Tom McDonough on Michael Asher

In Artforum’s May 2025 issue, writer and art historian Tom McDonough reviews an exhibition of Michael Asher’s works at Artists Space in New York. For the corresponding episode of “Under the Cover,” Editor in Chief Tina Rivers Ryan conducts an extended interview with McDonough about the materiality of Asher’s Conceptualism, the challenge of institutional critique in today’s political climate, the installation of objects that are “less than artworks but more than ephemera,” the myth of the artist as “honest laborer,” and more.