Michael Asher

An examination of a major 1992 installation by a pioneer of site-specific experimentation. Michael Asher (born in 1943), one of the foremost installation artists of the Conceptual art period, is a founder of site-specific practice. Considered a progenitor of institutional critique, he spearheaded the creation of artworks imbued with a self-conscious awareness of their dependence on the conditions of their exhibition context. In the work Kunsthalle Bern 1992, Asher removed the radiators from all the museum's exhibition spaces and reassembled them in its entryway gallery. Metal pipes connected the relocated radiators to their original sockets; these tubular conduits, coursing in linear fashion along the Kunsthalle's walls, kept the steam heat flowing and endowed the installation with directional lines of force. This “displacement of givens” offers a perfect example of site-specific practice, one that took the gallery space and the institution itself as its subject. In this detailed examination of Kunsthalle Bern 1992, Anne Rorimer considers the work in the context of Asher's ongoing desire to fuse art with the material, economic, and social conditions of institutional presentation. Rorimer analyzes Kunsthalle Bern 1992 in relation to the earlier innovations of such minimalist artists as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, and Dan Flavin as well as to such conceptualist contemporaries as Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, and Maria Nordman. She also considers the installation in the context of other works by Asher that have used non-art, functional elements, including walls, or that have investigated museological issues.

Published to accompany the exhibit, Focus: Michael Ashner, organized by and presented at the Art Institute of Chicago from September 29, 2005 to January 1, 2006.

The first book-length study of this influential artist's work, focusing on the participatory role of the human subject rather than the art object. Michael Asher doesn't make typical installations. Instead, he extracts his art from the institutions in which it is shown, culling it from collections, histories, or museums' own walls. Since the late 1960s, Asher has been creating situations that have not only taught us about the conditions and contexts of contemporary art, but have worked to define it. In Situation Aesthetics, Kirsi Peltomäki examines Asher's practice by analyzing the social situations that the artist constructs in his work for viewers, participants, and institutional representatives (including gallery directors, curators, and other museum staff members). Drawing on art criticism, the reports of viewers and participants in Asher's projects, and the artist's own archives, Peltomäki offers a comprehensive account of Asher's work over the past four decades. Because of the intensely site-specific nature of this work, as well as the artist's refusal to reconstruct past works or mount retrospectives, many of the projects Peltomäki discusses are described here for the first time. By emphasizing the social and psychological sites of art rather than the production of autonomous art objects, Peltomäki argues, Asher constructs experientially complex situations that profoundly affect those who encounter them, bringing about both personal and institutional transformation.

Essays and criticism that span Michael Asher's career, documenting site-specific installations and institutional interventions. During a career that spanned more than forty years, from the late 1960s until his death in 2012, Michael Asher created site-specific installations and institutional interventions that examined the conditions of art's production, display, and reception. At the Art Institute of Chicago, for example, he famously relocated a bronze replica of an eighteenth-century sculpture of George Washington from the museum's entrance to an interior gallery, thereby highlighting the disjunction between the statue's symbolic function as a public monument and its aesthetic origins as an artwork. Today, Asher is celebrated as one of the forerunners of institutional critique. Yet because of Asher's situation-based method of working, and his resistance to making objects that could circulate in the art market, few of his works survive in physical form. What does survive is writing by scholars and critics about his diverse practice. The essays in this volume document projects that range from Asher's environmental works and museum displacements to his research-based presentations and reflections on urban space. Contributors Michael Asher, Sandy Ballatore, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jennifer King, Miwon Kwon, Barbara Munger, Stephan Pascher, Birgit Pelzer, Anne Rorimer, Allan Sekula

In 1880, the French government ordered a surveying expedition for arailway that would bring the fabulous wealth of Timbuktu, in French Sudan, to Paris. This trek should have heralded a new era of French prosperity.Instead, it was a deadly..

In 1979, the author of this work read Arabian Sands by W. Thesiger, which had an impact on his life and made him become a desert explorer. In tribute to Thesiger, he has written this biography of Thesigers motivations and achievements. A man of great paradoxes and contradictions, Thesiger revered traditional peoples, but retained at the same time a profound pride in his own race and background. He felt most intensely alive when living on the same level as his tribal companions, yet rejoiced in his ability to return to the civilized world. also follows in Thesinger's footsteps, interviewing many of his former travelling companions and throwing new light on the celebrated Arabian expeditions.

The true story of the most famous SAS operation in history. 'Bravo Two Zero' was the code-name of the famous SAS operation: a classic story of bravery in the face of overwhelming odds. BRAVO TWO ZERO by patrol commander 'Andy McNab' became an international bestseller, as did the book by 'Chris Ryan' (THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY). Both men became millionaires. Three members of the patrol were killed. One, veteran sergeant Vince Phillips, was blamed in both books for a succession of mistakes. As Michael Asher reveals, the stories in BRAVO TWO ZERO and THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY grew considerably in the telling. Their heroic tales of taking out tanks with their rocket launchers, mowing down hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, the silent stabbing of the occasional sentry, were never mentioned at their post-war debriefings... In an investigation literally in the footsteps of the patrol, Michael Asher tells the true story.

A brilliant atmospheric thriller, set in Cairo and the surrounding tombs and deserts, involving the threat of the past entwined with present deaths and future machinations. Omar Ross, a maverick archaeologist, is disturbed by the death at the foot of the pyramids of Giza, of his old colleague, a famous Egyptologist, Richard Cranwell. Cranwell had become obsessed by his search for the legendary lost city of Zerzura. Ross's suspicions become further aroused by documents left referring to other deaths, of Carnarvon, of Wingate, of Carter, all linked by the inscription for the god Thoth. It seems as if Cranwell had been on the verge of a great discovery; but every contact, every informant, disappears: Cranwell's body itself is lost and Ross, threatened, beleagured and friendless, turns to his mother's family, of the Bedouin tribe. This is a first novel with a difference. Written with great confidence, it is rich with Egyptian mythology and history, its new discoveries are plausible and convincing, the secret organizations and believers complex and frightening, and the cast of characters lively and varied.