Andrea Fraser, Untitled 2003, 2003, Video still. |
In the Future, Gallerists and Collectors Will be Served with a Smile |
Andrea Fraser, Still from A Visit to the Sistine Chapel, 2005, DVD, 12 min., courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery.
Andrea Fraser, Untitled 2003, 2003, Video still.
Andrea Fraser, Little Frank and His Carp, 2001, Video still.
Andrea Fraser, Little Frank and His Carp, 2001, Video still.
Andrea Fraser, Little Frank and His Carp, 2001, Video still.
Andrea Fraser, still from Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989. Courtesy of the artist and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York.
Andrea Fraser, Kunst Muss Hangen, (Art Must Hang), 2001, one oil on canvas painting, 32 min. 55 sec., courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery.
Andrea Fraser, still from Exhibition, 2002, courtesy Friedrich Petzel Gallery. |
Mildred Lane Kemper Since the mid-1980s, Andrea Fraser has achieved a certain renown for her work in critiquing institutions and dramatizing the relationship between art and its audiences. Influenced by feminism, psychoanalysis, appropriation, and site-specificity, Fraser's practice has often centered on sociological performance and discursive analysis of various art world positions: the docent, the curator, the visitor, the dealer, the collector, the critic, the art historian, and, as the title of this exhibition suggests, the artist. Fraser is associated with what might be called a "third generation" of practitioners of institutional critique, a practice that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Closely related to conceptual and site-specific art, institutional critique is concerned with the disclosure and demystification of how the artistic subject as well as the art object are staged and reified by the art institution. Fraser's work is differentiated from a first wave of critical practitioners — Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke — in that she treats the institution as a set of positions and social relations rather than a physical site in which institutional power can be clearly located. Her practice answers to a more profoundly sociological model than the phenomenological and spatial models proffered by her predecessors. Fraser's earliest works emerged out of 1980s appropriation art as represented by the work of Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, and Louise Lawler, among others, yet she extends this gesture to include not only the appropriation of objects, images, and texts, but also positions and functions. In an era marked by the rise of the corporate mega-museum and the global art market, this Focus show examines the ways in which Fraser continues to provocatively negotiate the contradictions and complicities inherent in contemporary manifestations of institutional critique. The exhibition was initially inspired by the Kemper Art Museum's recent acquisition of two of Fraser's works, the video Little Frank and his Carp (2001), shot at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and a C-print Untitled (Pollock/Titian) #4 (2005). Works by the artist from the mid-1980s to the present will also be included, with special attention paid to the artists recent series of photographs exploring art historical representations through the use of appropriated imagery as well as her strategic implementation of video installation and projection. Curated by Meredith Malone, curatorial intern, Andrea Fraser, What do I, as an artist, provide? is the second in the Museum's recently inaugurated Focus exhibition series, which explores a theme, a single work, or a group of works by a single artist from the permanent collection. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated brochure. Andrea Fraser was born in 1965 in Billings, Montana and attended the School of Visual Arts, New York from 1982-84; from 1984-85 she participated in an independent study program at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; and she attended New York University from 1985-86. She lives and works in Los Angeles Andrea Fraser's work is exhibited in both the United States and internationally. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including a mid-career retrospective, Andrea Fraser, Works: 1984 to 2003, organized by the Kunstverein, Hamburg, in 2003, and a survey of her video work presented by the Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, in 2002. Fraser's work is in public collections worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery, Berlin; and Tate Modern, London. She was a founding member of the feminist performance group, The V-Girls (1986-96); the project-based artist initiative Parasite (1997-98); and the cooperative art gallery Orchard (2005-present). In 2005, the MIT Press published Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser. The artist recently relocated from New York to California to join the art faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles. Fraser's brand of performance during the 1990s popularized the institutional critique art movement, a loosely-formed artistic practice meant to critique the very institutions that are involved in the sale, display, and commerce of art. Arguably Fraser's most famous performance, Museum Highlights involved Fraser posing as a Museum tour guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 under the pseudonym of Jane Castleton. During the performance, Fraser led a tour through the museum describing it in verbose and overly dramatic terms to her chagrined tour group. For example, in describing a common water fountain Fraser proclaims "a work of astonishing economy and monumentality ... it boldly contrasts with the severe and highly stylized productions of this form!" Upon entering the museum cafeteria: "This room represents the heyday of colonial art in Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolution, and must be regarded as one of the very finest of all American rooms." Fraser's work typically analyzes the politics, commerce, histories, and even the self-assuredness of the modern-day art museum, including the hierarchies and the exclusion mechanisms of art as an enterprise. Fraser's performances, despite having serious undertones, are often presented in a humurous, ridiculous, or satirical manner. In Kunst muss hangen (Art Must Hang) (2001) — featured in Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne — Fraser reenacted an impromptu 1995 speech by a drunk Martin Kippenberger, word-by-word, gesture-for-gesture. For Official Welcome (2001) - commissioned by the MICA Foundation for a private reception — Fraser mimics the effusions offered at art awards ceremonies, while stripping down to bra and thong and concluding, "I am not a person today. I'm an object in an art work". In her Untitled videotape performance (2002), Fraser recorded a commissioned sexual encounter with a private collector in a hotel room, as an act of artistic prostitution. Though the piece represents a scathing commentary on the relationship between artist and patron, there was considerable backlash from its presentation, particularly from feminists and female artists. Andrea Fraser is constantly challenging the position of the artist within the institutional, economic and marketing field of art. Beyond their direct inscription in this specific reality, these reactive mini-scenarios, in which she plays herself, nevertheless inject a structural critique into the wider political and social issues. In the short video-performance Little Frank and His Carp (2001), filmed with a hidden camera, the artist plays a visitor to the Guggenheim Bilbao, reacting naively and emotionally to the refined celebratory injunctions of the suave voice of an audio-guide praising the merits of Franck Gehry’s architecture. This is one way of indicting the institutional art space as a consumer venue, but also as a power place seeking to create and guide our emotions towards the utmost vulgarity. Exaggeratedly subjected to a cultural order of things (fetishization of the container rather than the content, the display case more than the object, the museum over the works) which ultimately controls both bodies and imaginations, the artist goes as far as rubbing up erotically against one of the pillars of the building. These unverifiable physical symptoms are due to an invisible parasitic contamination by propagandist rhetoric associating contemporary architecture with a sacred fascination; (sex) tourism in Art-land. Working, as so often, on the professional language and rhetoric of her own circle, using this simple gesture, Fraser denounces through her deeds a direct transposition of marketing and advertising semantics to the art sector, a priori the space of intelligence and knowledge supposedly escaping from the coarse formalism of the market. Here, as in most of her other work, Fraser’s strength and effectiveness lie in using only unmanipulated real speech, with an injunctive logic taken to absurd lengths; the institutional readymade. Resolutely and simply engaged, with feigned ingenuity and enlightening idiocy, this in-situationist intervention questions that fundamental political opposition between celebration and critique (as discussed, for example, by the philosopher Luc Boltanski), now disputed by a consensual postmodernity, more and more readily confusing art and culture. |
Andrea Fraser, Untitled (Pollock/Titian) #4, detail, 1984/2005, Digital c-print, ed. 5, 40 x 61", University purchase, Parsons Fund, 2006. |
