Michael Asher

Santa Monica Museum of Art installation . 2008

+ e-flux

For the Santa Monica Museum of Art installation, Michael Asher reconstructed all the temporary walls built in from 1998 to the present–44 exhibitions’ worth–to create a conceptual history of the Museum... The skeletal frameworks illuminated what art historian Miwon Kwon describes as ”the temporariness of the architecture of temporary exhibitions.”
Santa Monica Museum of Art
For the work Kunsthalle Bern, 1992 (1992), Michael Asher relocated the building’s radiators from its exhibition spaces to its entry-way gallery and presented them as a group. Steel pipes connected them to their original valves, coursing linearly along the Kunsthalle’s walls and keeping the hot water flowing. Such ‘displacement of givens’ offers a perfect example of site-specific practice by Michael Asher, one of the foremost installation artists of the Conceptual art period and an inspiration for institutional critique.
afterall

Santa Monica Museum of Art . 2008

Kunsthalle Bern . 1992