LOS ANGELES — A walk through the exhibition Michael Asher at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles can make the artist seem, at first glance, like a benefactor. The modest solo presentation fills two galleries, and Asher’s name is most prominently displayed above the opening between the rooms, as if he were a wealthy patron underwriting his own legacy.
Asher, who died in 2012, was not a figure of the sort associated with the Annenbergs or the Sacklers, the well-known donors who persuaded museums to name wings after them. He was a conceptual artist and longtime educator at CalArts whose standing has endured despite producing few sellable objects. Much of his work focused on how museums function and present themselves, and his investigations into those backstage systems helped define “Institutional Critique” as a strand of conceptual art.
By echoing architectural details, signage, and catalog formats, Asher exposed the power, money, and influence institutions use to shape cultural capital. Because he left behind few conventional artworks such as paintings or sculptures, Michael Asher depends largely on archives and ephemera to document the artist’s subtle interventions in museums, galleries, and kunsthalles.
A strong example is “Painting and Sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art: Catalog of Deaccessions 1929 through 1998” (1999), an unassuming red book made for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The catalog closely mimicked MoMA’s graphic design style and listed 403 paintings and sculptures the museum had quietly removed from its collection. While museums often publicize major new acquisitions — as with the attention surrounding LACMA’s new wing and the announcement of Jeff Koons’s “Split-Rocker” (2000) — the reduction of collections is rarely discussed, let alone noticed.
Asher’s catalog showed that MoMA had sold canonical works, including Cézannes, to fund new acquisitions. Appearing in the 1990s, it also encouraged curiosity about what was not on view; at the time, there was no way to Google the works and judge for oneself whether they deserved to be considered lesser pieces. The list made these sidelined objects newly compelling, and some curators worried that the public might begin demanding that the unseen works be restored to MoMA’s collection.
