Writings 1973 1983 On Works 1969 1979

An essential and long out-of-print document of formative works by institutional critique progenitor Michael Asher Originally published in 1983, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979, by Los Angeles artist Michael Asher (1943-2012) presents select documentation of 33 works through writings, photographs, architectural floor plans, exhibition announcements and other ephemera. For most of his career, Asher did not create traditional art objects; instead, he altered the existing institutional apparatus through which art is presented, creating work that intervened in the architectural, social or economic systems that undergird how art is produced and experienced. For example, in 1974, he removed the partition wall dividing the office and gallery space of the Claire S. Copley Gallery in Los Angeles, revealing the day-to-day activities of the gallery to the public. In another work from 1979, Asher had a bronze replica of a late 18th-century sculpture of George Washington moved from the exterior of the Art Institute of Chicago to a museum gallery that housed 18th-century art, reintroducing the statue to its original period context and shifting its function from public monument to indoor sculpture. Due to its site- and time-specific nature, Asher's work generally ceased to exist after an exhibition, which makes this highly sought-after book an invaluable resource. As the artist states in the introduction: "This book as a finished product will have a material permanence that contradicts the actual impermanence of the art-work, yet paradoxically functions as a testimony to that impermanence of my production." Initiated by Kasper König, Writings 1973-1983 on Works 1969-1979was originally copublished by the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and was largely shaped by Asher's close collaboration with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who succeeded König as editor of the press.

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

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.

Writings by the conceptual artist Michael Asher—including notes, proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most published here for the first time. The California conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943–2012) was known for rigorous site specificity and pioneering institutional critique. His decades of teaching at CalArts influenced generations of artists. Much of Asher's artistic practice was devoted to creating works that had no lasting material presence and often responded to the material, social, or ideological context of a situation. Because most of Asher's artworks have ceased to exist, his writings about them have special significance. Public Knowledge collects writings by Asher about his work—including preliminary notes and ideas, project proposals, exhibition statements, and letters to curators and critics—most of which have never been previously published. Asher gave few interviews, didn't write art criticism, and rarely published extensive accounts of his own work. Yet writing was central to his artistic practice, serving as a tool for working out ideas, negotiating institutional parameters, and describing thought processes. In these texts, he considers writing and documentation, discusses artistic practice, offers notes for gallery and museum talks, presents artist statements for exhibition-goers, describes individual works and their situational context, and reflects on teaching and art education. Among other things, Asher provides his definition of site specificity, addresses the function of art in public space, and analyzes the intersection of teaching art and institutional models of education. Readers will see an artist at work, formulating ethical and political strategies for making art in a situational world.

In making light his primary medium, Dan Flavin (1933-1996) established himself as one of the most innovative and significant artists of the minimalist movement. A new generation encountered Flavin’s work through the critically acclaimed exhibition Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, which opened in October 2004 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Dan Flavin: New Light includes essays that respond to this exhibition and to the renewed interest in Flavin’s work and its place in 20th-century art. In this volume, six leading scholars of contemporary art consider the ambiguities and multiple resonances of Flavin’s light works. Each addresses the ontological complexity of the work--object-based, yet "situational,” and painterly in its deployment of colored light--within the insistently sculptural world of minimalism. The book’s contributors interpret this tension by exploring Flavin’s early assemblages, the relationship of drawing to his installation practice, the specificity of his materials and their operation in actual space, and the openly ambivalent place of Flavin’s work within the history of late modernism. Also available from Yale University Press: DAN FLAVIN: A RETROSPECTIVE (ISBN 0-300-10632-7) DAN FLAVIN: THE COMPLETE LIGHTS (ISBN 0-300-10633-5)

"New scholarship and interpretation of Flavin's work also appears in the form of three critical essays by experts and an extensive chronology, comprehensive bibliography, and exhibition history. In addition, this book includes Flavin's text, "'...in daylight or cool white.' an autobiographical sketch," originally published in Artforum in 1965, and two interviews with the artist - one from 1972 and the other from 1982."--BOOK JACKET.