If walls could peak: in a mazelike installation, renowned Conceptualist Michael Asher re-created the framing for every temporary exhibition wall built at the Santa Monica Museum of Art

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Few artists have had a larger role than Michael Asher in establishing Conceptual art within both art schools and museums. A lifelong Angeleno, Asher began teaching in the famous "post-studio" program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the early 1970s after participating in key Conceptualist exhibitions of the late '60s in New York: "Spaces" at the Museum of Modern Art (Asher soundproofed a gallery) and the Whitney Museum's "Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials" (Asher's "sculpture" was "made of thin air," wrote Grace Glueck in the New York Times).

Over four decades, Asher's career has unfolded in a series of subtly provocative installations, many of which are now touchstones for contemporary artists and critical anchors within the discourse of "institutional critique": for instance, his 1979 displacement of Jean-Antoine Houdon's Neo-Classical bronze sculpture of George Washington from its civic status outside the Art Institute of Chicago into a period gallery, or his removal of a wall at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974 to expose the gallery offices--the normally concealed business end of the operation. What is left behind? Documentation (institutional and amateur), narratives (historical and personal) and little else. Asher's oeuvre does not contain salable, collectible objects. He turns instead to the conventions of viewing and display, making the museum (or gallery) his medium.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

All this makes Asher an apt choice for a commission from a Kunsthalle (that is, an exhibition space with no permanent collection) like the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMA) for a commemorative installation on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. With no collection to draw from, Asher worked with more abstract forms of institutional memory, simultaneously revisiting all of the 44 temporary exhibitions that were housed in the museum's 4,500-foot space over 10 years by reinstalling the exhibition walls erected for each show. Asher skipped the drywall, using only galvanized steel (and occasional pinewood) studs. While many of the 44 exhibitions shared perimeters--and many left the rectilinear space largely open--the layered armatures result in a dense and absurd forest of unfinished construction. There was no entrance; to enter the exhibition space (permitted only after signing a waiver) was to walk "through" walls, permeating and ignoring boundaries that once channeled visitor traffic and organized the display of art. The standard 16-inch interval between studs challenged some bodies and caught on the outerwear needed for the brisk oceanfront springtime.

A small side gallery displayed the floor plans for all 44 shows, tracing the literal transformations of SMMA's space in the Bergamot Station gallery complex. Visitors could remark on the well-edited curatorial program with an emphasis on political work, often about race and gender--"William Pope.L--Art After White People: Time, Trees, & Celluloid" and "Mary Kelly: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi" are among many examples. Or one could dwell on unlikely juxtapositions, imagining a survey of the Ant Farm collective transposed over "Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico." To help process this information-heavy display, a sheet with tiny diagrams of floor plans and another with dates and titles of exhibitions were provided for viewers to take home--in essence, the documentation. Asher's invited "intervention" (to use the language of institutional critique) acknowledged that, even in the case of a Kunsthalle located amid commercial galleries, institutional identity is not reinvented with each installation but is formed over years of engagement with the community and the art world.

Institutional critique, the discourse with which Asher is typically associated, likes to emphasize the deceptive neutrality of display walls, the way in which this literal institutional support is meant to disappear behind the art in our routine privileging, which ignores the container in favor of the contents. To be sure, the "institutional container" shapes the contents. But Asher's installation at SMMA was too community-oriented, too much about the viewer, to be reduced to this reading. The reinstalled but unfinished walls offered no privacy, and bodies interacting with this disorienting space, seen between the studs, became the main event. This shift in focus from art to viewer was a generous turn that threw attention back on individual experience and decision-making as constitutive of art's significance. If this sounds like the logic of Minimalism, that's not accidental; the installation is also an elaborate statement about the legacy of Minimalism. Stud walls may never again be asked to do so much.

Michael Asher's installation was on view at the Santa Monica Museum of Art [Jan. 26-Apr. 12]. A catalogue is forthcoming with an essay by Miwon Kwon.