At the Claire Copley gallery in Los Angeles, Michael Asher removes the wall divide between the store room which housed artworks, undermining the gallery’s portrayal as a facilitator for the visual arts and exposing it as the house where art is valued as commodity.
Daniel Buren creates artworks using stripes to highlight areas of the gallery that go unnoticed. The green and white stripes are used inside and outside. They appear on escalators, on fences, on corners of the gallery, unused wall space, the area between paintings in an exhibition, these particular stripes undermining the value and prestige of the artwork hanging and creating an institutional critique of the gallery space. Burens work at the Guggenheim in NY, (Image on right) cause a lot of fuss between other artists that were exhibiting at the same show as the work was so large and over powering it made a mockery of the other works and blocked the view from to other artworks. The problem facing Buren’s work is that these stripes become iconic, which means that the audience desire to see the stripes only, and no longer view the areas that Buren was originally attempting to highlight.
A lot of these critiques of gallery space become architectural ones, as if the exact same idea was place in any other building then they would cease to be an institutional critique and more of a special awareness piece about the physicality of the body in the space or an awareness of things that go unnoticed.
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