Michael Asher (artist) - Works

Works

Asher's work takes the form of "subtle yet deliberate interventions – additions, subtractions or alterations – in particular environments." His pieces were always site-specific; they were always temporary, and whatever was made or moved for them was destroyed or put back after the exhibitions.

His work in the late 1960s and early 1970s consisted of dividing up gallery spaces using partition walls and curtains, and designing environments that reflected or absorbed sound. For his first solo exhibition at the La Jolla Museum of Art, Asher installed a tone generator in one of the gallery walls that effectively cancelled out all sound waves in the room, creating a dead zone in the center of the gallery. In 1969, for the group show “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he concealed a blower above a door to create a slab of air that visitors passed through when they moved from one gallery to the next. In the 1970s he began to remove elements from spaces, for example sandblasting away layers of paint (at Galleria Toselli, Milan, in 1973) or removing the partition walls separating an exhibition space from the gallery office. More dramatically, in his piece Installation (1970) at Pomona College, he created a work by reconfiguring the interior space of a gallery and then leaving the gallery open, without a door, 24 hours a day, introducing light and the noise of the street into the gallery as experiential elements. For another early work at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, in 1974, he removed a crucial wall that protected the office space from view, framing the art gallery's behind-the-scenes business operations as something worth viewing itself. In 1979 he started to reposition objects in museum collections. Sometimes Asher gathers facts, like the list he published of all the artworks ever deaccessioned by the Museum of Modern Art. For a show at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2008, he decided to re-create all the 44 stud walls that have been built for every exhibition since the museum relocated to Bergamot Station in May 1998. Architectural floor plans for those 44 exhibitions, captioned with the title and dates of each one, are displayed in a small gallery at the show's entrance, providing a key to what visitors are about to see.

His untitled 1991 work featuring a functional, polished, granite drinking fountain juxtaposed with a flag pole was his first permanent public outdoor work in the United States. Part of the Stuart Collection of public art on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. This drinking fountain is an exact replica of commercial metal fountains typically found in business offices and government buildings. Instead of its usual context as interior office furniture, the fountain is placed monument like on a grass island in the center of the campus. It marks the site as the former Camp Matthews, a military training facility from 1917 to 1964.

He has exhibited at documenta (1972, 1982) and the Venice Biennale (1976), and his solo museum shows include the Centre Pompidou (1991), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2003), Art Institute of Chicago (2005) and Santa Monica Museum of Art (2008).

Asher won the Bucksbaum Award 2010. The jury consisted of: Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director; Donna De Salvo, Whitney Associate Director of Programs and Chief Curator; the 2010 curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari; and three guest panelists, Hou Hanru (San Francisco Art Institute), Yasmil Raymond (Dia Art Foundation), and James Rondeau (Art Institute of Chicago). The winner got $100,000 and a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His project for the 2010 Whitney Biennial involved having the museum remain open 24 hours a day for one week (although this was shorten to three days by the museum due to “budgetary and human resources limitations”).