging paper. "Marcel Duchamp, 4/4/46," it reads—just one portrait of many O'Doherty would make using the measurement.

O'Doherty will discuss his Duchamp portraits, and himself, in his upcoming lecture for the Art Department entitled "Duchamp's Heart and My Multiple Selves." The lecture will take place on Feb. 21 at 6 p.m. in Taylor Hall 102. Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art Tyler Rowland proposed bringing O'Doherty to Vassar. 

O'Doherty is a living Renaissance man to many—having been a medical doctor, art critic, novelist and television host, among other things. "He's not only a man who wears multiple hats," Rowland said, "each hat fits perfectly." His book, Inside the White Cube, introduced an entirely novel concept: thinking of the art gallery as an ideological space, whose very sanitized, "white cube" style necessarily affects the viewing experience of art. "To be honest no one at that point had written about the gallery space as a hermetic or political place," Rowland said. "Through his analysis of artists' work in the 60'S and 70's, O'Doherty showed new ways for artists to think about their own work in relation to what he called 'The White Cube.'" His lecture and appearance means three of his works are planned to come to Vassar.

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center will hold three of his works, including "The Body and Its Discontents" and "The Alphabet Print." "The Body and Its Discontents" is a small, wooden box divided as a grid into 60 compartments, and within each compartment are blocks with categories. "Alphabet Print" is one of his more recent works, and deals with O'Doherty's Irish roots and language.

The third work is his aforementioned portrait of Marcel Duchamp, an 8.5 x 11 inches paper with ink and typewriter in electrocardiograph form. The Art Library will house one more work by O'Doherty, his "Aspen Magazine 5 + 6." A conceptual work commissioned for legendary art journal Aspen, the work is a box filled with items like audiotapes and films non-traditional to magazines, in addition to written works.

"He's one of the sages of the art world," Chair of the Art Department Molly Nesbit said. "[He] is someone who's able to communicate wisdom, and the wisdom of a lifetime—and not just his own lifetime."

The lecturer himself will first focus on his Duchamp portraits, and then talk about his multiple selves. Rowland explained, "He has these five different identities, Brian O'Doherty himself, and four alter-egos." O'Doherty, an expatriate of Ireland has created work under the name Patrick Ireland, for example, in protest of 1972's Bloody Sunday. Further detail is still unknown until the lecture's delivery.

The lecture is part of the Agnes Claflin Lecture series, sponsored by the Friends of the Loeb Center. "It's a way of continuing to bring the best in the arts to Vassar. And we are very lucky," Nesbit said. Its lectures hope to bring in a swath of people from the art world from historians to upcoming contemporary artists. Nesbit characterizes the lecturers in each Claflin lecture succinctly: "People who are making a difference."

Rowland is excited for O'Doherty's arrival. "He's constantly investigating and experimenting," Rowland said. "He's not interested in creating distilled styles or pre-packaged one-liners. He's interested in setting up a way of working that becomes expansive."