SMMoCA presents the first account of American conceptual artist Michael Asher’s imagined Untitled (2000-2012), a previously unpublished project developed in collaboration with Dia: Beacon. The artwork’s duration marks the period during which Asher was in dialogue with the museum in planning and executing his project, which has not been made public until now. Asher directed aspects of the construction of the museum’s exhibition spaces prior to opening in 2003 and guided modifications to the spaces over time as he observed the reception and engagement of visitors. During this period, Asher remained undecided about whether the project should be made public out of a concern that knowledge of it would impact its reception. He deferred the decision while the private development of the project with Dia: Beacon continued under Asher’s guidance until his passing in 2012. Untitled was envisaged as a culmination of Asher’s career-long commitment to interventions in museums and galleries.
In 2000, the Dia Foundation began the renovation and reconstruction of a former Nabisco box printing factory built in 1929 on the bank of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York This expansive space constructed from steel, concrete, and glass, featuring high ceilings and over 34,000 square feet of skylights, is “a model of early-twentieth-century industrial architecture, the elegant, functional design of which provides an ideal environment for contemporary art.” The Dia Foundation’s commitment to showcasing innovative and monumental works dating from the 1960s to the present aligned with Asher’s decades-long exploration into what Benjamin Buchloh describes as “The threshold between symbolic space and actual space, the ambiguous shift between functional object and aesthetic object, [that] demonstrates the lines between which Michael Asher’s works operate with increasingly analytical precision, deconstructing our notions of the sculptural.”
On Dia: Beacon’s invitation, the 240,000 square feet of exhibition space became a site for the development of Asher’s project aimed at catalyzing an engaged experience in which visitors are impacted by the space’s design, its materiality, engineered acoustics and sound, modified ventilation, and aromatic diffusers. Throughout his career, Asher critically examined art exhibition spaces, their institutions and relationships with visitors by modifying exhibition spaces and highlighting their contexts.
As an extension of this career-long exploration, Asher’s Untitled (2000-2012) produces invisible phenomenological effects designed for the viewer experience and reception of art best characterized by Marcel Duchamp’s notion that “a work of art is completed by the viewer.”
At the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles in 1974 for example, Asher removed walls separating the gallery and administrative offices, which in his own words, “direct[ed] perception to the gallery and the person operating the gallery.”
In 1982, Asher reconstructed the Museum Haus Lange’s interior walls 90 degrees from their original orientation for visitors to imagine their own reorientation within the space, and left some of the shifted interiors to extend outside of the museum. At the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2008, Asher reconstructed the supporting studs of all the temporary walls of exhibitions since 1998 and displayed the 44 corresponding floor plans in the same space for reference.
Speaking on the exhibition, Asher stated: “I am interested in how viewers’ comprehension and experience change as they do that cross referencing. . . [of the] list of exhibitions and diagrams.” These architectural projects created visual ruptures challenging visitor expectations and assumptions of the gallery space and their context within it. As Andrea Fraser notes in her Art Forum review of Asher’s SMMoA exhibition, Asher was concerned with the “reflection on the process of reception itself.”
Other interventions by Asher have included subtle and easily unnoticeable interventions without explanations accessible to the viewer. For the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Spaces Asher’s work Untitled (1969) integrated an ambient noise generator, speakers, and acoustical board into an empty gallery space to create a void. Curator Jennifer Licht writes in the Spaces catalogue, “Space itself is Asher's medium; he both shapes and activates it through distribution of anonymous sound sources, ordering both their amplitude and direction.” Asher continued subtly manipulating sound in the gallery space for Installation (1970) in which he created a pinpointed audio deadzone by cancelling out soundwaves in the center of a gallery at the La Jolla Museum of Art. During this period Asher also began to experiment with subtle light manipulations of gallery spaces which he found influenced perceptions of space. In 1973 Asher painted the white ceilings of Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Cologne a shade darker than the floor without signage to explain the work. These installations encourage a sensitivity to both the material and immaterial qualities of the exhibition space. Jennifer Licht writes, “If a discernible style can be defined in [Michael Asher’s] work, it is one of reduction and subtlety, which demands the intensification and heightening of our powers of perception.” These works reflect the nuance of Asher’s interventions that informed Untitled (2000-2012) at Dia:Beacon.
At the onset of the project, Asher served as a lead consultant to architects and directed Dia: Beacon to employ a range of atmospheric effects related to sound, space, and air. Drawing on his expertise in tone generation, sound manipulation, and gallery design utilized in his previous projects, Asher crafted exhibition spaces that included invisible or barely noticeable qualities to catalyze experiences of art that were designed to be both physically and psychologically impactful. One of his aims, to this end, was for the resonant sounds of the former industrial building’s spaces to be absorbed by walls modified with added gypsum panels. The altered construction of the building executed by Dia: Beacon’s primary architects at Rice+Lipka resulted in a “constrained architecture that firmly embraces the artwork.”
This “embrace” extends to the viewer, whose sense of focus is subtly influenced by the neutralization of ambient noise and the stabilizing density of the surrounding architectural materials.
Building off an interest latent in several of his works concerned with the effects of sounds and silence (e.g. Untitled, 1969 at the Museum of Modern Art and Installation, 1969 at the La Jolla Museum of Art), Asher further explored acoustics and tone generation to integrate into the design of Dia: Beacon galleries. Working with a team specializing in the psychology of sound and space from the design and engineering consulting firm ARUP, and a therapeutic sound laboratory, Cyma Technologies, Asher developed a blend of audible sounds and inaudible frequencies designed to both calm and inspire the visitor when broadcast into the museum’s spaces. The mix included 20% grey noise to enhance variability in individual audio perception, 35% pink noise to foster concentration, 25% brown noise to encourage movement, and 20% white noise. This created an immersive yet mostly imperceptible effect.
Asher’s interventions also extended to the air inside Dia: Beacon. In ‘Notes on Air Works, Regular Air Works 1967-69,’ Asher wrote: “Air seems to be the most obvious yet the most overlooked material that we come in everyday contact with.” He found that the manipulation of air in exhibition spaces was a subtle way of influencing physical effects. Asher’s experimentations with air began in the late 1960s with his “air works,” created with a Dayton air blower in a studio space. Throughout the following decades, these experimentations gradually became more nuanced and complex as Asher played with the scale and precision of ventilation design in exhibition spaces. In line with previous projects such as his “curtain-of-air” at the Whitney Museum in 1969 and for his work Kunsthalle Bern, 1992 relocating radiators within the museum and thus shifting the sources of heat within the galleries, Asher redirected the air flow at Dia: Beacon to spill out from over the top of the thickened walls and into the galleries, in anticipation of encouraging movement through the exhibition spaces.
Museums typically employ advanced air filtration systems to protect their collections by controlling humidity levels and mitigating the spread of air-borne contaminants. One of them is a system that artificially generates free ions into interior spaces to purify the air. Asher explored these methods of filtration and purification to consider how they impact the visitor and consulted with a team of neuroscientists and museum air care specialists to further explore the potential effects of air ionizers, which disperse negative ions and maintain an optimal balance of charged air. Ionizers are occasionally used in museums for controlling contaminants and odors, but have also been used in cognitive therapies. Naturally produced by UV rays and crashing water, negative ions are capable of improving oxygen flow to the brain, increasing dopamine production, and generally improving mental performance and memory. Asher explored the potential artificial production of free negative ions in therapies to stimulate these effects and guided the installation of air ionizers throughout the museum’s ventilation system with the aim of unobtrusively stimulating the mind.
While further investigating the psychological impacts of ionized air, Asher also explored scent diffusion technologies and worked with Sensory Co. to integrate into the ventilation system dry atomization methods common in airports, convention halls and shopping centers. Psychologists who specialize in olfactory research have published research that shows that engineered scents can induce a balance of beta, alpha, and theta brainwaves and stabilize the nervous system to produce a meditative mental state. In consultation with some of these psychologists Asher developed a custom scent designed to stimulate visitors psychologically to encourage a receptiveness to the art and the gallery space.Asher then worked with specialists at Air-Scent International Inc. to integrate these carbon-based compounds into scent diffuser systems within the museum.
Architects design museums in consideration of acoustics, atmospheric effects, light, and space, to engage people physically and psychologically. Museums have often been compared to sacred spaces devoted to spiritual worship where the architectural design shapes experience. Just as religious buildings are designed to encourage contemplation, museums are also designed to have an effect on the visitor and their experience within the space.
These spaces not only hold artworks, but also mediate the perception of art and influence their reception. Since the first introduction of public viewings of private collections in the eighteenth century, the gallery has been an instrument for reimagining how viewers can experience art. The contemporary white cube museum aesthetic has become synonymous with neutrality and purity by suppressing the idea that the museum is an instrument and hiding the institutional influences behind the gallery. Michael Asher aimed to reveal institutional influences and interrogate the contextual conditions of artworks. Asher manipulated the acoustics, air, and architectural elements to highlight context. Asher’s invisible alterations at Dia: Beacon, like other exhibition spaces he worked with throughout his career, have offered visitors opportunities for expanded experiences of art.
Untitled (2000-2012) builds upon Asher’s career-long interrogation of materiality, physical context, and imperceptible elements of the museum for their potential effects on physical and psychological experience. The project is an exploration of the ways the atmosphere can elevate visitors' encounters with the museum space and its art. One year into the project, Asher described in an interview the potential for an artwork’s quality of limitless meaning, stating “Limitless meaning refers to a quality in an artwork which initiates associations alone as its function. Its job is to consume an endless stream of thought.” In keeping with this idea, Untitled (2000-2012) is Asher’s life-long exploration of art in context with the aim of catalyzing expanded experiences. Since 2003, over two million visitors have experienced Asher’s work without knowing they did. But in opening themselves up to experience the museum space, they have “completed” it nonetheless.
SMMoCA Discretionary Notification: The following advisory is issued in coordination with the museum’s adherence to national guidelines in accordance with the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Code of Ethics and Sensitivities. Dia: Beacon is committed to the well-being of its guests and aims to provide an environment that prioritizes emotional and psychological safety. Dia: Beacon and its affiliates wish to inform its visitors that its galleries are designed to induce sensorial and cognitive experiences through intentional modifications to sound, air, and space, which will elicit varying emotional and psychological responses unique to each individual. The imagined Untitled (2000 - 2012) invites a consideration of the influence museums and institutions have on the reception of art. If you have concerns or questions about your experience, we encourage you to communicate directly with museum staff, who are available
to assist you.