Modern Lab: The Box as Form, Structure, and Container
Image: Andy Warhol, Portraits of the Artists, 1967. Gift of The Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, 2006.126.9 The Modern Lab is a small gallery dedicated to focused installations of modern and contemporary works in a variety of media from the Gallery's collection. Art objects do not exist alone; they are subject to accumulation, display, and rearrangement. The box allows the artist to act out this relational impulse and at the same time make it a subject of the work. Some of the boxes here address art's relationship to the camera, other optical devices, or the diorama; they let in or block out light and they enable or obstruct perception. Others address the relationship of art to architecture and its dichotomies: looking in and looking out, open and closed, concealment versus exposure. Boxes allow artists to consider the architectural problem of how to combine two-dimensional surfaces to create three-dimensional objects. Conversely, the unfolded, commercially produced cardboard ...