ASHER

Support and Decoration: Michael Ashers Critique of the Architecture of Display

Miwon Kwon

Artists produce art objects to individuate themselves, thereby filling up spaces with unique encounters. But what has the museum done to provide more exciting experiences for viewers than the artists?

Michael Asher

For more than three decades, Michael Asher has pressed this question, not so much to reveal the museum as a benign provider of exciting experiences but to consistently and rigorously examine how aesthetic experiences are constructed by the institution and framed for the viewers. A central figure in the development of institutional critique, Asher continues to favor surgically precise interventions in exhibition spaces involving material (re)articulations or architectural displacements of elements already found on or familiar to the given site. He does not introduce new objects or gestures brought from elsewhere into exhibition spaces. This has been a guiding principle for Asher since the late 1960s, when he described his method as: using just elements which already existed without a great modification to the space.

His 1979 project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago is a paradigmatic example of his commitment to such a method. In this case, a set of aluminum wall panels cladding the external faade of the museums new annex building was relocated to its interior gallery space. In the new indoor setting, the panels functioned not so much as International Style architectural decoration, covering up the cement blocks of the buildings exterior as before, but as Minimalist art objects, sculptural reliefs made of prefabricated industrial material and displayed to emphasize the logic of serial repetition (i.e., the grid). Through this seemingly simple procedure of displacement, in which a select material already part of the site is moved to a different location and placed in slightly altered relation to existing contextual elements, Asher undid the symbolic function of the wall panels (meant to signify the progressive expansion of the museum) while simultaneously revealing Minimal Arts hidden formalist agenda (which demands the neutrality of the architectural container). In a characteristically succinct manner, the artist noted of this project, I contextualized the sculpture to display the architecture and the architecture to display the problems of sculpture.

Ashers methodological commitment refuses the modernist myth of the work of art as an autonomous entity whose meaning and identity are self-contained, as something that can be moved around from here (studio) to there (museum/gallery/market/living room) without substantial consequence to its integrity. Instead, he insists on the inseparability of the work of art and its supporting context. Or, more precisely, his projects always draw the audiences attention to the context of a given exhibition situation itself as the primary object of consideration, particularly how it functions to determine what can count as a work of art in the first place. Asher accounts for specific supporting conditionsspatial, material, temporal, social, and discursivethat normally remain hidden even as they define the exhibition situation. Consequently, for Asher the exhibition space is never a neutral, empty container awaiting content (to be supplied by the artist attempting to assert his or her individuality), but an already meaningful situation that is laden with historical, political, economic, social, and cultural values and meaning. The fact that these values and meanings, and the mechanisms of their production, remain largely invisible to most of us even while in plain sight further motivates Ashers practice.

Take the modern gallery wall, for example. Typically, it is white and flat. It is ubiquitous. Yet, as common installation practices go, the material presence of a gallery wall is minimized as much as possible in order that it will not distract attention from the work of art. Whether the wall serves as a surface upon which a painting or photograph hangs, or demarcates an area around a sculpture or other three-dimensional display, the successful function of a gallery wall is to disappear, not to be noticed at all. The entrenched cultural belief in the priority (if not the autonomy and even sanctity) of the work of art, in fact, is dependent upon the active neutralization of the gallery wall, for this entrenched belief cannot be sustained without the continuous repression of the actuality and present-ness of the wall.

Against this orthodoxy, Asher has offered the gallery wallits physicality, materiality, and artistic, architectural, and ideological functionsas the central protagonist of the exhibition situation in many projects over the years. Some of these projects have involved a process of displacement, as at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago described above. Other projects have entailed the subtraction of materials found on site in which parts of the given architectural condition, like the wall, are deleted altogether. Ashers removal of a wall at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974, exposing the gallerys backroom office activities as part of the support structure for the display and sale of art in the front room of the gallery, is a well-known instance of such a procedure. Perhaps a lesser-known example is his 1973 project at the Lisson Gallery in London, where the artist cut into the walls of the gallerys basement space to create a continuous floor-level architectural reveal, high by 1 deep, around the entire perimeter of the room. Although this subtractive mark would have been hardly perceptible to inattentive viewers (they would have registered only an empty room), it effectively separated the walls from the floor, destabilizing the perception of the room as a coherent architectural container. Through the very precise withdrawal of building materials, Asher highlighted the two-dimensionality of the walls and the floor as pictorial planes, as flat backgrounds against which artworks are normally positioned as foreground elements. At the same time, since the reveal was located at the base of the walls, it emphasized their object quality as well, as volumetric masses positioned in the gallery space rather than contiguous with it.

If Asher employed a subtractive method at the Lisson Gallery to complicate the hierarchical figure-ground logic of artwork-to-gallery space relationship, it was employed in another 1973 project at the Franco Toselli Gallery in Milan to achieve a different result. Here, Asher sandblasted the entire gallery space, removing the many accumulated layers of white paint on the walls and the ceiling that had accommodated prior exhibitions. In so doing, he literally stripped the gallery space of its conventional costume of white paint and exposed the unevenly colored and rough plaster surfaces beneath. This exposure in turn revealed not only the material specificity of the site (now the same as the material specificity of the artwork) but also revealed the artifice of the appearance of timelessness and autonomy of the display condition that is achieved through the habitual whitening of modern gallery spaces. Asher accomplishes here, as in many of his projects, an ideological deconstruction of the gallery/display condition through the material deconstruction of its parts.

Asher has also constructed walls as strategic additions in other exhibition contexts. His very first exhibition, in 1969 at the San Francisco Art Institute, entailed the building of a partition wall 10 feet high and 36 feet long, made of interlocking modular wall panels found in storage, which divided the existing exhibition space into two different zones, one a relatively open area and the other a passageway. Critically engaging the discourse around Minimalism of the period, Asher simultaneously took away the art object with his partition wall and made the wall of the exhibition space into an object. Or, in the words of art historian Benjamin Buchloh, Asher applied the Minimalist principles of self-referentiality and specificity with a new literalness and immediacy to the architectural container of the exhibition space itself.

Ashers 1982 project at Museum Haus Lange and Esters in Krefeld, Germany, is another, different case in point. Originally designed by Mies van der Rohe in the late 1920s as private residences for Drs. Herman Lange and Joseph Esters, the two houses were renovated to accommodate a municipal museum in 1981. Ashers installation in Haus Lange entailed the construction of walls identical to the preexisting interior walls of the house but rotated 90 degrees so that they intersected the existing architecture at right angles. This overlay or composite of two identical plans one on top of another with a shift in axis created a situation in which, once again, the given space of display became an object of display itself. Ashers walls, as they traversed the house, extending beyond its perimeter walls to cross the front and back gardens, shifted in identity from outdoor pavilion enclosure to indoor partition, from sculptural object to architectural plane. They also oscillated between representational space (as Ashers walls re-produced the existing walls of Haus Lange) and actual space (as they literally reorganized the architectural experience of the house). Ashers intervention made plain how identities and functions of architectural components, like the wall, are unfixed. They are dependent on the particular disposition produced by conjunctures and interrelationships of contingent elements.

It is further instructive to compare Ashers Haus Lange project to the concurrent project at Haus Esters by Daniel Buren, who is cited as often as Asher as a father figure of sorts for institutional critique. Asher and Buren were in fact invited at the same time to produce a project for Haus Lange and Haus Esters respectively. The two artists agreed not to share their plans with each other, but as it turned out they both replicated at full scale the existing interior walls of Haus Lange. However, whereas Ashers installation entailed the exact doubling of existing interior walls and their relations to one another, only rotated 90 degrees, Burens installation involved the transposition of Haus Langes interior wall plan inside Haus Esters. Burens walls were also distinguished by his signature stripes, accentuating their status as flat pictorial surfaces on the one hand (referencing painting more than sculpture or architecture) and, on the other, marking their difference from the existing walls and surrounding context. Consequently, despite the seeming similarity between the artistic acts of the two artists, the resulting effects were radically divergent. In Burens installation, the work of art is a product bearing the distinct mark of an artists creativity (i.e., the striping of the walls), and this product is asserted as separate from, if not independent of, the exhibition context. Ashers project, in this instance and elsewhere, asserts the opposite.

The current installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is no exception. Employing a methodological approach similar to that of his Haus Lange project, this installation also literally replicates at full scale the existing interior walls used for the display of art, yielding a kind of architectural composite that is somewhat analogous to a single photographic print made from multiple negatives. But unlike the earlier German project, which doubled in order to displace an existing plan, the Santa Monica project reconstructs all the temporary walls that have ever been built in the museum over the institutions twenty-year history at its Bergamot Station location. Using the same metal or wood studs normally employed at the museum (no unfamiliar materials introduced here either), Asher frames out the exhibition history of the museum as a material and architectural accumulation. The project thus becomes an archive or inventory of past transformations of the museums exhibition space that inevitably manifests what was originally deemed by the museum staff to be appropriate if not ideal for the showcasing of particular artworks over the years. In this simultaneous presentation of multiple exhibition layouts, the spatial overlay of the earlier German project is replaced by a temporal overlay, providing the viewer with the opportunity to both see and physically encounter the mechanics of display conventions as they shift in relation to the contingency of time.

Significantly, the walls of Ashers installation at the Santa Monica Museum are only demarcations, skeletal frameworks delineating the positions of past walls rather than asserting their material presence. They are neither fully realized pictorial planes nor volumetric masses as explored in earlier projects. In part, this is due to the practical need of providing access into the museum space, which would not be possible if all the walls were to be rendered as solid forms. But their provisional, even ghostly, quality as structural outlines, as unfinished walls, seems suitable to the task of revealing the temporariness of the architecture of temporary exhibitions. By emphasizing the impermanence of these walls through their literal hollowness and transparency, Asher underscores the transience of what commonly appears permanent and stable, including ultimately the institution of the museum itself. He further reveals the conventions of wall construction with its dependence on modularity of parts (i.e., prefabricated studs and drywall boards), allowing the viewer to recognize the interrelatedness of conventionalized building technology and conventionalized display techniques.

The fact that Ashers site-specific projects not only take their cues from existing material conditions of an exhibition context, but also make those very conditions the work, means that the complexity of what they reveal can often be missed. And since his interventions do not introduce elements that are unfamiliar or foreign to the exhibition contextthey never declare their newness or uniqueness as works of artit can sometimes seem as if the artist did nothing at all. Yet, what he proposes through his interrogative projects is nothing short of a radicalization of the exhibition situation in which even the most minor aspect of it must be questioned. Given the profoundly unself-reflective, hyperbolic, gluttonous, and delirious intensification of the production and presentation of art today, Ashers ongoing commitment to what English artist Victor Burgin described in the early 1970s as a situational aesthetic seems all the more important and necessary. His principled methodology holds out the possibility of a sober critical artistic engagement that is an antidote to the forgetfulness or willful blindness that refuses to see the white gallery walls for what they really are and what they really do.

. Michael Asher, in conversation with author, August 31, 2007.

. Michael Asher, as quoted by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh in Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture (1980), in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 19551975 (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), 20.

. On the matter of Minimalisms ambivalent relation to modernist formalism, see Hal Foster, The Crux of Minimalism, in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 3570.

. Michael Asher, Michael Asher: Writings 19711981 on Works 19691976, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1981), 198.

. For a project description, see Asher, Michael Asher: Writings 19711981 on Works 19691976, 95-100.

. This basement room was originally deemed not suitable for exhibition use by the gallery. See Asher, Michael Asher: Writings 19711981 on Works 19691976, 7281.

. Ashers attention to the material specificity of the architectural container is a challenge to Minimalisms localized focus on the material specificity of the art object. See Asher, Michael Asher: Writings 19711981 on Works 19691976, 8894

. Buchloh, Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture, 20.

. Ashers intervention at Haus Lange is in critical conversation with postmodern architecture of the early 1980s, particularly Peter Eisenman and the architecture of deconstruction. As Asher writes in his statement regarding this project: With its shift of axis this work reflects a familiar condition found within the Post-Modern discourse where a comparable shift would claim to be a sign of aesthetic achievement in architecture. It is hoped that numerous other questions arise about the way in which structures with identical elements function within the separate discourses of art and architecture. See the exhibition catalog Michael Asher/Daniel Buren (Krefeld, Germany:Kunstmuseen der Stadt Krefeld, 1982). n.p. Asher subsequently reconstructed the ground-floor walls of Haus Esters in Kassel, Germany, for Documenta 7 in 1982. There, Ashers intervention highlighted the effort of Rudi Fuchs, the curator of Documenta 7, who tried to assert a museological postmodernism through the diagonal placement of many display walls, a gesture that is likely informed by postmodernist architectural discourse of the time. See also CONTACT _Con-4081683420 \c \s \l Benjamin Buchloh, Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas, October, no. 22 (Fall 1982): 104126.

. For an analysis of the relationship between site-specific art and the logic of photography, see my essay Unfixing Values, in Christian Philipp Mller (Amsterdam and Basel: Hatje Cantz and Kunstmuseum Basel, 2007), 1528. See also Rosalind Krauss, Notes on the Index: Part 2, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 210220.

. In this regard, the project at the Santa Monica Museum of Art recalls Ashers 1988 installation at the Artist Space in New York. There, in a space recently redesigned to convert it from its original function as a site of manufacturing to an alternative space for the presentation of contemporary art, the artist filled in the upper portion of the display walls that were left open by the architects of the sites adaptive reuse. By completing the walls, taking them up to the high ceiling, but leaving his insertion unpainted, Asher not only revealed the material reality of the walls as new constructions but also made visible the broader socio-cultural-economic phenomenon of SoHo and Tribecas adaptive reuse of industrial spaces, which we also call gentrification. See John Vincis essay Michael Asher: The Wall as Object, the Gallery as Framework, in the exhibition catalog Michael Asher/James Coleman (New York: Artist Space, 1988), n.p. For an analysis of Ashers project in relation to the urban transformation of lower Manhattan and the simultaneous rise of the alternative art scene, see Martin Beck, Alternative: Space, in Alternative Art New York, 19651985, ed. Julie Ault, (Minneapolis and New York: University of Minnesota Press and The Drawing Center, 2003), 249279.