Michael Asher

ANNE RORIMER

MICHAEL ASHER developed his renowned and innovative practice by originating, with others of his generation, a site-specific way of working. He has also been labeled one of the founders of so-called institutional critique—a potentially misleading term, unless the word critique is clearly understood as relating to art’s capacity for self-reflective analysis (and not construed as simply censorious). Asher’s lifelong interest in reevaluating the traditional, discrete, material object led him, over the course of a career spanning more than forty years, in multiple pathbreaking

print November 1978

Blinky Palermo: Objects, “Stoffbilder,” Wall Paintings

WHEN BLINKY PALERMO¹ MOVED from Düsseldorf to New York in 1974, three years before his death at the age of 34, he had already created a highly significant body of work. While far from being well known in the United States, Palermo’s art of 1964–1974, made while he was still a very young artist, is central to any consideration of artistic concerns and innovations, in Europe and America both, after 1965.

In a brief time span Palermo’s work took different forms. During the later 1960s and early 1970s Palermo’s ideas resulted in distinct and separate kinds of work, which, in terms of the artist’s