Situation Aesthetics - The work of Michael Asher PT1

The work of Michael Asher has become of considerate importance recently, and flagged by many of my tutors throughout the tutorials and critiques. Asher's work begun throughout the 1960's, a time when the museum and gallery was being questioned in relation to its own context and the work that was situated within this space "art". This area of research has fueled much of my project and reference collection to date. The following extracts and text has been noted from Asher's 'Situation Aesthetics' book by Kirsti Peltomaki. 

"Designed work to facilitate human interaction. Site specific installation connect people with meticulously organized museum and gallery situations. The work engaged with the existing environments. Ashers installation tend to disable the day-to-day functions of the host institution and therefore have been barred from permanent material existence."

"Experiential approach to museum or gallery presentation, which addresses the viewers epistemological and emotional faculties. The ideological debates that surround and influence current museum practices. The removal of the gallery wall but more important that the gallery cut is the social and psychological situation. The installation offered viewers opportunities to immense themselves in sensory experiences.

Art that seemed attuned to viewer reactions was often called "situational" " Situation aesthetics" 

Victor Burgin [another artist writer in the 1960's]

Some recent art, evolving through attention both to the conditions under which objects are perceived and to the processes by which aesthetic status is attributed to certain of these, has tended to take its essential form in message rather than in materials. In its logical extremity this tendency has resulted in a placing of art entirely within the linguistic infrastructure, which previously served merely to support art. In its less hermetic manifestations art as message, as “software,” consists of sets of conditions, more or less closely defined, according to which particular concepts may be demonstrated. This is to say, aesthetic systems are designed, capable of generating objects, rather than individual objects themselves. Two consequences of this work process are: the specific nature of any object formed is largely contingent upon the details of the situation for which it is designed; through attention to time, objects formed are intentionally located partly in real, exterior space and partly in psychological, interior space. http://www.ubu.com/papers/burgin_situational.html

This work wasn't about manipulating perception.

There are some key ties and relational words form the above text that start to really impose on me what my project is doing. the fact that mine to if situated "for real" within the gallery space would provide the experience of almost sectioning the gallery space and creating a division of planes and frame but realistically couldn't last. I suppose I have considered these as short term architectural interventions that would follow the de-installation of one exhibition [of which the intervention would be based upon] and would be removed ahead of the new exhibit.