Brian O‘Doherty is first and foremost, an artist. This may come as a surprise to those who already know him as the internationally renowned art critic. Yet, art has been, and continues to be, the central unifying factor of a life which straddles parallel, yet distinct, roles, of artist, critic, administrator, teacher, and novelist. Added to these is the work of another persona since the early 1970s, Patrick Ireland, who is also an artist.1 In this age of professionalism and rigid specialization, the work of both personae has escaped adequate critical appraisal until recently.2 3 4 This relative neglect is perhaps not too surprising given that the ‘language’ of art has changed remarkably since the late 1960s, and is only recently receiving the attention of art historians and critics. This article outlines some aspects of the artistic achievement of O‘Doherty/Ireland over the past forty years.
O‘Doherty, although born in Ireland, where he qualified as a doctor, has been based in New York since 1960. There, he became one of the pioneering figures of conceptual art from the mid-1960s. Briefly, this was a revolutionary turning-point in contemporary art in which the perception and practice of art were redefined as primarily a medium for ideas rather than the production of objects, (paintings or sculptures), designed for exclusively visual pleasure. An allied concern was the consumption of art as another commodity in the consumer culture of a post-industrial Western world. Modern art’s notions of the autonomy of the art object, devoid of any social or political content, together with the authority of the gallery, dealer, and critic in the evaluation of art, were all challenged by conceptual art. Philosophical ideas about language, mass media and culture, politics, and subjectivity, became the locus of artistic interpretation through artists’ works, and writings. Other cultural forms such as music, dance, media, film and video were transposed to the context of art, both inside and outside of the gallery. Earlier suppressed historical forms of artistic practice were reinterpreted in a contemporary context to provide alternative models of creativity and practice. Categories of art expanded far beyond the traditional genres of painting and sculpture to include, among others, Performance, Installation, Land Art, the Readymade, and Happenings. The ‘look’ of conceptual art was therefore diverse, and resistant to traditional art historical concepts of an individual or ‘period’ style. Often an individual artist’s practice, as is the case with O‘Doherty/ Ireland’s, spanned more than one of the new genres.
Conceptual art can be best defined in terms of a critical attitude, one which continues to generate questions about art in general, including conceptual art itself. In its dominant formulation, conceptual art uses language as a medium in the form of text to analyse definitions of art. Language is used to avoid the traditional emphasis upon visual form, for which the eye acts as the privileged sense in perception. Other formulations, to which O‘Doherty/Ireland’s art belongs, in spite of his use of language, address art issues, but also adopt a range of intellectual, social, and political concerns within a wider context linked to other cultural disciplines. This alternative to so-called ‘linguistic’ conceptualism, spans a plurality of new media, which may or may not also use text. Thus, the new ‘canvas’ for making art might use as a medium, the body, land, billboard signs, mathematical systems, documentary photography, and various modifications of gallery spaces.
O‘Doherty’s artistic life began in Ireland where he regularly exhibited while still a medical student. An early work entitled Preacher (c1945) , depicts rejection of Church hypocrisy. Painted at the age of seventeen, it displays an early critical attitude which continues to inform his art. Having spent some time engaged in the study of perception in the Experimental Psychology Laboratories, at Cambridge University, England, O‘Doherty left for the United States in 1957 to continue his medical studies at Harvard University. By the late 1950s and early 1960s however, he decided to pursue a career in art rather than medicine. While still living in Boston, this took the form of televised interviews on WGBH with prominent artists and writers, and the pioneering use of television for public art education from the Museum of Fine Arts. Moving to New York in 1960, he worked for WNBC television, and became art critic of The New York Times. A couple of years later, he resigned his post as critic. Initially influenced by Minimalism, he began to make art again in the mid-1960s within the intense intellectual milieu of a group of fellow artists and critical theorists. These included Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Peter Hutchinson, Dorothea Rockburne and Eva Hesse.
The year 1967, was a watershed in this early phase of O‘Doherty’s work. In that year, he edited and produced one of conceptual art’s earliest exhibitions,5 Aspen 5/6, in the form of a portable box/magazine. He commissioned contributions from minimal/conceptual contemporaries, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Robert Morris, Mel Bochner as well as including his own language work, Structural Play No. 3. He juxtaposed these with a cross-section of work from the art historical avant-garde and other cultural disciplines. Roland Barthes’ famous essay, The Death of the Author, LeWitt’s first serial piece, Serial Project No. 1 ( A,B,C,D), and Graham’s Schema, were first published in Aspen 5/6. It also included Russian Constructivists, and such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, Tony Smith, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo and Norton Pevsner, Hans Richter, John Cage, Morton Feldman, George Kubler, George Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Richard Huelsenbeck, Douglas MacAgy, Michel Butor and Merce Cunningham. Using a spectrum of media in the form of records, texts, drawings, boards and films, this international galaxy of contemporaries and ‘ancestors’ was ‘held together in several conceptual schema, cross-referenced through traditions and themes.’6 The broadness of the conceptual framework with the inclusion of other cultural forms; the vernacular mode of presentation outside of the art system of the gallery; the shift to active participation of the reader/ viewer/listener; all mark this as a significant conceptual work. The American art historian, Irving Sandler, concluded during the last decade, that O‘Doherty’s Aspen 5/6 had, ‘summed up the sensibility of the decade and foretold much of what would influence artists subsequently...’ 7
It was also in 1967 that O‘Doherty introduced the labyrinth into contemporary art. This model for more active participation in the reception of art, was taken up later by many other artists, including Robert Morris in 1974. O‘Doherty’s, however, was not derived from the classical labyrinth with its oppressive implications of danger at the core. His were derived from a combination of other sources, including the pattern of formal gardens, the chessboard, and the open-ended motif of the Irish St Bridget’s Cross, to evoke ideas of rites of passage, inside and outside, enclosure, and the relations between these and ourselves, both physically and psychologically.
The Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, which began in 1966, was another significant work completed in 1967. With Marcel Duchamp’s co-operation, O‘Doherty recorded his heartbeat on an electrocardiogram and subsequently ‘animated’ it with three boxed oscilloscopes, hung on the wall. He also made a series of drawings to complete the sixteen-part work. The Portrait functions at many different levels. It is an early conceptual ‘portrait’ in which the ‘sitter’ is known only by the title of the work, thus stretching the boundaries of portraiture to new limits. It tests the long-held assumption that the location of individual subjectivity and consciousness is in the mind, by placing it in the body. It draws attention to conditions within our society in which there is a reduction of personal identity by technology, by paradoxically using a technologically generated line. But, it is also an early critique of some of Duchamp’s ideas from within conceptual art. By taking Duchamp’s heartbeat and ‘animating’ it on a wall, O‘Doherty humorously subverts Duchamp’s contention that putting art on the wall of the museum effectively consigned it to death.
In 1967, O‘Doherty first introduced the ancient Celtic language of Ogham (c 5th-7th century A.D.) (pronounced ‘oh-um’), into contemporary art. Ogham, originally found on standing stones which may have been grave or boundary markers, transcribed twenty letters of the Roman alphabet into a series of vertical or slanting lines on or across the edge of the stone. Unlike any other conceptualist, O‘Doherty’s use of a ‘silent’ language system shows that, like visual forms, languages are ultimately artefacts belonging to a particular culture. Both O‘Doherty, and Ireland, have used Ogham to produce a large series of drawings, sculptures, wall paintings and, more recently, easel paintings, since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Newman’s Razor (1970), is one of O‘Doherty’s Ogham sculptures. Part of its title refers to Cardinal Newman, the founder in 1854 of the Catholic university, University College Dublin. The only other university at the time was the University of Dublin, Trinity College, founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1592 exclusively for Protestants.8 The second part of the title refers to the medieval scholastic philosopher, William of Ockham. O‘Doherty, was attracted to Ockham’s reductivism, which anticipated Le Corbusier’s ‘Less is More,’ stating: ‘Why do with more what can be done with less?’ This statement is known as ‘Ockham’s Razor.’
The sculpture, a free-standing four square column extending to a height of 335 cm., is situated in a sunken garden at University College Dublin. It is inscribed with a progressive series of Ogham numbers, 123, 132, 213, 231, etc., on the stainless steel cladding. The changing environment surrounding the work, including its viewer, becomes part of its subject matter. With alternation of light, the sculpture appears to ‘dissolve,’ or become a mirror of nature. From many perspectives, we are invited to contemplate the complexities involved in ‘seeing and believing’, in the act of looking, and perceiving.
The early 1970s was another fruitful phase of O‘Doherty’s career. Changing his name to Patrick Ireland in 1972 (see below), he embarked upon a large series of installations, called Rope Drawings, becoming one of the early practitioners of this mode of practice. These continue today. All, of which there are over 100, are conceived and executed by the artist, with assistants used only in recent years. Some have been outdoor pieces, but the majority have been executed indoors as site-specific installations using ordinary rope and house-paint to obliterate the ‘white cube’ of the modernist gallery.9 The majority are ephemeral works documented primarily by memory, but also by photographs or drawings. Historically important, in the context of Minimalism/ conceptualism’s concern with decentring viewer attention away from objects in the gallery, Ireland’s Rope Drawings extend viewer experience to issues outside of gallery spaces, (even when in them), by virtues of the range of their subject matter.
One recent installation, without ropes, is One, Here, Now: The Ogham Cycle (1996), which was installed in the Sirius Art Centre at Cobh, Co. Cork, while Ireland was artist-in-residence . This is one of the few permanent installation pieces in O’Doherty/Ireland’s oeuvre. Using words he had already used in many different media over the years, this whole-room installation articulates O’Doherty/Ireland’s abiding concerns with the location of the individual (ONE), in time (HERE), and space (NOW), using three languages, Ogham, Irish, and English. These function in the Cycle (a title with Italian art references, but also with the historian, Vico (1688-1744) to juxtapose Irish historical linguistic experience with that of the site, a port of Irish emigration to America for hundreds of years. Each of the nine large wall-panels is painted with Ogham lines which either translate the vowel underneath and its Irish equivalent above, or a word in English. Without any hierarchy of one part over another, the viewer is free to wander about the space aided by the painted Ogham alphabet above the gallery windows. This ‘score’ facilitates unlocking the codes of this fugue-like composition of colour and line.
Finally, why did O‘Doherty change his artist name to Ireland in 1972? Briefly, it was an emigrant’s response through art, to the killing by British Army Paratroopers, of thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers on January 30th 1972, in Northern Ireland. In this first performance art carried out in Ireland, entitled Maze, O‘Doherty, enacted the legal, linguistic, visual, and geographical constructs of identity. Signing a statement before a lawyer and an audience of witnesses, he undertook to retain the name Patrick Ireland for all his visual art until all citizens have their civil rights restored and the British have left the North of Ireland. The resonance of this act continues to reverberate over the last three decades within Ireland’s art, as well as within the country’s politics.10 The forthcoming retrospective exhibition of O’Doherty/ Ireland’s art in the spring of 2004 which shall open at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, and travel to both Europe and the United States, will provide the opportunity for a wider audience to experience the work of this challenging and compelling artist.

Dr Brenda Moore-McCann was awarded a Ph.D. by University of Dublin, Trinity College for her thesis Ireland in Perspective: The Art of Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland in 2002.

1 The circumstances of this change of artist name is discussed later in this article.
2 Alberro, A & Stimson, B., (eds.), Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press.
3 Ratcliff, C., Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975 (2000), New York, School of Visual Art & Allworth Press.
4 Moore-McCann, B., Ireland in Perspective: The Art of Brian O‘Doherty / Patrick Ireland (2002), Ph. D. thesis, University of Dublin, Trinity College.
5 Alexamder Alberro, a scholar of conceptual art, designated O‘Doherty’s Aspen 5/6 the first exhibition of conceptual art in a Round Table discussion, Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp, October 70 (1994), Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, pp. 127-146.
6 Patrick Ireland quotation from Apen 5 / 6 (1967), by Jan van der Marck in exhibition catalogue, Patrick Ireland: Gestures Instead of an Autobiography (1994), The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, p.16.
7 Sandler I., ‘Book: Art since 1945’ in Patrick Ireland: Gestures Instead of an Autobiography (1994), p.35.
8 ‘The Catholic Relief Act (1793) enabled Catholics to enter Trinity…but in spite of this, Trinity’s ethos and management continued to be Protestant and unionist.’ McCarthy, D. UCD: A National Idea: The History of University College Dublin (1999), Dublin, Gill & McMillan, p. 1.
9 O’Doherty coined the term ‘white cube’, used ubiquitously in art, in a series of essays in Artforum (1976), subsequently published as a book, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (1986), San Francisco, Lapis Press. Translated widely, an expanded edition was published in 1999 by Berkeley University Press, California.
10 The current Saville Inquiry has been re-investigating the events of Bloody Sunday for the past three years, decades after the initial Widgery Inquiry (1972), exonerated the British soldiers.