A perfect lack of a plan

IT’S a coincidence. But Elsa Longhauser, director of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, thinks it’s great.

What could be better than an installation by Michael Asher to headline a yearlong celebration of the museum’s 20th anniversary?

A conceptualist known for grappling with the inner workings of art institutions, Asher has an impressive international resume and a 34-year tenure as a CalArts professor, but the L.A. artist’s work is rarely seen in his hometown. Just the sort of artist who should have a forum at the museum -- which, despite its name, does not have a collection and prides itself on filling a gap between commercial galleries and traditional museums.

What’s more, his project will dig into the past of the Santa Monica museum at a moment when it is celebrating its exhibition record. “The absolute purity of his vision is the highest exemplar of the work we do,” Longhauser says, “and I am very proud that his work is about the history of this museum, which has always been about changing exhibitions.”

Asher did not plan his installation as an anniversary bash. That would be out of character. Soft spoken and retiring, he is a giant in the annals of conceptual art but nearly invisible in the commerce-driven art world because he deals with ideas, not objects. More to the point, his works develop as they will, typically through long periods of research and cogitation.

The Santa Monica project began with an invitation from Longhauser, extended about seven years ago. After much thought and a few ideas that didn’t pan out, Asher decided to partially rebuild every temporary wall constructed at the museum since its 1998 move to Bergamot Station. The installation would be a sort of history of the museum’s exhibitions -- without the art.

Longhauser was delighted with the idea, but it took a while to get the show on the museum’s schedule. When “Michael Asher” landed in the Jan. 25 to April 12 slot, it became the first exhibition in a year of anniversary programs and festivities, including a gala fundraiser, lectures, tours and community outreach.

Longhauser says the timing of the show is astonishingly fortuitous. Asher says it’s irrelevant.

Either way, “Michael Asher” is a rare chance to see one of his major installations in the Los Angeles area -- and to get insight into how he thinks.

Search for understanding

“Each one of my works is a problem that I am trying to figure out,” the artist says several days before construction of the Santa Monica project is to begin. Of slight build and dressed in faded jeans and work shirt, he sits on a folding chair amid a meticulously organized archive that has taken over the front rooms of his modest home. Filing cabinets line the walls and fill the central space, leaving an aisle to reach the materials.

“I’m trying to figure out -- not answers,” he says, “but I’m trying to understand better. So this installation is just one of those problems.”

At 64, Asher does not get involved in the art market because he thinks that would compromise the meaning of his work. But he has participated in prestigious international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and has done projects at museums such as the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1979, he moved a statue of George Washington -- an American copy of a French artwork -- from the outdoor steps to a European period gallery for the museum’s “73rd American Exhibition.” At the Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, in 1992, he moved all the radiators into one room and reconfigured their pipes on walls throughout the building.

His contribution to “The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect” -- a 1999 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which invited artists to make works based on the collection -- was a book listing all 403 objects sold or traded from the collection since MoMA was founded 70 years earlier. Instead of reflecting on acquisitions, he called attention to the controversial practice of “deaccessioning.”

In Santa Monica, Asher will delve into the ever-changing character of spaces that accommodate temporary exhibitions. Although he will deal with the structure, not the content, of the shows, his work may be interpreted as an invitation to think about changing fashions in art and the temporal nature of exhibitions.

Normally, in a museum, he says, “the display system is something that recedes and is supposed to be somewhat neutral. The reason is that the museum wants us to focus on the aesthetic value and the history of an art object. I’m trying to alter that. Instead of showing the artwork’s history, I’m showing its support.”

But not completely. If he rebuilt entire walls of all 44 exhibitions staged since 1998, no one could enter the space. The plan is to create a sort of skeletal replication consisting of wood and metal frames that supported the Sheetrock walls.

Visitors who stop in a small documentation room near the front entrance will find clues to the meaning of the installation in floor plans and descriptions of each exhibition. Those who enter the museum from the back can pick up diagrams of the floor plans to carry along as they wander through the installation.

At least that’s how Asher envisions the audience’s engagement with his work. But until the installation is built, accessibility is uncertain -- a fact that doesn’t seem to bother him.

“I don’t really know if you will be able to get into the space,” he says. “These things are up in the air. I have no idea what will happen. If you can enter, you can go back and forth between the small front room and the frames, and cross reference what is in what show. If you come through the back way and get a list of exhibitions and diagrams, you can go further with that cross referencing and have a very close understanding of what frame goes with what exhibition.

“I want to see if the viewer understands this as a sort of abstract sculpture made of frames or something very specific. I am interested in how viewers’ comprehension and experience change as they do that cross referencing.”

And how will he know? He won’t, but he’ll get some sense over time through conversations and reviews.

An indifferent student

Anative of Los Angeles whose mother, the late Betty Asher, was a contemporary art collector and dealer, Michael Asher describes himself as an indifferent student who had to find his own way. He attended USC and the University of New Mexico and spent a year in New York before receiving his bachelor of arts degree from UC Irvine. He started graduate school at Irvine, but dropped out after one term.

“I didn’t do well in school,” he says. “I wasn’t able to experiment and do things I wanted to do and see things I wanted to see. The schools I went to certainly wouldn’t allow that, so I did it on my own. Since I didn’t think the schools could help me, I had nothing to lose. I was open to making my own mistakes.

“It’s funny too, because I have been teaching at the California Institute of the Arts for years and teaching graduate students for the last 10 or 15 years. I have the greatest respect for people who study rigorously and carefully, but I was not so good at that.”

He was good at getting his work exhibited, though.

“I have been very lucky, particularly with some of the places that have showed my work,” he says. “It’s been pretty amazing. I would never have dreamt it in a million years because this is something I was really struggling over and trying to figure out.”

Asher began making Minimal graphite drawings and painting-like structures of wood and raw canvas or heat molded Plexiglas in the 1960s. But he soon abandoned objects and began to examine the nature and function of art institutions.

In his first conceptual installation, at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, he used the gallery’s modular display system to build a long wall that divided the exhibition space. That led to other investigations and physical “interventions” that may reveal a museum’s history or question how curatorial processes influence the meaning of art, or who decides what becomes historically important.

The Santa Monica installation, he says, is akin to the Bern radiator project and others that “take an existing structure and follow it through some sort of historical repetition, reconstruct it or something like that. But I think the results will be quite different.”

Preference for exhibitions

No matter how it evolves, the installation will be documented step by step in a catalog with photographs by Grant Mudford and an essay by UCLA professor Miwon Kwon.

And no matter how inadvertently, “Michael Asher” will arrive at a celebratory moment at the museum.

Founded in 1985 by Abby Sher -- who developed the former Edgemar Farms, an egg processing plant on Main Street in Santa Monica, into a mixed use complex -- the museum opened in 1988 with a series of artists’ projects in an unfinished space. Tom Rhoads, who directed the museum for 12 years and oversaw the move to Bergamot Station, developed an exhibition program that included provocative examinations of social issues and mid-career surveys for Los Angeles artists, such as Jeffrey Valance, Karen Carson and Margaret Nielsen, who had been overlooked by larger museums.

With an annual operating budget of about $2 million, a full-time staff of 11 and a parade of guest curators, the privately funded museum has carved a niche for itself as a kunsthalle, a free-wheeling art institution that uses its resources to develop exhibitions and explore ideas rather than to build a collection. Large shows in the main gallery are complemented by artists’ projects in smaller rooms.

“The museum has a truly remarkable and influential program that ranges from exhibitions of historic significance to important shows of the works of emerging artists,” says Jeremy Strick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “The quality and range of the museum’s program makes it one of the great resources of the community.”

Longhauser, former director of the galleries of Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, took charge of the Santa Monica museum in 2000, when Rhoads moved to the J. Paul Getty Museum.

“When I came, the art world had shifted to a much more global perspective and that was my interest,” Longhauser says, “to show artists from around the world whose work was important and wasn’t well known here. But it also became clear that there were very important artists in Los Angeles who had an impact on the international art world but had not been shown in Los Angeles. Michael Asher is a perfect example.”

suzanne.muchnic@latimes.com

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Through the years

Michael Asher’s installation will dig into the past of the Santa Monica Museum of Art with a skeletal structure of walls used in temporary exhibitions since the museum’s 1998 move to Bergamot Station, but it will not bring back the artworks. For those who might want a reminder of those exhibitions, here’s a sampling:

2001: “Freestyle,” including a painted cardboard installation by Eric Wesley, presented works by 28 emerging African American artists.

2003: “Alfred Jensen: Concordance” focused on abstract paintings by a highly revered but often overlooked American artist who died in 1981.

2005: “George Herms: Hot Set” surveyed the veteran L.A. assemblagist’s work in a show organized by Walter Hopps, a major force in the development of Southern California’s art scene.

2006: “Enigma Variations: Philip Guston and Giorgio de Chirico” pointed out surprising relationships between the paintings of an American Expressionist and an Italian Surrealist.

2006: “Dark Places,” the brainchild of curator Joshua Decter, offered a new kind of group exhibition in digital works by 76 artists, projected from a huge spider-like contraption designed by servo architects.