In 1974, the Claire Copley Gallery was a storefront space
overlooking a gallery-laden stretch of La Cienega Boulevard
in Los
Angeles. Among Los Angeles cognoscenti, Claire Copley was known as a
"serious" gallerist who showcased work by minimalist and conceptual
artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Daniel Buren, and within that
context, Copley's invitation to Michael Asher to present his first solo
exhibition in an American commercial gallery was entirely appropriate.
Yet, even within the early 1970s conceptual milieu, Asher's 1974 Claire
Copley exhibition stood out. Asher's work had recently expanded from
primarily sensory installations, such as the 1969 works for
Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials at the Whitney Museum of American
Art and Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art, to include conceptualism
more prominently. This was evident in his 1973 installation for the
Heiner Friedrich Gallery in Cologne, where Asher's material
intervention served to foreground the ideological division of social
space. For Anti-Illusion, Asher had set up a barely detectable stream
of pressured air over a passageway between two galleries at the
Whitney, while his Spaces installation featured an acoustically
insulated room in which ambient sounds were distributed in relation to
the room's open doorways. At the Heiner Friedrich Gallery, Asher had
painted the ceiling of the premises (including the gallery's office
space) to match the floor, extending the work--and implicitly the
spectator's reach--to the normally private areas of the gallery as
well. (1) For his exhibition at the Claire Copley Gallery, Asher
removed the partition wall between the exhibition space and the back
room, exposing the storage area and gallery director's office to the
public. "The idea was to integrate the two areas, so that the office
area and its activities could be viewed from the exhibition area, and
the exhibition area opened to the gallery directors' view," Asher later
explained. (2) Copley, who normally would have been invisible to the
casual visitor, was placed on display along with her office and the
everyday business of running a gallery--organizing upcoming exhibitions
or meeting with artists, critics, and buyers. Along with exposing
Copley-the-gallerist to the viewer, Asher was well aware that his
removal of the dividing wall equally displayed the visitor to the
director. Considering the psychological ramifications of this radically
increased visibility, Asher observed, "In the same way that gallery
personnel seemed to become increasingly aware of their activities,
viewers also became more aware of themselves as viewers." (3) The
object of attention for Asher's exhibition, then, was the
institutionally framed social relation that each viewer established
with Copley and other viewers.
The initial reactions to Asher's project at the Claire Copley Gallery
emphasized distinctly affective responses. One critic recounted this
scenario:
All that stuff on the walls is gone, along with every bit of privacy.
Actually viewers don't intend social interaction. They come to look at
art. But without knowing it, they are an integral part of the work
they see. How unsettling, and uncomfortable. There are no visual
entertainments to cast intent gazes upon, security in the altered
proportions of the room which now seems so long and narrow. Are we in
the right gallery? No. Yes. Shall we walk around a little and then
saunter out the door, or shall we say the hell with it and stomp on up
La Cienega shaking our heads. Oh, of course, the show isn't up yet.
Oh, it is! (4)
For this reviewer, the absence of a dividing wall, along with lack
of "that stuff on the walls," produced a situation that viewers
negotiated through a cadre of affective responses: hesitation,
uncertainty, irritation, and outright alarm at the reversal of viewing
relations. Perhaps we got the wrong address, or the wrong date (maybe
the gallery had not installed the work yet). Ultimately, at least for
this reviewer, discomfort gave way to a sense of delight in the
expanded range of experiential interpretation when the lack of
absorptive viewing possibilities brought the social normativity of an
ordinary gallery visit into sharp focus. The responses of Asher's
spectators were not settled in advance by habitual codes of viewing (in
the absence of traditional art objects that they might have regarded
knowingly) or the artist's schema (which might have instructed the
viewer to follow specific procedures). Yet the viewer's engagement with
Asher's situation was influenced by the social pressure exerted by the
presence of the gallerist. Spectatorial agency--the ability to respond,
evaluate, judge, transform, and be transformed--was based on the
viewer's engagement with the psychological and social demands of the
situation. Whether the viewer was amused, curious, or irritated, or
simply decided to leave, her reception of Asher's foundational work of
institutional critique at the Claire Copley Gallery in 1974 involved
affective response.