Michael Asher and the Transformation of "Situational Aesthetics"

Abstract

While questioning such received notions the organic unity, autonomy, and purity of the modernist work of art, the Duchampian paradigm-inserting a readymade object within an art context-exposed the legitimizing function of the institution, its crucial role in the definition of what should be considered art. At the same time, it also revealed its own discursive limitations, since the significance of the readymade was entirely dependent upon the institution a context. This may explain why, in the late sixties, Daniel Buren was attacking the Duchampian strategy, directing his critique toward the institution itself through the introduction in situ of a visual tool, constant in terms of its structurel--making no authorial claims regarding its inner relations-but site-specifically variable in terms of spatial extension, configuration, and modes of application, and thereby able to produce specific meanings in each situation according to the particular contextual (architectural) relations. This kind of strategy, however, eventually lost its edge, the constant became a signature and its various uses just so many means toward the conquest of space. Meant to bypass such a double bind, Michael Asher's situational aesthetics excludes any inserted authorial/personal traces whatsoever, defining itself as an aesthetic system that juxtaposes predetermined elements occurring within the institutional framework, that are recognizable and identifiable to the public because they are drawn from the institutional context itself.2