Michael Asher's work since the late 1960s has been founded upon a number of related strategies: subtraction or relocation of a priori elements, serial repetition under variant conditions of the artist's own a priori moves, deliberate historical stagnation or regression (that is, staging of anachronism), and logical or symbolic inversion of an explicit or implicit institutional condition.

Sometimes Asher produces a work in which all four operations overlap, as was the case in his 1996 project for the Vienna Kunstraum.¹ Asher was invited to work in a space that had been an eighteenth-century imperial stable, located across from the Museumplatz, a key site of 19th-century Ringstrasse modernisation. Employing the labours of a crew of welders and riggers, Asher 'subtracted' the vertical supports for the late-modernist free-standing mezzanine that had elevated the Kunstraum's offices above the open exhibition space, dropping the catwalk and office platform down to the level of the gallery. The horizontal I-beam supports that had traversed the space above the internal walls now blocked the floor. Here Asher was repeating an earlier work in which the boundary between a gallery office and an exhibition space was removed, his 1974 project at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles.² However, he was also 'bringing the office down to earth', levelling the architecture's symbolic, but also literal, hierarchy which elevated art administration above art-in-itself. So there is a kind of anti-bureaucratic sentiment operating here. Furthermore, by partially demolishing the late-modernist addition, by actually hastening the dismantling process that was likely to follow the Kunstraum's imminent closing - his was the last exhibition in the space - Asher was helpfully restoring the space to