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Article Excerpt
In 1974, the Claire Copley Gallery was a storefront space overlooking a gallery-laden stretch of La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. Among Los Angeles cognoscenti, Claire Copley was known as a "serious" gallerist who showcased work by minimalist and conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Daniel Buren, and within that context, Copley's invitation to Michael Asher to present his first solo exhibition in an American commercial gallery was entirely appropriate. Yet, even within the early 1970s conceptual milieu, Asher's 1974 Claire Copley exhibition stood out. Asher's work had recently expanded from primarily sensory installations, such as the 1969 works for Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art, to include conceptualism more prominently. This was evident in his 1973 installation for the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Cologne, where Asher's material intervention served to foreground the ideological division of social space. For Anti-Illusion, Asher had set up a barely detectable stream of pressured air over a passageway between two galleries at the Whitney, while his Spaces installation featured an acoustically insulated room in which ambient sounds were distributed in relation to the room's open doorways. At the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, Asher had painted the ceiling of the premises (including the gallery's office space) to match the floor, extending the work--and implicitly the spectator's reach--to the normally private areas of the gallery as well. (1) For his exhibition at the Claire Copley Gallery, Asher removed the partition wall between the exhibition space and the back room, exposing the storage area and gallery director's office to the public. "The idea was to integrate the two areas, so that the office area and its activities could be viewed from the exhibition area, and the exhibition area opened to the gallery directors' view," Asher later explained. (2) Copley, who normally would have been invisible to the casual visitor, was placed on display along with her office and the everyday business of running a gallery--organizing upcoming exhibitions or meeting with artists, critics, and buyers. Along with exposing Copley-the-gallerist to the viewer, Asher was well aware that his removal of the dividing wall equally displayed the visitor to the director. Considering the psychological ramifications of this radically increased visibility, Asher observed, "In the same way that gallery personnel seemed to become increasingly aware of their activities, viewers also became more aware of themselves as viewers." (3) The object of attention for Asher's exhibition, then, was the institutionally framed social relation that each viewer established with Copley and other viewers.
The initial reactions to Asher's project at the Claire Copley Gallery emphasized distinctly affective responses. One critic recounted this scenario:
All that stuff on the walls is gone, along with every bit of privacy. Actually viewers don't intend social interaction. They come to look at art. But without knowing it, they are an integral part of the work they see. How unsettling, and uncomfortable. There are no visual entertainments to cast intent gazes upon, security in the altered proportions of the room which now seems so long and narrow. Are we in the right gallery? No. Yes. Shall we walk around a little and then saunter out the door, or shall we say the hell with it and stomp on up La Cienega shaking our heads. Oh, of course, the show isn't up yet. Oh, it is! (4)
For this reviewer, the absence of a dividing wall, along with lack of "that stuff on the walls," produced a situation that viewers negotiated through a cadre of affective responses: hesitation, uncertainty, irritation, and outright alarm at the reversal of viewing relations. Perhaps we got the wrong address, or the wrong date (maybe the gallery had not installed the work yet). Ultimately, at least for this reviewer, discomfort gave way to a sense of delight in the expanded range of experiential interpretation when the lack of absorptive viewing possibilities brought the social normativity of an ordinary gallery visit into sharp focus. The responses of Asher's spectators were not settled in advance by habitual codes of viewing (in the absence of traditional art objects that they might have regarded knowingly) or the artist's schema (which might have instructed the viewer to follow specific procedures). Yet the viewer's engagement with Asher's situation was influenced by the social pressure exerted by the presence of the gallerist. Spectatorial agency--the ability to respond, evaluate, judge, transform, and be transformed--was based on the viewer's engagement with the psychological and social demands of the situation. Whether the viewer was amused, curious, or irritated, or simply decided to leave, her reception of Asher's foundational work of institutional critique at the Claire Copley Gallery in 1974 involved affective response.
The institutional theory of art had been explicitly formulated in academia in the mid- 1960s, when the American philosopher of aesthetics Arthur C. Danto and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu began to theorize concepts such as "the artworld" and the museum. (5) Danto pointed to "the artworld," defined by a combination of art theory and history, as a necessary framework for distinguishing art from "mere real things," while Bourdieu studied the social validation that institutions of art and culture, such as the public art museum, bestowed upon their visitors. (6) Danto attributed to the art world a pervasive discursivity that consisted of shared debates and histories, arguing that "it is the role of artistic theories ... to make the artworld, and art, possible." (7) Bourdieu, on the other hand, regarded the art institution through the social legitimation ("distinction") that it provided for those who fit certain culturally determined criteria. (8) While Danto's chief concern involved the analytic preconditions necessary for art to be perceived within a particular historical and discursive context, Bourdieu emphasized the struggles implicit in the sociohistorical conditions for specific artistic fields and "the cultured habitus" required for experiencing art and participating in those fields. (9) Despite their differences, both Danto and Bourdieu approached the art institution as a set of social and ideological formations through which the "material" structures such as museums and galleries--as well as artworks themselves--were imbued with meaning.
This theorizing of the art institution laid the ground for the "critique of institutions" that artists undertook from the late 1960s on. Though Asher was neither alone nor the first to engage in this reflexive project, his 1970s installations, along with those by artists such as Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren, were pivotal to the formation of what gradually became known as the art of "institutional critique"--an investigation of the material and sociopolitical conditions of contemporary artistic practice. From the late 1960s on, Haacke's "real-time social systems" had treated museums and galleries as politically and economically determined sites. Buren had since 1965 limited his work's internal formal elements to alternate colored-and-white stripes, pointing to the overpowering influence of the art institution over artwork while seeking to activate his viewer-ship. "We ask you to become intelligent!" Buren, along with his BMPT colleagues, urged his viewers in 1967. (10)
Buren's direct address to his audience exemplified the foregrounding of spectatorship that early institutional critique shared with other postwar avant-garde movements. Beyond the generic viewer who, in Marcel Duchamp's 1957 quip, would complete the work of art, the 1960s and 1970s viewing subject had become an increasingly specific entity whose place in the work of art was scripted alongside material or processual relations. While Happenings and Fluxus events often called for concrete modes of audience participation, other, more indirect approaches facilitated particular modes of viewing encounter (such as the minimalist bodily experience) or addressed specific types of viewers (for example, the gendered viewers of feminist art). (11) Other postwar artists, however, limited the spectatorial encounter to a closed, personalized circuit among the artist, artwork, and viewer. Robert Morris's mid-1960s phenomenological beholders, for instance, had been caught in...
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