Michael Asher

by King, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780262528795
• ISBN10: 0262528797
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2016-01-29
• Publisher: The MIT Press

Summary

Essays and criticism that span Michael Asher's career, documenting site-specific installations and institutional interventions.

During a career that spanned more than forty years, from the late 1960s until his death in 2012, Michael Asher created site-specific installations and institutional interventions that examined the conditions of art's production, display, and reception. At the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, he famously relocated a bronze replica of an eighteenth-century sculpture of George Washington from the museum's entrance to an interior gallery, thereby highlighting the disjunction between the statue's symbolic function as a public monument and its aesthetic origins as an artwork.

Today, Asher is celebrated as one of the forerunners of institutional critique. Yet because of Asher's situation-based method of working, and his resistance to making objects that could circulate in the art market, few of his works survive in physical form. What does survive is writing by scholars and critics about his diverse practice. The essays in this volume document projects that range from Asher's environmental works and museum displacements to his research-based presentations and reflections on urban space.

Contributors
Michael Asher, Sandy Ballatore, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jennifer King, Miwon Kwon, Barbara Munger, Stephan Pascher, Birgit Pelzer, Anne Rorimer, Allan Sekula

Author Biography

Jennifer King is Associate Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and an editor of October magazine. He is the author of Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (MIT Press) and other books.

Michael Asher was a conceptual artist often associated with site specificity and institutional critique. For many years he taught the famous and influential “Post Studio” class at California Institute of the Arts.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and an editor of October magazine. He is the author of Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (MIT Press) and other books.

Anne Rorimer, an independent scholar and curator, is the author of New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality.

Jennifer King is Associate Curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Miwon Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Miwon Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles.