Institutional Critique: Michael Asher

Artists have been working with notions of site specificity to critique art institutions and museums since the early 1970s (even much earlier dada etc). Its interesting to look at the gradual shift in critique away from the physicality of the museum space and general relationship of the physical space to the artwork (serra etc) to an exploration into the inner cultural and ideological influences continuously put on art by the institutional framework.

Miwon Kwon

"Whether articulated in political and economic terms, as in Haacke's case, or in epistemological terms, as in Asher's, it is rather the art institution's techniques and effects as they circumscribe the definition, production, presentation, and dissemination of art that become the sites of critical intervention. Concurrent with this move toward the dematerialization of the site is the ongoing de-aestheticization and dematerialization of the artwork. ...The "work"no longer seeks to be a noun/ object but a verb/ process, provoking the viewers critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological conditions of that viewing."