| Ginger
Wolfe: In your years of art practice have you noticed over time
an internal modification within institutions that have therefore changed
the nature of your critical response?
Michael Asher: Museums are much more aware of my practice
but this hasn’t altered my approach. Since the onset, my response
to an institution in developing a work is quite direct, the way an institution
presents itself is something I take as a preexisting way of working, and
this is what I respond to. So your question is have they changed? Have
they gotten used to this way of working? They still remain very diverse,
in other words some invite me because they feel obliged for me to participate
when they feel I obviously belong but then become reticent with my proposal.
On the other hand there are others that have followed me for years and
know my work very well and are very open to anything I propose even if
they are critical of my proposal which did happen recently. Though, they
disagree with it, they are still interested in doing a project along those
lines even if it’s inimical to their interests.
GW: That feeds into my next question, which is in projects
like the one you’ve constructed in LACMA’s Made in California:
Now exhibition, I wondered if you were engaging the role of the curator,
which has significantly changed over the past thirty years?
MA: One important aspect of it is that it questions the
role of the curator, in so far as perhaps the curator misses opportunities
to install work in a way which is compelling, because they have their
own way, a recognized way of installing…and telling a story, some
sort of narrative of what they feel is important for the viewers to see,
underscoring where they want the major reception to occur and how they
want to build up to it. So, I was really hoping that the young people,
the students, would perhaps come across something that would become a
new convention for the curator, a new way of presentation, one they hadn’t
utilized and wouldn’t have thought of utilizing. The students didn’t
have a background in art or art history. Their way of presentation and
display is just totally different. They hit upon a way which today we
might call relational display. It was not relational like some art practices
today, but relational from a period between wars.
Well. Maybe I should discuss a little more about what this work was about.
This work was very much about the process of …. museum education
which ordinarily comes from the museum to bring significance to the most
important parts of their collection. It’s sort of a top down way
of getting the public to know the collection as well as support and legitimate
that collection and get people involved with those aspects of it and the
student project is more of an attempt to say that through some sort of
bottom up process there’s a great deal more that can be revealed
this way. There might be learning and more education involved in it and
there might be more benefit for everyone all the way around… So
that’s one of the places that this work begins to seek some sort
of reflection that possibly non-professionals can come across ideas professional
artists and curators could have missed about institutional display. There
was another part that had to do with the city and a lack of funding, and
the overcrowding of classes in our public schools. The work suggests that
our public museums could substitute for that lack of funding and bring
certain enrichment to students. It was very necessary to allow the students
to figure things out on their own. I met with the students, but only for
short periods of time, and actually this is another thing I’m interested
in this work. There was a facilitator that was between the museum and
me and everybody else and she was most important in carrying out my structure
and the students ideas. But this work would not have existed without the
experimental foresight of LACMALab. Once the students informed themselves
about the museum as their own responsibility then the museum couldn’t
go back and say you misunderstood about this, or made an assumption about
that, because ultimately they didn’t. Finally I wanted a work that
would present to the museum and the school system, that students of a
certain age have their own motivation and can motivate themselves. In
the end it wasn’t a response to the curators alone.
GW: I’m thinking much of your work including the
untitled installation at Pomona College in 1970 and the installation at
the Art Institute in 79 (George Washington Replica) subverted interior
and exterior space in a formal way. I’m wondering if you could comment
on the degree in which you were engaging social space rather than purely
formal?
MA: I am using formal tools to engage social space. The
work at Pomona was an installation where I was very interested in extra
visual experience. So I was interested in…airflow, in the subtlety
of where air sort of died, where it moved quickly as well as acoustical
variations in space. I built the two triangular spaces like an architectural
wind instrument, and in the large chamber you could often here street
sounds louder than in the street. The sounds would be amplified though
the small triangular space. There is also an important part socially to
it which is that this is open 24 hours a day. In this way the aesthetic
experience is accessible at any given time. Both works led to an increasing
use of having the formal animate social questions in these two works one
can isolate the issue of access and see that begin to happen but in very
different ways. For example the conflicts which are produced in the presentation
of the Houdon open up questions about the conventions of display and at
Pamona College where the two front doors remain off 24 hours a day so
that people could see the installation after work.
GW: Were you engaging in a value exchange in these two
works? I was thinking that the subversion of exterior and interior space,
if you were thinking in terms of an exchange of value?
MA: Well, they are very different in that sense. The
installation at the Art Institute in 1979 is meant to recontextualize
the Houdon statue from outside the museum to its period room which means
that, yes, the meaning had shifted. The first thing one can see is its
monumentality is lost altogether once it’s in its period room. Similarly
I left the weathering on the statue thereby disrupting the idea that artwork
on the interior ought to be viewed once they are well conserved. Then
in terms of the inside outside question I hope this installation begins
to broach upon the disparities which occur in sign value when they are
not aligned conventionally. The installation at the art gallery at Pamona
College in 1970 dealt with trying to integrate the interior with exterior
phenomenon. In this case exterior sounds, light, and climate are not subverted
but rather they are modified on the interior.
GW: I’m also thinking about another piece from
1989 for D & S Austellung, you mentioned a corollary you saw between
the exhibition concept’s reference to limitless meaning and the
potential for limitless waste, both as agents for the colonization of
space. I’m wondering if this fed into a sort of commodity and sign
exchange referential to the restrictions between East and West Germany?
MA: Limitless meaning refers to a quality in an art work
which initiates associations alone as it functions.
GW: Perhaps you could think a bit more generally about
the work. I’m wondering if the transition of space, if those ideas
fed into commodity, sign exchange, which in essence fed into your feelings
between East and West Germany?
MA: Yeah, I know what you’re asking. The dumping
of garbage in the east was a very low cost way of occupying the east and
it was also a way in which the west could get rid of what it didn’t
want. So it demonstrates in a sense the way the west saw the east in that
particular case as just a dumpsite. Today the Germans can no longer afford
to devalue the former East. They must bring it up to their own standards.
But his work identifies a relationship which seems common between industrialized
and developing nations.
GW: That sort of feeds into my next thought, which is
in retrospect with the passing of time, the falling of the iron curtain
and the unification of East and West Germany alters your perception of
that work?
MA: Not Really. What was once a document of daily activities has now become
more of a historical document due to the unification. One has to see it
at the point at which it was done.
Continues...
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