Approaching Architecture: The Cases of Richard Serra and Michael Asher

Author(s): MIWON KWON

Source: Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin , 2009, State of the Art: Contemporary
Sculpture (2009), pp. 44-55
Published by: Yale University, acting through the Yale University Art Gallery

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40682627

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Approaching Architecture:
The Cases of Richard Serra and Michael Asher

MIWON KWON

by aatkey
Architecture has consistently been least these two artists as a means to
reference point in the development and
interrogate the category of sculpture. This
deconstruction of twentieth-century
typological
sculp-exercise is motivated in part b
Benjamin
ture-explicit in much of rationalistic H. D. Buchlohs assessment tha
experi-
mentations of Constructivism, the
overwhelmed
available trajectories of sculptural pra
and rendered delirious in Dadaist ventures
since the early part of the twentieth centu
like Kurt Schwitters s Merzbau.have been either
Sculpture s as a "model for the artist
production
engagement with architecture has of reality (e.g., sculptures tra
been par-
ticularly pronounced since the tion toward architecture and design) or a
post-World
epistemic
War II era, with architecture serving as model that investigates the stat
the often-ghosted ground uponand conditions
which the of aesthetic object produc
polemics and practices of Minimalism,
(the readymade, the allegory, the fetish)."
Postminimalism, Process art, land art,there
While someare probably other models to
account
Conceptual art, some Performance for than these, Buchlohs identifi
art, insti-
tion
tutional critique, installation art, ofsite-
and sculptures approaching architectu
specific art all have come to be is what interests me in this essay. For Ser
defined.
architecture
Moreover, with the pervasive interest among is tectonics and a "lost origin
forgotten
a younger generation of artists in principle of sculpture.2 In Asher
architec-
bodyof
tural and interior design as a source ofvisual/
work, architectures forms and ma
rials are mobilized primarily as semiotic
formal vocabulary, models of production,
ments, up
and an avenue for accessing a sociality of for continuous rearticulation o
resignification.3
"everyday life," the need to articulate the Despite these differences,
however,
complexities of the histories of the recent developments in their w
sometimes
dialectical, sometimes parallel, sometimes
indicate a surprising convergence of sorts
well,
oppositional relationship between which is another reason for attempt
architec-
ture and sculpture (if we can even hold on
this essay.
to this category today) seems undeniable.
My consideration here of relatively
Fig. i. Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipse TV, 1998.
recent works by Richard Serra Weatherproof
and Michael steel, overall 11 ft. 9 in. χ 22 ft. 6 in. χ
Asher, however, is less a historical
35 ft. analysis
7 in. (3.6 χ 6.9 χ 10.8 m), plate: w. 2 in. (5.1 cm).
and more a typological sketch of the distinct
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional
ways in which architecture has and
been recruited
promised gift of Leon and Debra Black

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/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']

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When Richard Serras Torqued Ellipses (see
figs. 1-3) were exhibited at the Geffen Con-
temporary at MOCA in Los Angeles in 1998,
one could hardly remain unmoved by their
symphonic orchestration of spatial experience
in the huge 55,000-square-foot space. The
seven Ellipses - made of two-inch-thick
sheets of Cor-Ten steel, roughly eleven to
thirteen feet high, weighing twenty tons
each - majestically commanded the exhibi-
tion, which also included the cubic rotations
of $8 χ 64 χ 70 (1996) and the serpentine cor-
ridors of Pickhans Progress (1998). In the calm
expanse of this former hangar structure, the
Ellipses seemed quite at home despite, or
rather because of, their size, scale, weight,
and mass. They looked like primitive indus-
trial huts, recalling at once shelters to be
found in a derelict shipyard and simultane-
ously projecting an image of a futuristic
village of twisted podlike structures that no
longer maintain the familiar distinction
between inside/outside, enclosure/exposure,
or private/public. ("Vessels" is Serras pre-
ferred description.)
Walking around and into the Ellipses
engendered a highly attenuated awareness
of my movement (one cannot describe the
experience without owning it in the first
person, which is part of the point of this
kind of sculptural practice). Shirting contin-
uously from a sense of disorientation and
dizziness to clarity and placedness, I found
myself overwhelmed and thrilled by the
range of extreme sensations. The curving
walls of the Ellipses seemed alive, falling away
or leaning toward me, pulling and pushing
the curvilinear spatial volume in sync with
each step I took. The faster my movement,
the greater the velocity of spatial variations.
The effects of those variations were multi-
plicitous: certain passages, especially within
the corridor spaces created by doubled
ellipses, felt compressed, threatening; others
felt expansive, comforting, even spiritual.
These qualitative differences were to be
understood in terms of the relationship
between my moving body and the physical
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forms and not as intrinsic properties of the
forms themselves.
This kind of keen phenomenological
self-awareness is, of course, precisely what
Minimalism initiated more than forty years
ago as part of its radical reorientation of the
art-viewing experience. Repudiating the body
as a figurative representation that would
accommodate sculpture s illusionistic space,
Minimalism sought to activate the body of
the viewer in actual space instead. In a sense,
Torqued Ellipses perform Minimalisms origi-
nal lesson of the interdependent play between
a sculptural object and a viewing body, on
a grand scale, incorporating the concerns
to foreground immediacy of materials and
transparency of construction, concerns
which revisit Constructivism and develop in
particular ways out of Minimalism. Serras
Torqued Ellipses seem to return us to a
moment prior to the complications of the
subject and the body engendered by post-
structuralism and feminist theories. One
might even say he returns us to an art-
historical moment of an "innocent" and
unfragmented body, which is possibly one
of the reasons for the across-the-board praise
of the Torqued Ellipses. It is as if we have
finally been convinced by the advances
proposed by Minimalism more than forty
years ago, just as the logic of its elaborations
seems to have run its course.
But this is not to insinuate that Serras
work is dated or anachronistic, although
aspects of his oeuvre are. For instance, the
imperative to reveal the process of construc-
tion is strictly limited to the physical manip-
ulation of the sheets of steel. Thus the edges
that join or abut to form the Ellipses func-
tion only emblematically in relation to the
notion of transparency of process and con-
struction. Furthermore, at the Geffen exhi-
bition, the side gallery with fifty working
models of the Ellipses in lead focused on
process as it relates to formal and material
resolution only, subordinating, if not obfus-
cating, the institutional and social processes
of artistic production. Despite much press
commentary on the behind-the-scenes dif-
ficulties of transporting and installing these
gigantic sculptures, their presentations reveal
nothing of these aspects of Serras process. The
sculptures occupy the exhibition space mirac-
ulously. It may be that, following Buchloh's
analysis of David Smith and Anthony Caro,
Serra is likewise mystifying the Constructivist
démystification of sculpture.4
The concept of "actual space" in Serras
Ellipses seems uninflected by cultural or
social dimensions as well. Even if the subject
is destabilized and made acutely self-aware of
this fact by the sculpture s eccentric moves,
space itself is treated like, and understood as,
pure and irreducible matter. The disorienting
effects of the Ellipses' spatial coordination,
however, remain a complex phenomenon,
particularly because of their peculiar pleasure.
Perhaps this pleasure is attributable to the
fact that the sculptures ultimately guarantee a
reorientation and a new centeredness (maybe
Minimalism never fully gave up on this). But
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Fig. 2. Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipse IV, 1998.
Weatherproof steel, overall 11 ft. 9 in. χ 22 ft. 6 in. χ
35 ft. 7 in. (3.6 χ 6.9 χ 10.8 m), plate: w. 2 in. (5.1 cm).
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fractional
and promised gift of Leon and Debra Black
another reason for this pleasure, more accu-
rately a thrill, might be due to the implica-
tion of an utterly different order of spatial
experience, one that is disengaged from grav-
ity altogether. I realize that this is a bizarre
conjecture considering the irrefutability of
gravity as a physical law and its centrality in
Serras artistic practice for more than forty
years. But even as we are made aware of the
presentness of space through the relay between
our bodies in motion and the immovable
sculptural structures, an uncanny sense of
weightlessness, a slightly hallucinatory sense
of unrealness, accompanies the experience.
Metaphorical associations that have been
drawn between the Ellipses and the natural
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■

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landscape (cliff sides) and industrial referents Fig. 3. Richard Serra, Double Torqued Ellipse II, 1998.

(hulls of ships) are not quite on the mark, I Weatherproof steel, outer ellipse: overall 11 ft. 9 in. χ
36 ft. χ 27 ft. 6 in. (3.6 χ 11 χ 8.4 m), inner ellipse:
think. We might feel more comfortable with
overall 11 ft. 9 in. χ 28 ft. 6 in. χ 19 ft. 6 in. (3.6 χ S.j χ
conventional associations such as these, but
5.9 m), plates: each w. 2 in. (5.1 cm). Private collection
the Ellipses announce a new technological
sublime, an unprecedented spatial (dis) order Fig. 4. Michael Asher, installation view of Michael
that is distinct from the hyperreality of post- Asher, Santa Monica Museum of Art, January 26-
modern space as famously diagnosed by April 12, 2008
Fredric Jameson.5 That the Ellipses required
aerospace technology for their design and
fabrication makes sense: our conception of
"actual space" is already confused by virtual
variants and knowledge of weightless bodies
floating in nongravitational zones of outer
space. The Torqued Ellipses register this con-
fusion: the actuality of space is rendered
unreal, or, in Hal Fosters words, "perverse."6
Foster elaborates on the "Baroque effect" of
Serras Ellipses as "a simultaneous sense of a
subjective deforming of space and a spatial
overwhelming of the subject. . . . [L]ike

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Figs. 5-6. Michael Asher, installation view of Michael
Asher, Santa Monica Museum of Art, January 26-
April 12, 2008
Baroque architecture, the Ellipses put the
subject in play within the space in a way that
seems to derange its rational structure." 7 For
Foster, this psychological effect of the Ellipses
is a surprise in that it reflects a Surrealist
sense of spatiality more than a Constructivist
one, concluding that as Serra has developed
the Constructivist line of modernism, "he has
also transformed it to the point where, here
at least, it converges with its other."8
A similar process of convergence may be
at work in Michael Asher s practice as well.
From January 26 to April 12, 2008, the entire
five thousand square feet of exhibition space
at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in
Southern California was filled with framed-
out, open-stud walls evocative of a dense for-
est, a complex maze, or a set of prison cages
(figs. 4-7). The space looked in part like an
unfinished although tidy construction site;
the Sheetrock that would normally have cov-
ered the studs was missing so that one could
see and move straight through the gallery
space. But seeing and moving through the
space was not necessarily a simple matter,
since one had to be careful not to get oneself
or one s clothes caught between the studs,
which were spaced repetitively at the stan-
dard sixteen inches on center (not an ample
amount of room to walk through). One also
had to be careful not to trip over the metal
runner pieces on the floor.9 In some areas,
several walls were placed close together or
intersected one another, creating a very tight,
even claustrophobic situation despite the
open skeletal quality of the walls. In other
areas, the walls were placed far apart or in
isolation, providing a physical clearing and a
sense of expansion (even an emptiness) that
offered psychological relief from the experi-
ence of spatial compression as just described.

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In this way, the installation as an architec- the installation or the straightforwardness of
tural framework shifted from an oppressive its presentation as conventional interior wall
or menacing presence one moment to a constructions or the literalness of the bare

benign, even comforting one the next.
Visually, too, the project presented mul-
tiple conditions. Depending on one s posi-
tion and movement, the installation and by
extension the exhibition space as a whole
appeared to shift from opaque, then to trans-
parent, and then back again or the walls vari-
ously became solid masses, open volumes,
and two-dimensional planes, all as a function
of the viewer's mobile perspective. The shiny
quality of the mostly metal studs further
complicated visual perception. At times a
glimpse of another person some distance
away walking through or passing by the studs
registered like a mirror reflection of ones
own body in motion, producing an effect of
both magical playfulness and a disturbing
uncertainty. Thus - despite the facticity of
the unadorned and familiar store-bought
two-by-four building material that comprised
exhibition space of the museum - the work
supported fleeting yet powerful mispercep-
tions, even momentary hallucinations, as if
one were wandering through a surreal dream.
For those familiar with Asher's body of
work, or more precisely, for those familiar
with the critical discourse developed around
his practice over the past four decades as
an exemplar of post-studio, site-specific,
institutional critique art, it will likely be very
surprising to read the words dream or surreal
associated with his work. The extent to which
I have dwelled on the visual, material, spatial,
bodily, sensual, psychological, symbolic, and
even more the metaphorical and affective
aspects of his Santa Monica Museum of Art
installation will likewise strike the knowing
reader as somewhat astonishing. I have not
yet said anything about the conceptual prem-
ise of the piece. Nor have I mentioned the

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Fig. 7. Michael Asher, installation view of Michael
Asher, Santa Monica Museum of Art, January 26-
April 12, 2008
rational rules governing its material realiza-
tion, which given the prevailing Asher dis-
course, would typically be considered the heart
of the matter, far more significant to the
meaning of "the work" than the physical and
especially the psychical impact of the installa-
tion as experienced in actual time in actual
In the Artforum review, Fraser argues that
"[f]rom everything we know about Asher s
method, it is quite certain that the aesthetic,
symbolic, and even phenomenological quali-
ties that may be associated with the results
of procedures he undertook are quite inci-
dental. . . . What is to be interpreted in
Asher s work are not the formal qualities of
the installation but the procedures of which
they are the product, as well as the relation-
ship between those procedures and the con-
ditions of the site and situation for which

space by actual bodies and imaginations. they were undertaken."10

Indeed, artist Andrea Fraser, a deeply
knowledgeable follower of Asher s practice
over the years, in her lengthy review of the
exhibition for Artforum acknowledged the
abundance of allegorical and hermeneutic
possibilities of the installation. But she ulti-
mately dismissed these possibilities as mere
viewer projections and insisted on the need
to distinguish them from Asher s real project.
With this particular assertion and her
article in general, Fraser reminds the readers
that it is Asher s rigorous site-specific meth-
odology, a certain process of working, and
not so much the resulting physical manifest-
ations in exhibition spaces, that should be
understood as his primary artistic work.
She further underscores the importance of
recognizing the fact that Asher s mode of

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site-specificity not only critiques sites of
art's presentation and display (that is, muse-
ums and galleries) but also the conditions
of its production. For Fraser, the radicality
of Asher s practice lies in his consistent
development of a paradigm of production
entirely different from the traditional one in
which artistic labor coalesces into an object-
commodity form as an end product. Instead,
Fraser defines Asher's labor as a kind of ser-
vice provision that is expended with each
project; his site- and time-specific art disap-
pears without an object, refusing or prevent-
ing subsequent circulation and exchange.11
There is hardly a point to dispute in
Fraser s assessment. One cannot overlook or
underestimate Asher s method of producing
a work- the complex institutional processes
and necessary logistical negotiations all lead-
ing up to a public presentation - as the heart
of his artistic practice. Indeed, these aspects
are precisely what are obscured, buried as
outside of "the work," in Serras and most
other artists' practice. Yet . . . While Fraser
might be "quite certain that the aesthetic,
symbolic, and even phenomenological quali-
ties that may be associated with the results
of [Asher's] procedures ... are quite inciden-
tal," I am less confident on this point. In fact,
ever since my experience of viewing Asher's
stunning installation at the Santa Monica
Museum, a space of doubt has grown regard-
ing the prevailing assumption that Asher's is
foremost a conceptually driven critique of
institutional sites and procedures and that, as
such, to focus on formal, material, symbolic,
phenomenological, or aesthetic experience
of his work as presented in the exhibition
space is to somehow miss the point. Such
an assumption is at the root of the casual
remark of one of my former students that
once he knew what Asher planned for the
Santa Monica Museum installation - to
reconstruct at full scale all temporary walls
that were built in the museum space over the
institution's ten-year history of exhibitions at
its current site- he did not feel the need to go
see it. He felt he "got" the work without the
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experience of viewing the installation in actu-
ality. While such a remark might be dismissed
as lazy or ill-informed, I take it seriously as
reflecting certain entrenched and naturalized
views that hierarchically separate the concep-
tual and procedural aspects of a work (as pri-
mary) from its material, aesthetic, formal,
symbolic, and affective dimensions (as inci-
dental), especially if an artist is identified in
contemporary art discourse, like Asher, as a
Conceptualist or a post-studio practitioner.
I have to confess to working under
such an assumption myself when I wrote the
essay for Asher's Santa Monica Museum exhi-
bition catalogue.12 Based solely on the artist's
description of what was planned, and men-
tally visualizing it in relation to what I knew
of the museum space as well as some of
Asher's past projects, I made claims about
his installation without seeing the work. The
fact that such a presumptuous act was not
deemed inappropriate is in part my point.
For an artist like Asher, who has long been
identified with institutional critique as a
post-studio, site-specific, Conceptualist, what
ends up in the gallery space is considered of
lesser significance than the social and institu-
tional processes involved and the ideas that
generate them.
Here is what I wrote rather confidently
in the catalogue essay:
Asher frames out the exhibition history
of the museum as a material and archi-
tectural accumulation. The project thus
becomes an archive or inventory of past
transformations of the museum's exhibi-
tion space that inevitably manifests what
was originally deemed by the museum
staff to be appropriate if not ideal for the
showcasing of particular artworks over
the years . . . [T]his simultaneous pre-
sentation of multiple exhibition layouts
. . . [provides] the viewer with the
opportunity to both see and physically
encounter the mechanics of display
conventions as they shift in relation to
the contingency of time.
53
 Significantly, the walls of Asher s
installation at the Santa Monica
Museum are only demarcations, skeletal
frameworks delineating the positions
of past walls rather than asserting their
material presence. They are neither fully
realized pictorial planes nor volumetric
masses as explored in earlier projects.
In part, this is due to the practical need
of providing access into the museum
space, which would not be possible if
all the walls were to be rendered as
solid forms. But their provisional, even
ghostly, quality as structural outlines, as
unfinished walls, seems suitable to the
task of revealing the temporariness of
the architecture of temporary exhibi-
tions. By emphasizing the imperma-
nence of these walls through their literal
hollowness and transparency, Asher
underscores the transience of what com-
monly appears permanent and stable,
including ultimately the institution of
the museum itself. He further reveals the
conventions of wall construction with
its dependence on modularity of parts
(i.e., prefabricated studs and drywall
boards), allowing the viewer to recognize
the interrelatedness of conventionalized
building technology and conventional-
ized display techniques.13
Although I stand by the points I made
in that essay, they are at the same time not
enough insofar as they do not account for
how the installation offered so much more.
On the one hand, Asher s Santa Monica
Museum project extends his long-standing
epistemological (rather than ontological)
interrogation of sculpture through an engage-
ment with the terms and material conditions
of a site's architecture.14 On the other hand,
the extension of Asher's method of contextu-
alizing "the sculpture to display the architec-
ture and the architecture to display the
problems of sculpture" has yielded, in this
case, a kind of "perverse" space as well.15 Not
unlike Serras convergence as described ear-
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lier, Asher s rationalistic and transparent
deconstruction of the history and the condi-
tions of a given exhibition site at the Santa
Monica Museum "puts the subject in play
within the space in a way that seems to
derange its rational structure," the results
consequently being the excess of physical
and affective intensities for its viewers.16
Serra's Torqued Ellipses and Asher s Santa
Monica Museum installation represent points
on different, parallel lines of investigation of
site-specific sculpture since the mid-1960s.
The tectonically oriented structures of Serra
and semiotically informed displacements or
interventions of Asher, while both decon-
structing and undoing sculpture vis-à-vis
architecture, seem now to be cutting across.
Serra, whose long-standing artistic project
has never abandoned sculpture in pursuit of
its internal immanence, and Asher, whose
epistemological investigations of sculpture
and architecture have insisted on the external
and contingent relationality of these catego-
ries, have both reached a point with their
works in which the bodily and psychical
intensity of experiencing the works in situ
overtakes the rational-critical awareness one
could have of them from elsewhere. Whether
such an immersion of the subject and the
transformation of "actual space" into a Sur-
realist or Baroque space of alterity should
be understood as a function of these artists'
works moving toward the condition of spec-
tacle or, as Foster has suggested, a manifesta-
tion of the semiautonomy of art within the
conditions of late capitalism is not totally
clear. What is clear is the extent to which
sculpture s ongoing life, beyond being a thing
that you bump into while backing up to look
at a painting, has complexly relied on archi-
tecture to provide medium-differential
grounds of investigation.
Parts of this essay, particularly the section on Richard
Serra, are drawn from previously published material.
As the problem of sculpture has been a long-standing
interest, especially as it has developed against the term
of architecture, this opportunity gave me a chance
to revisit some past ideas. Thanks to Jennifer Gross,
the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and
Contemporary Art, Yale University Art Gallery, for
the invitation to contribute to this issue of the Yak
University Art Gallery Bulletin.
i. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Michael Asher and the
Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture" (1980), in Neo-
Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European
and American Art from 1955 to 197$ (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2000), 4.
2. See Hal Foster, "The Un/Making of Sculpture,"
Richard Serra Sculpture: 1985- 1998 (Los Angeles:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 13-31.
3. See Michael Asher, Michael Asher: Writings 1971-1981
on Works 1969-1976, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
(Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, 1981).
4. Buchloh, "Michael Asher and the Conclusion of
Modernist Sculpture," 8-9.
5. Fredric Jameson, "The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism," in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 1991), 1-54·
6. Foster, "The Un/Making of Sculpture," 27.
7. Ibid., 28.
8. Ibid.
9. Before entering the exhibition, the visitor was
required to sign a waiver releasing the museum from
any liability claims that might arise from attempting
to see the installation. It read: "I recognize that by
entering the installation in the exhibition Michael
Asher, I am going through commercial grade stud
walls with raw edges and floor plates, and there is the
possibility that I might harm myself. 1) I knowingly
and intentionally waive any and all claims of liability
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for all injuries, illnesses, or property damage against
SMMoA, their Trustees, agents and employees, and
sponsors of the Michael Asher exhibition. 2) I authorize
SMMoA, their agents and employees to act for me,
according to their best judgment, in any emergency
requiring medical attention. . . . Visitors must be 18
years of age or older to enter the installation."
10. Andrea Fraser, "Procedural Matters," Artforum 46
(summer 2008): 377.
11. What is produced in lieu of such exchangeable
goods, according to Fraser, is the artist s archive.
12. Miwon Kwon, "Support and Decoration: Michael
Asher s Critique of the Architecture of Display," in
Michael Asher, exh. cat. (Santa Monica, Calif.: Santa
Monica Museum of Art, 2008), n.p.
13. Ibid.
14. Asher s 1979 project at the Museum of Contempo-
rary Art in Chicago is a paradigmatic example. In
this case, a set of aluminum wall panels cladding the
external façade of the museum s new annex building
was relocated to its interior gallery space. In the new
indoor setting, the panels functioned not so much as
International Style architectural decoration, covering
up the cement blocks of the building s exterior as
before, but as Minimalist art objects, sculptural reliefs
made of prefabricated industrial material and displayed
to emphasize the logic of serial repetition (that is, the
grid). Through this seemingly simple procedure of
displacement, in which a select material already part of
the site is moved to a different location and placed in
slightly altered relation to existing contextual elements,
Asher undid the symbolic or semiotic function of the
wall panels (meant to signify the progressive expansion
of the museum) while simultaneously revealing Mini-
mal art s hidden formalist agenda (which demands the
neutrality of the architectural container). On the mat-
ter of Minimalisms ambivalent relation to modernist
formalism, see Hal Foster, "The Crux of Minimalism,"
in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1996), 35-70.
15. Asher, Michael Asher, 198.
16. Foster, "The Un/Making of Sculpture," 28.
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