Perpetually Out of Place: Michael

Asher and Jean-Antoine Houdon

at the Art Institute of Chicago*
JENNIFER KING
OCTOBER 120, Spring 2007, pp. 7186. 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 1916 the Art Institute of Chicago placed an order with the Gorham
Manufacturing Company of Providence, Rhode Island, to acquire a bronze cast of
Jean-Antoine Houdons late-eighteenth-century statue of George Washington. The
original marble statue had been commissioned in 1785 by the General Assembly
of the Commonwealth of Virginia, as a result of its resolution the previous year to
have a statue erected as a monument of affection and gratitude to George
Washington, who, uniting to the endowments of the hero, the virtues of the
patriot, and exerting both in establishing the liberties of his country, has ren-
dered his name dear to his fellow-citizens, and given to the world an immortal
example of true glory.
1
Thomas Jefferson, who, along with Benjamin Franklin,
was entrusted with the task of selecting the appropriate sculptor for the commis-
sion, reported from Paris on their selection of Houdon: There could be no
question raised as to the sculptor who should be employed; the reputation of
Mons. Houdon, of this city, being unrivaled in Europe.
2
Describing Houdons
fame and skill in a letter to Washington, Jefferson wrote, A bust of Voltaire exe-
cuted by him is said to be one of the nest in the world.
3
Prior to Houdons
receiving the commission, Governor of Virginia Benjamin Harrison had arranged
for Charles Willson Peale to paint a full-length portrait of Washington, which was
sent to Jefferson in Paris.
4
Houdon, however, preferred to model Washington from
* An earlier version of this essay was presented as a talk at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in
2006. My thanks to Michael Asher, Lisa Dorin, Whitney Moeller, and Anne Rorimer for help with
research and images, and to Kaira Cabaas, Hal Foster, Mark Haxthausen, and Gordon Hughes for
critical feedback and encouragement. I am also grateful to the College Art Association for the support
of a Professional Development Fellowship for Art Historians.
1. Resolution of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, June 26, 1784. Quoted in
Ronald E. Heaton, The Image of Washington: History of the Houdon Statue (Norristown, Penn., 1971), p. 6.
2. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Harrison, January 12, 1875. Quoted in Charles Henry
Hart and Edward Biddle, Memoirs of the Life and Works of Jean Antoine Houdon: The Sculptor of Voltaire and
of Washington (Philadelphia, 1911), p. 187.
3. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, December 10, 1784. Quoted in ibid.
4. Once considered lost, the Peale painting has been identied by scholars as the portrait of
Washington now in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. See John S. Hallam,
72 OCTOBER
life, and in late 1785 the sculptor trav-
eled with Franklin from France to
America. During a two-week stay at
Mount Vernon, Houdon modeled a
terra-cotta bust of Washington and
made a life mask of his subject before
returning to Paris to execute the com-
mission.
5
Completed by 1792, the
statue was installed in 1796 in the
rotunda of the Virginia State Capitol,
where it continues to stand today.
The Art Institute statue is one
of the multiple reproductions cast
from molds of the marble original.
During the 1850s the Commonwealth
of Virginia allowed for the production
of one plaster and six bronze casts,
and in 1910 the Virginia General
Assembly authorized the Gorham
Manufacturing Company to produce
an unspecified number of bronze
copies, with the provision that each
request for reproduct ion first be
approved by the governor of Virginia.
In 1916 the Art Institute paid Gorham
$3,375 for a copy of the statue, and in
1917 the bronze replica was installed
under the central portal of the museums Michigan Avenue entrance, where it
remained almost continuously until 1979.
6
As photographs from this time period
demonstrate, the Houdon statue remained a reliable presence at the buildings
entrance for more than sixty years, even as the facade decorations and museum
signage gradually changed.
Houdons Washington in Richmond: Some New Observations, American Art Journal (November 1978),
pp. 7380; and American Art at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University,
1972), n.p.
5. Houdon left the terra-cotta bust at Mount Vernon, returning to Paris with the life mask and a
plaster cast of the bust. The life mask is now in the collection of the Morgan Library and Museum in
New York; the original bust is owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, which owns and main-
tains historic Mount Vernon.
6. The statue was removed from this location for a brief period during 1960. For a detailed history
of the Art Institutes Houdon cast, see Whitney Moeller, George Washington at the Art Institute of
Chicago, 19162006, and Anne Rorimer, focus: Michael Asher, in Michael Asher: George Washington
at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1979 and 2005 (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2006), pp. 1527; 2933.
Jean-Antoine Houdon. Bronze cast of George
Washington in front of the Art Institute of Chicago.
May 1917. Photography The Art Institute of Chicago.
Michigan Avenue Entrance at
the Art Institute of Chicago.
Top: April 1923. Right:
January 1954. Photography
The Art Institute of Chicago.
OCTOBER 74
*
In 1979, as the museum approached its hundredth anniversary, the Art Insti-
tute prepared to mount the seventy-third installment of its long-standing American
Exhibition. The not-quite-annual American Exhibition, a show initially conceived to
bring a representative selection of American art to Chicago each year, had, by
1979, evolved from a large, often juried exhibition into a more focused selection of
works chosen by the museums curatorial staff. Despite these changes, the exhibi-
tions underlying principle continued to be to inform the public about some of
the best work done by Americans since the preceding exhibition.
7
Co-organized
by A. James Speyer and Anne Rorimer, the museums curators of twentieth-century
painting and sculpture, the 73rd American Exhibition featured the work of sixteen
artistsMichael Asher, Robert Barry, Dan Graham, Michael Heizer, On Kawara,
Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Allen Ruppersberg,
Edward Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and
Lawrence Weinermany of whom were by then associated with one or another of
the still-developing movements of Process art, Conceptual art, or Post-Minimalism.
7. A. James Speyer, The American Exhibition, in 73rd American Exhibition (Chicago: Art Institute
of Chicago, 1979), p. 5.
Installation view of 73rd American Exhibition. 1979. Photography The Art Institute of Chicago.
Perpetually Out of Place 75
Michael Asher, for his contribution to the 73rd American Exhibition, initially
proposed reversing the positions of the familiar and much-beloved lions by
Edward L. Kemeys anking the front entrance of the buildinga subtle alteration
intended by Asher as a means of questioning the symbolic and institutional mean-
ings attached to the buildings architectural decorations. Although both curators
gave their full support to the proposal, the work met with considerable internal
resistance from other museum staff and trusteesa sentiment most vociferously
expressed in a memo sent to Speyer from the museums registrar (and copied to
the president of the Art Institute), which stated:
Although you probably deliberately neglected to tell me anything
about reversing the positions of the Kemeys lions at the front entrance
when we discussed the contents of the 73rd American Exhibition, I have
heard that you do intend (apparently with ofcial approval, which I
nd totally incomprehensible) to take this action. I nd this so com-
pletely revolting and unworthy not only of you but also of the Art
Institute, that I must state very plainly that this department will refuse
to do anything further toward the collecting, packing, shipping, or
insuring of all objects lent to this exhibition.
8
Based on the threatening tone of the memo, it is easy to assume that such
internal opposition played a role in scuttling Ashers original proposal. Rorimer,
however, recalls that it was ultimately the works prohibitive cost estimate that was
the deciding factor in abandoning the project.
9
As an alternate proposal, Asher
asked to have the bronze cast of George Washington removed from its location at
the front entrance of the building and reinstalled within the museums eighteenth-
century gallery. The second proposal, which was approved by the museums
steering committee as a practical alternative to moving the lions, was accompa-
nied by two gallery handouts, one placed at the entrance to the 73rd American
Exhibition, directing viewers to the eighteenth-century gallery, and one located in
the gallery itself.
10
In both handouts, Asher explained, In this work I am interested
8. Memo from Wallace D. Bradway to A. James Speyer, March 23, 1979, Archives of the Art Institute
of Chicago.
9. Conversation with the author, April 28, 2006. According the exhibition le, the cost of moving
and insuring the lions was estimated to be $20,000. Document labeled Notes for le and for A. R.
info, n.d., Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago.
10. The memo indicating the steering committees endorsement of the project also implies that the
work remained something of an enigma to the Art Institute staff. Addressed to Speyer by Milo M.
Naeve, the memo concludes with the statement, We rely on your professional judgment about the
place of the project in the exhibition. Memo from Naeve to Speyer, April 10, 1979, Archives of the Art
Institute of Chicago. Rorimer believes Ashers second proposal was met with less resistance than it
might have otherwise because John Maxon, the museums vice president for collections and exhibi-
tions who installed the eighteenth-century gallery in 1976 (and under whose charge the gallery would
have belonged) had died in 1977, leaving a vacancy that was not lled until 1980. Conversation with
the author, April 28, 2006.
OCTOBER 76
in the way the sculpture functions
when it is viewed in its eighteenth-
century context instead of in its
prior relationship to the facade of
the building.
11
As numerous past interpreters
of Ashers work have noted, the
relocation of the Houdon statue
accomplished two signicant acts
of displacement. First, by recon-
textualizing the sculpture in its
proper historical milieu, Ashers
movement of the Houdon high-
lighted the disjunction between its
symbolic function as a public mon-
ument and its aesthetic origins as
an eighteenth- century art work.
Second, in so doing, Ashers work
performed an important cognitive
shift, refocusing attention from
the autonomous object of art, to its
contingent institutional framing
conditions.
12
Although I certainly
agree with this reading of the work,
and the important role it has played in establishing Asher as a crucial progenitor of
what is now termed institutional critique, I want to depart here from the teleo-
logical impulse driving certain versions of this interpretation. In particular, rather
than viewing Ashers work as an endpointas a moment signaling what Benjamin
Buchloh has called the conclusion of modernist sculptureI will instead argue
that Ashers work can be understood as a sophisticated looping back: a return,
that is, to the question of sculpture and its reception in the aftermath of Mini-
malism and Post-Minimalism.
11. Handout by Michael Asher for the 73rd American Exhibition, Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago.
12. Among the many texts to discuss these aspects of the work are Anne Rorimer, Michael Asher:
Recent Work Artforum 18, no. 8 (April 1980), pp. 4650; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Michael Asher and
the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture, in The Centennial Lectures of the Art Institute of Chicago, ed. Susan
Rossen (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1983), pp. 27795; Craig Owens, From Work to Frame, or,
Is There Life After The Death of the Author?, in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 12239; and Thomas Crow, Site-Specic Art: The
Strong and the Weak, in Modern Art and the Common Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1996), pp. 13150. Ashers own writings also serve as an important primary source for interpretations
of the Houdon installation; see Asher, Writings 19731983 On Works 19691979, ed. Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), pp. 20720.
Houdon cast on the front steps of the Art Institute.
1979. Photograph by Courtney Donnell.
Perpetually Out of Place 77
One of the primary developments of Minimalism as it emerged during the
mid-1960s was to foreground the phenomenological aspect of the viewing experi-
ence. By creating objects that moved beyond the optical realm of the picture
plane and into the literal space of three dimensions, such works sought to engage
with the subjective, temporal, and physical presence of the viewer. Robert Morris,
for example, was explicit about the central role of the viewers phenomenological
engagement with such sculptures, stating, Im very much involved with that rela-
tionship towards things that has to do with the bodys response.
13
It was this
attention to conditions external to the art work that paved the way for works
focusing primarily on the framing conditions of art.
14
Many of Ashers early works,
such as his 1972 installation at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany, were in fact crucial
in forming the bridge from a phenomenologically based Minimalism to institu-
tional critique. At Documenta, Asher divided a gallery space along its central axis,
13. E. C. Goossen, The Artist Speaks: Robert Morris, Art in America 58, no. 3 (May/June 1970), p. 105.
14. My understanding of Minimalism, and of the stakes it established for subsequent art practices, is
indebted here to the work of Hal Foster. See Foster, The Crux of Minimalism, in The Return of the Real
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 3568.
Michael Asher. Installation view of Ashers contribution to 73rd
American Exhibition. 1979. Photograph by Rusty Culp.
OCTOBER 78
painting half the space black, and the other half white. In certain respects, this
action extended the phenomenological investigations of the Minimalists by creat-
ing a situation where the viewers perception depended on his or her position within
the space. But by basing the works structure on the gallerys architectural planes,
Asher signicantly departed from Minimalism by eliminating any remaining con-
nection to an autonomous art object. As he would later describe his departure
from Minimal sculpture, Traditional practice had been to insert something into a
space, rather than to comment on that insertion. A space with an object in it is
dominated by the object, rather than by itself.
15
By completely eliminating the art
object in installations like the Documenta piece, Ashers work thus marked a funda-
mental shift from the partially contingent ontology of Minimal sculpture to the
totally contingent epistomology of the institutional frame.
It is because of the basic narrative I have just sketchedthat is, the progres-
sive move from Minimal object to site-specic practicethat Ashers work for the
73rd American Exhibition has been overridingly associated with the breakdown of
modernist sculpture and the advent of a concept-driven institutional critique.
Miwon Kwon, for example, in her inuential essay on site-specic art, describes
Ashers installation as an example of the shift away from a literal or physical con-
ception of the site to what she describes as a dematerialized, de-aestheticized, and
ultimately discursively determined sitein other words, a conceptual site, generated
15. Asher, Writings 19731983 On Works 19691979, p. 13.
Asher. Installation for
Documenta 5. 1972.
Perpetually Out of Place 79
rst at the level of content.
16
In my reading of the work, however, I am not ready
to discard the art object and its physical environment quite so quickly. Indeed,
what I see in Ashers work is a clever reversal of such dematerialization. For if the
phenomenology of Minimalism opened the door to the discursive commentary of
institutional critique, then it was the critique of the institution, in the case of
Ashers work at the Art Institute, that allowed for a return to the questions rst
raised by Minimalism, but now addressed to a different contextthat of the
Houdon statue and its reception in the late-twentieth-century art museum.
*
In one of the especially negative reviews from 1979, Alan Artner, an art critic
for the Chicago Tribune, derided Ashers contribution to the exhibition by describ-
ing the Houdon statue as ridiculously out-of-place in its new location.
17
One of
the primary reasons for Artners assessment was the almost acid green patina of
the weathered statueevidence of its outdoor placement and exposure to the ele-
ments over a period of more than sixty years. But another reason the statue might
have looked out-of-place in the museums eighteenth-century gallery was the by-
then relatively marginalized status of sculpture within the museumwhat Alex
Potts has identied as the otherness of sculpture, resulting from the pervasive
logic of the two-dimensional image in modern culture.
18
This pronounced hier-
archy of painting over sculpture was not always the case, either in museums at
large, or at the Art Institute in particular. In early photographs of the Art Institutes
central foyer, for example, one can see the prominent position once given to gu-
rative sculpture. Indeed, at one time the Art Institute, like many American and
European museums, devoted numerous galleries to plaster casts of sculptures dat-
ing from antiquity to the Neoclassical period; in 1890 the Art Institute housed one
of the largest collections of plaster casts in the country.
By 1979, however, museological conventions had changed considerably
both in terms of attitudes toward copies and in terms of the display of sculpture.
Thus, even in the museums eighteenth-century gallery, which was conceived as a
period room, the only sculptures in evidence in 1979 were displayed as if they
were paintingsa fact that was apparent in the two busts mounted high on the
back wall of the gallery, blending almost seamlessly into an arrangement of por-
trait paintings. Even the furniture and decorative art objects in the gallery were
pushed against the walls, further reinforcing the reigning visual logic of two-
dimensional display.
16. See Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specicity, October 80 (Spring 1997),
pp. 85110.
17. Alan Artner, Institutes New Exhibit Offers a Bleak Picture, Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1979.
18. Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), p. ix.
OCTOBER 80
By inserting the bronze statue of
George Washington into the Art Insti-
tutes eighteenth-century gallery, Asher, I
argue, did more than simply highlight
the discursive role of the institution in
designating the Houdon a patriotic sym-
bol in one location and an art work in
another. Rather, what this insertion also
did was to reenact the lessons of Mini-
malism and the radical reordering of
perception originally brought about by
the literalism of objects that could not be
perceived in a single glance. Here, rather
than simply eliminating the object of art
in order to comment on the institutional
frame, Asher reinserted an object within
that framea frame now newly consti-
tuted to our awarenessin order to com-
ment on the still- pervasive hegemony
within the museum of a two-dimensional
mode of viewing, when dealing with sculpture outside the categories of Minimalism
and Post-Minimalism.
In the twentieth century the Houdon statue had come to function more as
an image than as an object. This effect is evident in posters from the 1932 bicenten-
nial celebration of the birth of George Washington, in which the sculpture was
translated into a picturetransformed from sculpture to image in a lithograph of
Uncle Sam standing with a young boy and pointing to a replica of the Houdon
statue.
19
As depicted in the bicentennial postermore than one hundred thou-
sand copies of which were distributed during the nine-month celebration
Houdons statue of Washington was important not for its artistic qualities as a
sculpture, but for its illustrative and ideological legibility as an icon. Indeed, even
at the Art Institute, in its function as a monument, the sculptures placement in
line with the facade of the building, and its strict frontality of presentation at-
tened the work into a two-dimensional, image-based mode of reception. One can
therefore see, in a photograph from 1944, how the sculpture operates within the
19. The poster was one of several issued by the Bicentennial Commission to bring the Celebration
before the people and to sustain interest in it over a period of nine months. In a remarkable series of
media translations, the depiction of the sculpture was the result of a drawing by Albert T. Reid, which
was then rendered in oil by Henry Hintermeister, whose painting was subsequently reproduced as a
color lithograph. See Activities of the Commission and Complete Final Report of the United States George
Washington Bicentennial Commission 5 (Washington, D.C., 1932), pp. 58385. Special thanks to Adam
Greenhalgh for directing me to the report of the Bicentennial Commission and for sharing with me
his extensive knowledge regarding representations of George Washington.
Poster from 1932 bicentennial celebration of
George Washingtons birth.
Perpetually Out of Place 81
same visual plane as the two-dimensional war posters that ank it. Thus Asher, by
taking the sculpture off its base and placing it in the center of the Art Institutes
intimate eighteenth-century gallery, effectively reordered the mode of viewing
associated with the workturning the icon back into a sculpture whose undeni-
able materiality (in the form of its weathered patina) and literal physical presence
(as a large object set squarely in the center of a small room) would have prompted
an object-based phenomenological response on the part of the viewer. Or, to put
this another way, by presenting the work as a thing-in-the-world to be encoun-
tered, circumnavigated, and perceived in three dimensions, Asher sought to
counteract the purely symbolic and phenomenologically attened reception of
the statue. Thenand only thencould the work be viewed as a sculpture by
Jean-Antoine Houdon, and not just as an image of George Washington, our rst
president. With this simple action, Asher reasserted the Minimalists move from
the optical to the literal in order to return to the Houdon statue a long-lost mode
of viewing appropriate to its condition as an eighteenth-century sculpture. It was
for this perceptual displacement, then, as much as for any discursive displacement,
that the Houdon statue was received as being so out of place. By literalizing the
sculpture as an object, Asher disrupted the kind of easy image consumption to
which it had been previously given over.
Faade of the Art Institute of Chicago. December 1944. Photography The Art Institute of Chicago.
OCTOBER 82
At the end of the 73rd American Exhibition the Houdon statue was removed
from the museums eighteenth-century gallery. It was not, however, returned to its
former location at the front entrance of the building. One could conjectureand
I believe this to be truethat once Asher reasserted the statues aesthetic form as
a sculpture qua sculpture, the museum could not return it to its former, purely
symbolic use. Thus, despite the prominent position it had occupied on the
museums front steps for more than sixty years, the sculpture, once it was taken off
its granite pedestal, suffered from a kind of liminal status, neither fully an iconic
monument nor an object-based art work. This condition became apparent with
the museums subsequent difculty nding an appropriate location for the statue.
For a short time the Houdon was placed at the base of the grand staircase in the
museums Michigan Avenue lobby. It was soon moved, however, owing to its per-
ception as an obstacle blocking pedestrian access to the stairs. This led to further
relocationsrst to a corner of the lobby, where it was placed unceremoniously
against a wall, and then into storage, where it remained for several years. In 1984
the sculpture was exiled from the museum completelysent to Chicago City Hall
after a request by the mayors ofce for a long-term sculpture loan. Tellingly, in a
memo to Speyer regarding the selection of such a loan, the Art Institutes director
James Wood noted it should be a work for which there is no imminent use in our
own installations.
20
Given the many years that Houdons statue of George Washington stood as a
familiar and symbolic icon on the steps of the Art Institute, the sculptures fate
after the 73rd American Exhibition is particularly striking. On the one hand, Ashers
intervention irreparably disrupted the imagistic function once ascribed to the
20. Memo from James N. Wood to A. James Speyer, January 4, 1984, Archives of the Art Institute
of Chicago.
Lobby of the Art Institute of Chicago.
1979. Photograph by Anne Rorimer.
sculpture, which explains why it was never
returned to the Michigan Avenue entrance.
As it stood in front of the museum, the
statues function as an icon superseded and
even negated its status as an art workan
effect that was no longer possible following
Ashers installation. On the other hand, even
after Asher reasserted the works physical
presence as a sculpture, its lingering symbolic
associations still precluded its inclusion in
the galleries as an object of aesthetic contem-
plat ion. Suspended somewhere bet ween
image and object, the works liminal status
as not-quite art, not-quite symbol frustrated
the museums ability to understand, process,
and display the Houdon cast. Once it was
sent to the mayors ofce, the sculpture was
all but forgotten.
21
During the twenty years the Houdon
statue remained at the mayors ofce, Ashers
contribution to the 73rd American Exhibition
became known as one of the seminal installa-
tions in the history of institutional critique.
The works gradual canonization within aca-
demic and artistic circles was due in large part to the far-reaching inuence of
Buchlohs 1983 essay, Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture.
Buchlohs text, which deals as much with the changing historical stakes of the cat-
egory sculpture as it does with Ashers work per se, positions Ashers two 1979
installations in Chicago (the Art Institute work and a work for the Museum of
Contemporary Art) as marking a crucial turning point in the evolution of sculp-
ture under the conditions of modernism.
22
As I have already discussed, one of the
lasting effects of Buchlohs essay has been the notion that Ashers Houdon instal-
lation served as a purely discursive gesture. Although I depart from Buchloh in
this view, his essay makes a critical (and, as we will see, remarkably prescient)
point about the hierarchical value system historically attached to sculptural mate-
rials. Describing, for example, the nobility ascribed to marble and bronze in
Rodins late work, Buchloh observes: Sculptural materiality before or beyond its
iconic, formal, or procedural denitions has to be considered as a symbolic system
Perpetually Out of Place 83
21. On this point, see Moellers discussion of the fact that for many years, the sculpture did not
belong to any department at the Art Institute.
22. For more on the installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, see Rorimer, Michael
Asher: Recent Work, pp. 4849, and Asher, Writings 19731983 On Works 19691979, pp. 196206.
Relocation of the Houdon cast to Chicago City
Hall. 1984. Photograph by Courtney Donnell.
that is highly overdetermined.
23
For
Buchloh, Ashers work in 1979 signaled
the important negation of such material-
ity. In Buchlohs characterization of the
Art Institute and the Museum of Contem-
porary Art installations, their functional
presence and the precision of their func-
t ion were highly dependent on their
actual negation of their own material
presence as sculpture.
24
Ironically, it was
this very factorsculptural materiality
that would become a central issue in the
continuing story of Ashers involvement
with the Houdon statue.
In 2005 Asher was invited back to
the Art Institute, this time to mount a
one- person exhibit ion as part of the
museums focus series on contemporary
art. For the focus exhibition, Asher asked
to have the Houdon sculpture returned
to the Art Institute from the mayors
office. He also proposed mounting an
accompanying exhibit ion in the mu-
seums library that would document the sculptures changing fortunes over the
course of its history at the Art Institute. In a letter to Rorimer, guest curator of the
focus show, and James Rondeau, the Art Institutes curator of contemporary art,
Asher explained, The work I am proposing is a continuation of ideas about his-
torical context employing the cast of George Washington by Jean-Antoine
Houdon.
25
At the time of his initial site visit to Chicago, Asher considered plac-
ing the sculpture in one of the museums contemporary art galleries, where it
would have stood in the company of Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art works of
the 1960s and 1970s (the idea being to situate the statue in the context of works
by Ashers contemporaries). He later decided, however, that only by returning the
sculpture to the Art Institutes eighteenth-century gallery could the works original
implications from 1979 be revisited and extended.
26
OCTOBER 84
23. Buchloh, Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture, p. 279.
24. Ibid., p. 290.
25. Letter from Michael Asher to James Rondeau and Anne Rorimer, February 7, 2005, Michael
Asher les.
26. For discussion of many of the issues raised by Ashers 2005 reinstallation of the Houdon (in par-
ticular, its unusual status within the organizational structure of the Art Institute), see Moeller, George
Washington at the Art Institute of Chicago, 19162006, and Rorimer, focus: Michael Asher.
The Houdon cast at Chicago City Hall.
2004. Photograph by Michael Asher.
Perpetually Out of Place 85
Of particular note is the fact that in 2005by which time the concept of
institutional critique had been embraced (and even actively pursued) by many
major museumsAshers work was again met by considerable resistance from
within the Art Institute. Because the museums permanent collection galleries had
been reorganized and rehung in the years following the 73rd American Exhibition,
Asher asked that the work be installed in the gallery most closely approximating
the one used in 1979.
27
The new eighteenth-century gallery, in addition to being
much larger than the original, was not hung salon-style; however, it did still incor-
porate painting, sculpture, and decorative artsa combination that necessitated
approval of Ashers installation by three different curators, each of whom possessed
responsibility for a portion of the works on view. Although two of the three curators
27. The gallery Asher selected (gallery 220, according to the Art Institutes numbering system)
included seven paintings in common with the original installation.
Asher. Installation view of focus: Michael Asher.
2005. Photograph by Michael Tropea, Chicago.
OCTOBER 86
28. My thanks to Michael Asher, Whitney Moeller, and Anne Rorimer for each discussing with me
the delicate issues involved in mounting the 2005 focus exhibition.
29. The work by Houdon, Bust of Anne-Marie-Louise Thomas de Domageville de Srilly, Comtesse de Pange
(1780) was moved to an adjacent gallery. The other work, Antonio Canovas Bust of Paris (1809), was
removed from view entirely. It is interesting to note, in light of the Art Institute curators objections to
the Houdon cast of George Washington, that Houdon himself was interested in the reproducibility of
his sculpture for commercial purposes. As Guilhem Scherf notes in a recent essay, Houdon was the
rst modern sculptor who did not hesitate to mass produce his sculptures or to delegate production to
his workshop. . . . Houdon even thought of executing one hundred or two hundred plasters of
Washington, at 2 louis apiece. Guilhem Scherf, Houdon, Above All Modern Artists, in Jean-Antoine
Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment, exh. cat. (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2003), p. 22.
lent their support to Ashers exhibition, the third expressed serious reservations
about the project. Among the curators main objections was the fact that the
bronze copy would clash in a gallery containing works in marble, thereby creating
an alien presence.
28
In the ensuing discussions among the dissenting curator,
museum director James Cuno, Rondeau, and Rorimer, not only was the appropri-
ateness of the bronze cast challenged but also the very logic behind Ashers work.
As a result, both Rorimer and Rondeau were put in the position of having to
defend Ashers work against accusations of being a whim and disrespectful,
while also trying to diffuse concerns that the Houdon sculpture would compromise
the display of other works in the gallery. In the end (and only after much careful
negotiation), Ashers installation was allowed to move forward under the agree-
ment that two works in marbleone of them, ironically, a Houdon portrait
bustwould be removed from the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
29
Ultimately, the amount of difculty involved in mounting Ashers focus exhi-
bition simultaneously revealed two things: the now almost totally negligible status
of the Houdon cast as an art work, and the absolute retrenchment of certain
museological conventions regarding originality and the hierarchical value of
materials. Here, it was the very factor thought to be eliminated from Ashers art
workits material presence as sculpturethat proved to be such an obstacle to
the works realization. Intentionally or not, Ashers exhibition in 2005 thus
prompted yet another return to questions of Minimalismin this case, the nature
of materials and the effects of reproduction. Where his work in 1979 revisited the
phenomenological lessons of Minimalism, Ashers focus show became, in part, an
unexpected meditation on the specic materials once explored by artists like
Carl Andre and Donald Judd.
If Ashers installation in 1979 pointed to the disjunction between the modes
of viewing used to understand Minimal art and earlier forms of sculpture, his work
in 2005 demonstrated that such incongruities will and do continue to exist. In
closing, I would simply suggest that at a time when the concepts of reproduction
and repetition are now standard in contemporary art, and questions of interest
have largely surpassed notions of quality, Ashers work for the Art Institute stands
as a reminder that what is valued in one context can still appear, in another situa-
tion, entirely out of place.