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Michael Asher: Context as Content

Originally published as
Michael Asher: Kontext als Inhalt
in Texte zur Kunst Herbst 1990.
Reprinted in InterReview, 2004





One of a number of 20th century
bronze casts of a 1788 original
marble sculpture of George
Washington by French artist Jean
Antoine Houdon, taken off its
base from its exterior position in
front of the fa�ade of the Chicago
Art Institute, and re-installed by
artist Michael Asher in the center
of the Institutes Gallery 219, a
gallery devoted to European
painting, sculpture, and
decorative arts of the same
period. 73rd American
Exhibition, Art Institute of
Chicago, 1979.





Michael Asher: Context as Content
Anne Rorimer

The prodigious and protean production of Michael Asher has developed and continues to evolve
in critical response to its own definition as art, which perforce is situated within a physical
context as well as within an economic, social, political and historical one. During the last two
decades Asher has sought ways to engage each work with the relevant aspects of its provided
context. In so doing, he has succeeded in freeing his art form the conditions that, in each instance,
he chooses to investigate.

Two seminal works of 1969 demonstrate Ashers early involvement with questions of context
and his redefinition of established relationships between the object of art and its surroundings.
Created for Anti-illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art and for
Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, these works assumed the form of
environmental installations that relied on controlled perceptual conditions. The work of the
Whitney exhibition consisted of an invisible plane of air, barely detectable to the touch, which,
produced by an air blower concealed in the ceiling, was installed in the passageway between two
of the exhibition rooms. It satisfied the theme of the exhibition by taking physical form without
visibly intruding on the exhibition space. Similarly, the work for the Museum of Modern Art took
its surroundings directly into account. In accordance with the exhibitions title, Spaces, Asher
created a room to be entered and experienced acoustically and visually in relationship to the noise
and light levels outside of its walls. As the walls were built especially to absorb sound, visitors
distance from the exit and entry doors proportionately regulated the degree of exterior sound
heard inside. By thus defining the interior space of the work in accordance with its exterior, Asher
2
pointed to the fact that the piece, a hollow container, was not self-contained, but linked with the
ambient sounds and lighting in the museum.
1


Two slightly later works, one of 1973 for the Toselli Gallery in Milan, the other of 1974 for
the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, abandoned the methods of sensory control and opened
up the entire existing exhibition space as an area for consideration. In order to realize the Toselli
piece, Asher requested that all of the many layers of white paint covering the walls and ceilings of
the gallery be removed. Four days of sand blasting revealed a rich brown surface underneath
many coats of paint, visually uniting the walls and ceiling with the raw surface of the concrete
floor. By penetrating the superficial painted surface of the encompassing walls, Asher succeeded
in putting the exhibition space itself on view as an object of study and the subject of the work. As
Asher has written, the withdrawal of the white paint, in this case, became the objectification of
the work,
2
with its content and its container becoming one and the same.

For his exhibition at the Claire Copley Gallery, Asher followed a similar procedure of
objectification through removal when he took away the internal, free-standing partition of the
gallery, which the owner had built to divide the exhibition space from its business area. During
the course of the exhibition the owner at her desk and the gallerys storage were in full view.
Asher thus disclosed the inner works of the exhibition space by exposing its operations behind-
the-scenes. Through the picture window separating the gallery from the street viewers could see
the contents of the gallery as the content of the work. From inside the work/space they could
observe the external reality outside.

Furthermore, because he exposed the day-to-day functions of the gallery in its commercial
capacity, Asher simultaneously brought the normally unseen economic underpinnings of both the
gallery and the work to the fore. Just as the work served as a model of how the gallery
operated, the artist has pointed out, it also served as a model for its own economic
reproduction.
3
All subsequent works by Asher similarly have examined the factors that underlie
their status as art. Ashers one person exhibition at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven,
as a further example, likewise incorporated the interior spaces of the museum into the body of the
work per se. For this exhibition, Asher utilized the rectangular, transparent glass ceiling panels
above the gallery space of the museum to create a work that quite literally took place, like any
exhibition generally, over a period of about a month.

Before the opening of the Eindhoven exhibition, fifteen rows of glass panels had been
removed from their position in the ceiling above those galleries (comprising half of the museum)
that were allotted to Asher for the display of his work. During the beginning of each weekday
workmen proceeded to put the glass back in the ceiling. The closing date of the exhibition was
not set in advance but, instead, was determined by the number of days required to reinstall all of
the panels. The work, therefore, gradually unfolded as the completion of the task drew nearer to a
close. The exhibition ended when the last had been repositioned and thus when the exhibition
space whose walls remained free of other works of art for the duration of Ashers exhibition
was restored to its original condition.

The Eindhoven work presented the procedure of presenting exhibitions. If the Copley work
specifically made manifest the marketing of art, the work at the Van Abbemuseum turned the
exhibition itself into a temporal and spatial event requiring hired labor, which is normally

1

For further information on works executed by Asher before 1980, see Michael Asher in collaboration with Benjamin
H.D. Buchloh, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979 (Halifax: The press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
and Los Angles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1983).

2

Ibid., p.89.

3

Ibid., p.100

3
provided by the institution but which is not part of the finished work itself. Having filled the
exhibition space by emptying it while additionally having defined its own time frame based on
actual necessity, Ashers work turned museum exhibition procedures around in order to
simultaneously reveal and escape them.

Also in 1977 Asher participated in the group exhibition Skulptur, organized by the
Westf�lishes Landesmuseum f�r Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, M�nster. Unlike the Van
Abbemuseum work, which dealt with the nature of the museum exhibition from within the
physical confines of the institutions interior space, the work for M�nster confronted the question
of producing an outdoor sculpture in relation to a site. For this purpose Asher hired an 11-foot
trailer to be parked at nineteen locations during the nineteen-week period of the exhibition.
Stationed one week at a time in a succession of different locations within the city of M�nster and
its suburbs, the trailer moved away from the museum during the first half of the exhibition and
back toward it during the second half. In each of its positions, the trailer was juxtaposed and
absorbed into a variety of environments, both rural and urban. The otherwise detached trailer, a
seemingly self-contained but symbiotic unit linked itself with the community while the museum
responsible for the exhibition provided it with its center of gravity. Figuratively anchored to the
museum, the trailer delineated the boundaries of a work that encompassed the entire community.

The reconstruction of this work for another exhibition, Skulptur Projekte in 1987 M�nster
exactly a decade later, which was organized under the same auspices in the same location and
which was based on the same theme of outdoor sculpture, reinforced its original meaning. The re-
placement of the same k