Unpublished note of Michael Asher quoted in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture,” in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2000), 20.
See Eric Golo Stone, “A Document of Regulation Reflexive Process: Michael Asher’s Contractual Agreement Commissioning Works of Art (1975),” posted August 12, 2011 to Art and Education →.
Two related anecdotes spring to mind. In 2003, when the Los Angeles real estate market was approaching its peak, I asked Michael if the reason he rented an apartment had to do with his refusal of private property. He answered in the affirmative. Similarly, I recall the glee with which he recounted his one realized private commission, where he moved a wall on the southern edge of the house of a Beverly Hills collector eleven inches to the north: in effect, the collector paid for an excision to his private property.
One might speak of a culture of critique particular to Los Angeles-area art schools originating from Michael’s class. Mike Kelley and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe both initiated versions at Pasadena Art Center, while Mary Kelly is also known as a proponent of a specific critique style in which students begin by speaking only about a work’s concrete appearance for a given period of time, before proceeding to interpretation. Thus, each academy was invested in advocating for the rigor of its critical apparatus. Although Asher’s class was by far the most storied, by the time I attended art school, Asher’s course, as well as the CalArts visiting artist lecture series, were both far tamer events. As I have written elsewhere, the storied days of the 1990s were passed down to those of us who came later as a time when grad students had forsaken object-making altogether in favor of discourse and nurturing antagonisms that were often vented in Michael’s class. With some regret, I fail to recall an occasion when the level of rancor I experienced exceeded what might occur on your average high school debate team.
In an oft-repeated quote, Barbara Kruger is said to have advised CalArts students to take Michael’s class because no one in the art world would ever devote four or five hours to talking about their work. In essence, then, what Michael Asher offered in his class was the gift of time (just as the temporal specificity of his work offered another sort of gift of non-exchangeable, unequivocal time). There is reason for further reflection here, for while Michael established a contract for his work based on wage labor, it occurs to me now that the relationship between his salary from CalArts and the amount of time he devoted to teaching his class was also organized to emphasize its relation to the gift. There is a passage in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money where Jacques Derrida elaborates on the gift’s temporality: “The gift is not a gift, the gift only gives to the extent it gives time. The difference between a gift and every other operation of pure and simple exchange is that the gift gives time. There where there is gift, there is time. What it gives, the gift, is time, but this gift of time is also a demand of time. The thing must not be restituted immediately and right away. There must be time, it must last, there must be waiting—without forgetting [l’attente—sans obubli]. It demands time, the thing, but it demands a delimited time, neither an instant nor an infinite time, but a time determined by a term, in other words, a rhythm, a cadence. The thing is not in time; it is or it has time, or rather it demands to have, to give, or to take time—and time as rhythm, that does not befall a homogenous time but that structures it originarily.” (Thanks to Christine Würmell for pointing out this passage.) Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 41.
I recall one critique concerning a meter-high, all-white, knitted wall hanging that spelled out the word “colonialism.” At one end, a strand of yarn attached to an electric motor slowly unwound the knitting, undoing the substantial labor that had gone into making the piece. We gathered on folding chairs in a semicircle around the work, and slowly the logic of the piece was undone by the critique as surely as by the electric motor—a dehiscence in which it emerged that the artist’s wish for an end to colonialism was more fundamental to understanding the work than anything specific about what colonialism is and how it remains active in our ostensibly postcolonial epoch.
Birgit Pelzer, “Byways of History,” in the catalogue for Michael Asher: Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (Brussels: La Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts Bruxelles, 1995), 36.
An example of the type of quotidian detail that contributed to remaking the European cultural landscape is found in our answer to question number twelve on Michael’s form: “Q: What caused the transfer in ownership from one owner to another? A: Production stopped in Germany, they only imported umbrellas, and the containers didn’t fit through the entrance [3.8m high and above workers’ apartments]. The factory thus sold the building to the city of Aachen.”
Christine had translated portions of a book on the Teerhof, and while recently discussing the research we conducted, she mentioned that her participation in an exhibition at the Weserburg in 2011 cleared up a great deal of the difficulty in understanding the history of the museum’s premises that we had encountered while reading this text.
As I learned recently from reading the Wikipedia entry on the museum’s founder, Ryszard Wasko, at the time of my research, the museum’s premises had already been sold by the Łódź municipality to a private bank, and this bank had then proceeded to destroy the site-specific works comprising the museum’s collection. I was thus involved, I now realize, in a complicated shell game where the museum’s supporters were trying to conceal this salient fact—which, in retrospect, explains the lengthy gap in the museum’s published exhibition record.
Frederick Leen, “Archive and Index,” in the catalogue for Michael Asher: Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (Brussels: La Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts Bruxelles, 1995) 52–53.
In footnote 4 of her essay “Procedural Matters: Andrea Fraser on the Art of Michael Asher,” published in the summer 2008 issue of Artforum, Fraser supplies the following helpful information: “Asher has made only three permanent works. The first is a project for private collectors in Los Angeles that he completed in 1978. The second is a 1991 project for the Stuart collection [sic] on the Campus &leftbracket;sic&rightbracket; of the University of California, San Diego, where he placed a fully functional granite replica of a commercial indoor drinking fountain on a grassy island between a flagpole and a rock with a plaque commemorating the Marine Corps training ground that once occupied the site. The third was a project for the international exposition Daejeon Expo ‘93, in South Korea, for which he placed a rock on an island in a man-made lake. On the rock, a text is engraved in Korean: ‘ASSUMING THAT THE ARRAY OF STRUCTURES WHICH CONSTITUTE THE IMMEDIATE SURROUNDINGS WERE DESIGNED FOR US SPECTATORS, IT ENABLES US TO ASK: WHO BENEFITS FROM OUR NAVIGATING BETWEEN DISPLAYS OF CORPORATE LEGITIMATION AND REPRESENTATIONS OF POWER?’”
In the Autumn/Winter 2000 issue of Afterall, Allan Sekula wrote: “The preoccupation with the flows of waste, with plumbing and heating—with what, in American parlance, are termed ‘utilities’—is central to Michael Asher’s work. The realm of culture is always shadowed by the realm of utility, in an often very funny enactment of the old-fashioned Marxist hierarchy of base and superstructure, grafted onto an appreciation of the specific Duchampian origins of the readymade.”
Quoted from Michael Asher, “Introduction,” in Renovation = Expulsion (Lyon: Le Nouveau Musée, centre d’art, 1991), 6. The following is from an interview published in Merge Magazine about Michael’s contribution to the 1999 exhibition “Museum as Muse” at MOMA: Michael Asher: Another indirect aspect of my work deals with the relationship between the working classes and acquisitions and de-acquisitions of works of art by museums. I wondered why these classes oppose de-accession — of course, they are not the only ones. Its one of the things I find very complicated and really interesting. I think one of the reasons is, consciously or unconsciously, they are aware that or they identify with the fact that their labor made possible the purchase of these works of art. Stephen Pascher: How do you mean? Michael Asher: I mean that their labor was responsible for generating enough profits for company owners to purchase gifts. Gifts to museums are often the result of these purchases. Once these works of art become public, that is, part of a museum collection, they become part of the culture of that community, and when institutions de-accession a work or sell it off, they are taking it away from that community — removing it from the consciousness of the community to which the works have become valued possessions. And that's a speculation, but I really think it's true that people have a close bond and relationship with these works of art, not only due to their own labor, but due to the fact that they live in these communities. And the works become a part of the communities, and that's why it's very hard to unglue them, and where there is opposition. (Michael Asher and Stephen Pascher, "Cave Notes," Merge Magazine #5 [Summer 1999]: 26.)