Smart Dick(ie)

Having read what Danto, Diffey, Binkley and Eaton (what sounds like a law firm), I feel George Dickie's institutional theory of art to be the closest to my experience in the artworld. I joined this world as an innocent bystander in my childhood surrounded by paintings and sculptures and artists who were family friends. In my twenties I began collecting and gaining knowledge. In my thirties I began to produce work that had an intention, an idea and, what I believed, a meaning. Now I'm adding another dimension by being an art student.

Dickie's ideas resonate with me because he "wants to keep open the possibility that literally anything could be a work of art"; a thought that demands careful scrutiny and discourse (even it's all in your head) when an object is presented for evaluation, especially when he contends that "there is no set of properties that all artworks must share." It's being able to decide why a plant in a glass test tube (Janet Laurence) is a work of art just as a Gerhard Richter painting is. You can imagine that this situation can be exciting and frightening at the same time for many inhabitants of the art world, especially when you consider artists like Michael Asher.

In a 2008 article in Frieze to coincide with an exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Modern Art, James Rondeau suggests that Asher's works are like sculptures "whose forms are shaped by deeply considered ideas rather than by physical gestures, and which rarely involve objects of the artist's own making." Furthermore, Asher's practice concentrates for the most part on museum/gallery spaces in which he questions aspects of their organization such as their collection, deaccessioned works, use of space, technology, location, and so on.

Asher is an exciting artist because he is like the poster boy of institutional theory. For example, every time the Scuplture Projects Muenster has taken place (1977, 1987, 1997, and 2007), Asher has placed a three-metre long campervan in various spots around XXXX for a week at a time. The 'work' has never changed. It's always been the same campervan. Why? Because as Asher says himself, "If the basic logic of the exhibition didn't change, neither could my work." But because he only has an opportunity to take his van out of the garage every ten years to park it in the same spots he always does, the van, the work, acts as a constant that by its own 'singularity' shows us the 'differences' in the exhibition, the museums/galleries, the city and even himself. Asher travels to the centre of the artworld where he deposits his work and uses the energy of the questions and issues that arise to make his way back out to the periphery, where in the outer circles there might still be voices on the shores of the artworld asking "Is this campervan art?"