For Michael Asher, the Museum Was the Medium
A survey of the conceptual artist reveals his deep engagement with institutional machinations, though it sometimes feels like inside baseball.
LOS ANGELES — Walking through the exhibition Michael Asher at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, one may mistake the artist for a donor. The small solo show takes over two galleries, and Asher’s name is most prominently mounted above the opening that separates the rooms, like a deep-pocketed patron who bought their legacy.
Asher, who passed away in 2012, was not wealthy like the Annenbergs or the Sacklers, famous benefactors who coaxed museums into naming wings after them. He was a conceptual artist and longtime educator at CalArts, and his reputation endures despite the lack of sellable objects he produced. Asher was more interested in the way museums looked and operated, and his exploration of these behind-the-scenes machinations helped establish “Institutional Critique” as a category of conceptual art. Asher could reveal the power, money, and influence an institution had on shaping cultural capital by mimicking its architectural style, signage, or catalogs. Without many traditional art objects to display, like paintings or sculptures, Michael Asher relies primarily on archives and ephemera to show how the artist stealthily exhibited in museums, galleries, and kunsthalles.
“Painting and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art: Catalog of Deaccessions 1929 through 1998” (1999), an unassuming red book created for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a perfect example. The catalog, which nearly replicated MoMA’s graphic design style, listed 403 paintings and sculptures the museum had quietly offloaded. The public is often made aware of a museum’s splashy new acquisitions — just look at the buzz around LACMA’s new wing and the way they announced Jeff Koons’s “Split-Rocker” (2000) — but rarely does anyone hear about, or even realize, that institutions reduce their collections. Asher’s catalog reveals that MoMA sold canonical paintings, like Cézannes, to raise money for new works. As a product of the '90s, the catalog also sparked a craving for the unseen; there was no way to Google the art and decide for oneself whether or not it should be deemed a lesser work. Asher’s list suddenly made these marginal pieces more intriguing, and curators became anxious that the public would demand the unseen works be returned to MoMA’s collection.
