{"id":4045,"date":"2025-04-17T22:00:32","date_gmt":"2025-04-17T22:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/17\/observer-arts-interviews-artist-andrea-fraser\/"},"modified":"2025-04-17T22:00:38","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T22:00:38","slug":"observer-arts-interviews-artist-andrea-fraser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/17\/observer-arts-interviews-artist-andrea-fraser\/","title":{"rendered":"Observer Arts Interviews: Artist Andrea Fraser"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk<\/em>, 1989; performance, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Nagel Draxler Gallery. Photo: Kelly & Massa Photography<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI sometimes say everything was performance or I don\u2019t believe in fiction. Everything that people do can be understood as performance, either in terms of the performance of social roles and relationships or the performance of psychological and emotional roles. Those forms of social and psychological performance are going on all the time in institutions in particular ways,\u201d artist Andrea Fraser<\/a> tells Observer. When the practice she is associated with, institutional critique, first developed, it was within the framework of an avant-garde concept that pitted the artist against the institution and the tradition of anti-institutionalism, where institutions of art like museums could be conceived of as separate and separable from artists, critics and historians.<\/p>\n

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However, Fraser\u2019s relationship with institutions shifted as her artistic practices developed. \u201cI started to understand institutions, not only as entities that we enter into, but also as entities that we take into ourselves, internalize and embody them. Then we perform or enact them in the roles we take up in institutions and in relationships we develop within and around institutions.\u201d For her, those institutions might be specific museums, though she also interrogates the field of art as a whole. What she does is, in her own words, \u201cput a frame around some aspect of life in order to be able to think about and reflect on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO:<\/i><\/b> \u201cCulture Shift\u201d Revisits the Radical Legacy of One British Magazine\u2019s Boundary-Pushing Photography<\/i><\/b><\/a>\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In Museum Highlights<\/i> (1989), Fraser performed the fictional character of Jane Castleton, a guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art who describes facilities like a water fountain in the museum with overly dramatic and somewhat irrelevant terms. \u201cPsychologically, Castleton is a container that I created as part of my relationship with institutions that I didn\u2019t want to own or identify with publicly,\u201d Fraser says. That relationship is complex: it includes the desire to rebel against those institutions because she feels dominated, delegitimized and marginalized by them. But there are also parts of her that identify with institutions and want to be legitimized and recognized by them, which informed what was embodied by Castleton.<\/p>\n

Museum Highlights<\/i> also explores class and race in engagement with institutions. Castleton is dressed explicitly as an upper-class lady. In the performance, Fraser as Castleton described the person who named the gift shop, Andrea. The descriptions of Andrea were actually taken from a museum publication dedicated to a museum docent who passed away, which was an honorific and idealized description. Fraser explains, \u201cOne of the parts of the description is that I\u2019m a blonde medium-height lady, so for me, that very much has to do with race, as I\u2019m not blonde and half Puerto Rican. The museum is, therefore, a locus of class and with a long history in the U.S. of assimilation of whitening or passing within a set of racial hierarchies.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Andrea Fraser, Little Frank and His Carp<\/em>, 2001 (Video Still); SD video transferred to digital format, sound; 6 min. 8 sec. Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery and Nagel Draxler Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When making those early museum tours, Fraser was referencing the videotapes used to record and broadcast museum walkthroughs at the time\u2014specifically, Masterpieces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/i> with Philippe de Montebello, the longtime director of the Met. \u201cWhen I recorded my performance, I was performing directly to the camera, and viewers of these videotapes are not the second-order audience.\u201d Otherwise, the audience of the original performance becomes part of the spectacle of the performance, which creates an opportunity to not identify with the audience and to differentiate and distance oneself from the experience from a safe distance, especially if embarrassing or uncomfortable. She also has performances documented with live audiences, but she\u2019s very careful about that.<\/p>\n

In Little Frank and His Carp<\/i> (2001), which was shot with hidden cameras at the Guggenheim because she didn\u2019t get the museum\u2019s permission, Fraser posed as a visitor navigating the lobby with the audio tour. A voiceover tells the visitor that one might want to touch \u201cthe sensuous curves of the building, which is pretty suggestive,\u201d Fraser says. \u201cI touched the building, got a little carried away, started rubbing up against it, and pulled my dress up. That\u2019s the moment when people laugh the most when they watch the videotape.\u201d It\u2019s a form of humor that she tries to be very, very careful with. \u201cI don\u2019t want to let my audience off the hook. I want them to grapple with being embarrassed, guilty or culpable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Performance-based video installations can\u2019t be live performances, in Fraser\u2019s opinion, because the direct address to the camera is so important. In one of her most recent performance-based video installations, This Meeting is Being Recorded<\/i> (2021), she looks directly at the viewer at all times\u2014something that can\u2019t be achieved in person, but is achievable when performing to the camera. There are limits to this approach, however. \u201cI\u2019m a bit reluctant to give people access to view these videos because, again, you\u2019re viewing it on a monitor, and you don\u2019t have the experience of a video installation.\u201d This tendency for information technology to reduce everything to just an image rather than a physical experience is the opposite of what she aims for. She typically doesn\u2019t edit her videos much because she is \u201cstill fundamentally minimalist\u201d in her aesthetics. \u201cI don\u2019t respond to gratuitous manipulation of video effects: I feel that you\u2019re trying to manipulate me, and I don\u2019t want to be manipulated.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Andrea Fraser, This meeting is being recorded<\/em>, 2021; UHD video installation with six chairs, color, sound; 99 min. Installation view: \u201cAndrea Fraser,\u201d Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Alex Yudzon<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fraser\u2019s most recent site-specific project for a museum was Down the River<\/i> (2016) at the Whitney. It was part of a series of two-week exhibitions that the Whitney conceived for the fifth floor of the museum\u2014a space designed by starchitect Renzo Piano<\/a> to showcase new art and architecture. It provides a spectacular view with a full wall of windows looking onto the Hudson River and another wall of windows facing Manhattan. Thinking about the location of the museum, Fraser went to Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison built in the 1920s about 32 miles up the Hudson River from the Whitney Museum\u2019s new location. \u201cThere is this very New York phrase \u2018being sent up the river,\u2019 meaning going to prison, and also there\u2019s a movie called Up the River.<\/i> I brought the sounds of Sing Sing Correctional Facility to the Whitney Museum and wrote a wall text explicitly linking the twin boom in museum and prison buildings,\u201d Fraser says.<\/p>\n

The phenomenon was documented by architect Joe Day<\/a> in a book called Corrections and Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime.<\/i> This polarization reflects and represents economic and racial polarization, as the majority of incarcerated people are people of color. It also creates geographical polarization because prisons tend to be built far from urban centers\u2014out of sight and out of mind for people who are not impacted by the criminal justice system, and consequently very far from the families of incarcerated people. \u201cI went through many different rounds with the museum on that text and there was a tremendous amount of involvement by the museum in getting that text to a point where they felt comfortable having it on the wall,\u201d Fraser says. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s part of the process.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2012, she was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial and proposed a text for the catalog, There\u2019s no place like home.<\/i> It is about the contradictions in the material situation of the art market and of museums\u2019 and artists\u2019 claims for the radical, revolutionary, critical and subversive power of their works. The text accompanied her other essay, L\u20191%, C\u2019est Moi,<\/i> which explored the direct link between income inequality, wealth concentration and the art market boom. It begins with details about some of the top 200 collectors at that time, including their involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis, and it was very critical of collectors, trustees and the art market. \u201cWhen I wrote that, I was really worried that the museum wouldn\u2019t like it and wouldn\u2019t want to publish it,\u201d Fraser admits. \u201cIn fact, they were very clear with me that it was an artwork and they were not going to intervene with regard to content.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Andrea Fraser, Down the River<\/em>, 2016; sound installation. Installation view: \u201cOpen Plan: Andrea Fraser,\u201d Whitney Museum, New York, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo: Bill Orcutt<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For Fraser, the \u201890s marked the beginning of a phase of globalization, neoliberalization, privatization and corporatization during which museums that may have once been public institutions became increasingly privatized. That period also brought a massive expansion in the number of museums, contemporary art galleries and international survey exhibitions, which required curators and institutions to maintain a relentless global schedule. The sheer number of exhibition venues turned art into an industry that demanded a constant supply of product and, ultimately, increasing spectacle as museums competed for funding from corporate, individual and public sources. Responding to the values of those funders, museums became part of the attention economy. That shift dramatically changed the relationship between artists and museums, as artists increasingly felt compelled to produce massive installations that filled massive spaces. \u201cThere are very few alternatives because if you refuse to do that as an artist, then you\u2019re not going to be in those shows and will disappear,\u201d Fraser clarifies. When she started making art in the 1980s, she didn\u2019t realize she was part of a just-emerging field that was growing alongside institutional critique, which started in the \u201860s.<\/p>\n

Since 2022, Fraser has been represented by Marian Goodman Gallery\u2014her first U.S. commercial representation. Marian Goodman Gallery was a good fit for her because \u201cit has a long history of working with and supporting conceptual artists and early image artists,\u201d she explains. It is also one of the last galleries of its size and reputation that still maintains an artistic program. \u201cAt a certain point, instead of having artistic programs, galleries had market positions and became a mixture of photography, paintings, installations and conceptual arts. It then comes down to the question of why commercial galleries show video when video represents only 0.5 percent of the art market by value.\u201d Marian Goodman is one of the last significant galleries still rooted in conceptual art, minimalism and the moving image, which provides a strong context for her work.<\/p>\n

Fraser takes a heavily research-based approach to her explorations of social structures, which is rooted in the history of contemporary art methodologies. \u201cI don\u2019t produce that much,\u201d Fraser says, laughing. \u201cIt\u2019s partly because I don\u2019t want to be producing products and spectacle for the market and the attention economy.\u201d For her, research-based art practices and research as an artistic methodology are associated with a very specific history tracing back to the \u201860s\u2014to artists like Hans Haacke<\/a>, Adrian Piper<\/a>, Mary Kelly<\/a>, Martha Rosler<\/a> and Allan Sekula<\/a>, who conducted rigorous research as part of their works. \u201cThe idea of artistic research is that artists are producing knowledge, which to me is a pretty high bar. It\u2019s more than summarizing primary or secondary literature, which is what lots of artists end up doing as a way of generating content for products and spectacles, I\u2019m afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Fraser embarked on the project L\u20191%, C\u2019est Moi,<\/i> it was because there were numerous articles about the art market booming and wealth concentration. There was obviously a connection between the two, but nobody was talking about it. People were discussing the donor class\u2014describing wealthy political donors who, after the deregulation of campaign finance, were having increasing influence on politics\u2014but they weren\u2019t linking the political donor class to the cultural donor class or philanthropy more broadly. Fraser saw opportunity. \u201cMy assumption is, from a psychoanalytical perspective, if there\u2019s something that nobody\u2019s writing about, it\u2019s because it\u2019s repressed in some way.\u201d Part of her practice has been to pinpoint things people don\u2019t want to talk about and figure out how to talk about them without alienating anyone, which is not always easy.<\/p>\n

This Meeting is Being Recorded<\/i> is a project about white racism and the role of women in white supremacy. With this piece, she hopes to contribute an approach to thinking about race and racism from a psychoanalytic perspective, because she believes most of the anti-racist methodologies that are out there are either political education or cognitive behavioral social psychology. They focus on bias and are often very depoliticized, and both models presuppose a kind of conscious control, which, to her, is actually part of white supremacy and self-mastery. \u201cI think ultimately that a lot of racism is a defense against anxiety. The piece was about developing a methodology for getting at the unconscious and emotional dimensions of white supremacy and racism.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Andrea Fraser, There\u2019s no place like home<\/em>, 2012; text. Installation view: \u201cAndrea Fraser,\u201d Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria, 2015. Courtesy of the artist, Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Nagel Draxler Gallery. Photo: Rainer Iglar<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In addition to being a practicing artist, Fraser teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. \u201cBut I don\u2019t really teach institutional critique,\u201d she clarifies. \u201cI did in the past, and the undergraduate students said afterward, \u2018I was so depressed after your class that I decided not to be an artist anymore.\u2019 It was not fair.\u201d Fraser\u2019s approach to teaching now is to create a context and a framework for students to figure out what they care about and how to make art about what matters to them. \u201cI was hired in an area called new genres, and now I\u2019m in an area called interdisciplinary studio, and my approach to teaching is not about medium. The primary question that I ask students always is, what do you want the work to do, not what you want it to be about. Do you want the work to activate a thought process, an intellectual process, an associative process, a process of imagining? Do you want it to activate a physical experience or an emotional and psychological experience? Do you want it to activate mechanisms or shifts in social and economic structures?\u201d Fraser has students write not an artist statement but what she calls a purpose statement that they read aloud in class. \u201cIf you\u2019re afraid to share what you care about, then it is not going to be hard to make art about it. I try to create a space that holds vulnerability for students, and I think it can be very powerful for students to realize they survive the anxieties of that exposure and vulnerability. It gives them courage to put more of themselves in their work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fraser makes a diagram of contemporary art with students to help them determine where they want to be located in its three primary fields: exhibitions (artists producing experiences), the art market (artists producing value) or academia (artists producing knowledge). There are also subfields, like community-based art producing communities and activism, where artists are (ideally) producing social change. \u201cWhen you\u2019re an artist, you\u2019re always making one decision after another: how do I determine the idea, size and medium of my work? The values underlying the criterion for these decisions are very political, as people keep producing bigger art products that become more of a spectacle,\u201d Fraser says. By way of example, she points to Venice Biennale exhibitions that have a mix of old and new art, where everything made after 2020 is twice or three times the size of older works for the purpose of grabbing attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem that I find in a lot of work by younger artists and, frankly, by all artists, is that they\u2019re trying to do too many things at once. Part of that is a lack of clarity about what they want the work to do, and part of it is trying to satisfy different expectations.\u201d She believes that making art is about finding the most direct way to express what you want the work to do, and every step an artist takes needs to have a good reason.<\/p>\n

Fraser\u2019s works continue to inspire people to reevaluate their relationship with art institutions and social institutions in general. From sarcastic museum highlight tours to rigorous research-based articles about the economy and wealth concentration in the art world, her output is well-reasoned and continues to challenge assumptions about institutional power, supremacy, privilege and individuals\u2019 struggles with systems and labels. In an increasingly spectacle-oriented art market, her nuanced work holds its own.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\"How<\/p><\/div>\n