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?1
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.2

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).3 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.4

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.5 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.6 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.7

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.8

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.9

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.10 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.11

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.
3
. 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.
4
. 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.
5
. For a project description, see Asher, Michael Asher: Writings 19711981 on Works 19691976, 95100.
6
. This basement room was originally deemed not suitable for exhibition use by the gallery. See Asher,
Michael Asher: Writings 19711981 on Works 19691976, 7281.
7
. 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
8
. Buchloh, Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture, 20.
9
. 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 Benjamin Buchloh, Documenta 7: A Dictionary of Received Ideas,
October, no. 22 (Fall 1982): 104126.
10
. 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), 210
220.
11
. 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.
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