5:30-8:00 p.m.
focus: Michael Asher Exhibition Preview
Gallery 220 and Ryerson Reading Room
6:00 p.m.
Artists in Conversation
Price Auditorium, The Art Institute of Chicago
The American conceptual artist Michael Asher is internationally recognized for the groundbreaking nature of his practice and for his influence on subsequent generations of artists. In the late 1960s, he pioneered now accepted notions of "site-specificity," whereby a work and its place of display are thematically interlocked. For this focus exhibition, Asher is revisiting a project he created for the Art Institute's 73rd American Exhibition in 1979. This new work, involving the installation of a bronze cast of Jean-Antoine Houdon's statue of George Washington (1785-91/1917), will extend the implications of the work he began in 1979 with respect to the temporal, spatial, historical, and institutional factors that determine the meaning of sculpture.
Since the early 1980s, the Los Angles-based conceptualist Christopher Williams has challenged pre-existing systems of representation, and discredited the claim that photography is a purely objective medium. Working with original photographs and with images culled from institutional archives, Williams manipulates the conventions of traditional pictorial
genres to expose issues of political, cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. His formal approach references the modernist desire to depict subjects in a cold, detached manner as a means of satisfying the obsession with objectivity. Williams's introduction of subtle elements of disruption, however, obscures the objective nature of his photography and reveals an underlying sociopolitical dimension in his work.Please join us for what promises to be a lively discussion between Michael Asher and Christopher Williams.