The ‘Museum’ Show’s Case of the Missing List

What’s in and what’s out is not just the subject of L.A. artist Michael Asher’s project for “The Museum as Muse”--it has also become the work’s own fate.

According to the artist’s proposal to the Museum of Modern Art, Asher intended to produce a de-accession catalog specifically for each of the venues on the show’s tour (after San Diego, the show makes its third and final stop in Madrid).

“It was accepted as a piece that would continue on,” Asher said, “absolutely.” But just days before the show closed at MOMA on June 1, Asher says he received a call from the museum that he had been “removed” from the exhibition.

“I’m bewildered, mystified, curious,” he said. “They did give me an excuse, but it was silly. They said it would be unethical for me to show [at the Museum of Contemporary Art] in San Diego, because I would be the only commissioned artist to show there.”

In fact, Mark Dion, another of the five artists commissioned by MOMA’s Kynaston McShine to create works specifically for the exhibition, will be represented in the San Diego stop, and Janet Cardiff was solicited to participate but was too busy to create a new piece.

Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, acknowledged that a de-accession catalog by Asher might not shine the best of lights on the institution, but that “the decision was Kynaston’s not to have Asher do other versions of it.”

McShine, reached while installing the show in San Diego, stated without equivocation that a new de-accession catalog for each of the venues on the tour was “never proposed,” and that he and Asher had never discussed the show’s tour.