Andrea Fraser
Sarah Thornton
Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed Alexander Alberro, MIT Press, London, 2005, 291pp, illus, hb, £25.95, 0 262 06244 5.
The art historian Thomas Crow gave a lecture on 'Institutional Critique' at the Frieze Art Fair last October in which he declared: 'What we are missing is a model for how the art system operates, which is less about money than about recognition and validation.' The comment, which dangled uncomfortably and was not revisited, prefaced an erudite and thought-provoking talk in which he substituted the term 'competition' for 'critique.' By the end of the lecture, however, it was clear that Crow himself really needed a model, for without one his notion of 'competition' was as slippery as a wet fish. He was unable to differentiate between egotistical rivalry, social role conflict and institutional power struggles and, as a result, ended up depoliticising the artistic tradition associated with Hans Haacke, Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser.
In understanding the 'art system', the problem is not that we don't have a model, but that we have an extremely complex one that is not quite up to date. Between the mid 60s and his death in 2002, Pierre Bourdieu explored the hierarchies and conflicts of the art world. In The Field of Cultural Production, 1993, his most comprehensive text on the subject, he depicts the art world as a 'field of struggles', where many agents (critics, curators, dealers and collectors) 'create the creator' and where 'belief in the value of the work... is part of the full reality of the work.
Why do art historians pretend that Bourdieu's work doesn't exist, particularly when they are usually so good at importing theory from other disciplines, especially when it's French? Although appraisals of Hans Haacke note that Bourdieu published a book with the artist (Free Exchange, 1995) and art historians invoke notions of 'habitus' and 'cultural capital' (from his best seller Distinction, 1984), few scholars of contemporary art have engaged with his theories of the art world. Some see Bourdieu's work as a 'sustained attack on the discipline of art history' (see Richard Hooker et al in Reading Bourdieu on Culture and Society, 2000). Others are reluctant to shake their belief that meaning is intrinsic to the work. They may pay lip service to the power of the viewer, but they effectively deny the impact of the social uses of art on the meaning of works by failing to take them into account.
Andrea Fraser is not just an advocate for Bourdieu; she is an evangelical convert. She credits him with 'liberating' her from the 'sense of illegitimacy' that she felt as a 'high school drop out' and admits that she has 'internalized' his work. One has to ask: is it a telling example of institutional competition that an artist - rather than an art historian or full-time critic - took up the mantle of Bourdieu's analysis?
Fraser is best known for her performances and so Museum Highlights, which includes scripts and essays on different facets of art institutions, adds another dimension to her oeuvre. 'Being able to pass as an academic in a lecture hall,' says Fraser, 'is not so different for me than being able to pass as a samba dancer in Rio. In both cases, it is about performance.' Occasionally Fraser's display of scholarship is overly emphatic (or painfully dry), but all in all the book is a solid contribution to the sociology of art punctuated by exhilarating moments when Fraser disrupts art world discourses with disarming honesty and clarity.
When people think of 'institutional critique', the first institution that comes to mind is the bureaucracy of the museum. Indeed, Fraser's articles and scripts focused on deconstructing museum processes - particularly the way museums wrench art objects from their social context and convert bourgeois domestic culture into official high culture. Fraser gained early fame for her performances as Jane Castleton, a volunteer docent with a dilettante's knowledge of art whose tour of collection highlights scrambled the discourses of the 19th-century art museum and the poor house, making what seemed to be an entirely unconscious and hilarious critique of the museum as an institution for the discipline and punishment of classes without 'taste'.
Fraser is at her most powerful when she speaks from the point of view of an artist - a pose she adopts with increasing frequency in the later work. In a short gem of a text called 'A Speech on Documenta', Fraser states with unsettling openness, 'I would have liked to have been invited to participate in Documenta IX' not because 'it would have provided me with the opportunity to produce a particularly effective work' but because 'the invitation would have constituted a moment of professional recognition that I would have found narcissistically stabilizing.' Fraser's pose combines earnest naivete - by saying something that is not said - and ultra-sophisticated parody - by hitting the nail on the head. As she continues, 'Art making is a profession of social fantasy... Overvaluing and overestimating possibilities, investing in futures that do not really exist, are occupational requirements.'
While those in the art world tend to treat artists with special reverence, Fraser sees the artist as the linchpin of the whole system. In an essay called 'An artist statement', she writes, 'When it comes to institutional critique, I am the institution.' This is particularly significant given that Fraser is generally credited with coining the term 'Institutional Critique' (in an essay about Louise Lawler from 1985 included here). In turning institutional critique upon herself, Fraser is able to bring psychological depth to Bourdieu's play of social positions. Moreover, when the social theory is literally embodied, as is the case with her performances, the critique becomes deeply gendered and sexual.
Nowhere is this more strongly felt than in the searing discourse analysis of 'Official Welcome', a performance piece and published script where Fraser alternates characters between artists and their art world supporters whilst she strips to a bra and knickers, then down to nothing at all. Some of the characters are straight-out jokes - like the inarticulate painter who hums and aahs that his work is 'about the desire to be free' or the drunken yBa who shouts, 'Kiss my fucking ass! That's a great statement anywhere, right?' However, when Fraser speaks the double-negative language of the most widely respected artists (footnotes suggest the likes of Thomas Hirschhorn and Gabriel Orozco), the results are a tad nauseating: 'As an artist... I hope I can make people feel involved, but it's not about interactivity. I give something to people, but I don't expect communication. I hope I can make people think, but... I don't want to make political art... So, why am I an artist? I guess it is because I take a critical position toward the world. It's not about hope. It's about showing my disgust for the dominant discourse.' Although the performance is not without empathy or ambiguity, one can't help feeling that this artist is a wimp towing a tried and tested party line.
Whatever your attitude to institutional critique, there is no denying that Andrea Fraser has balls. While she admits that competition for attention is part of her artistic motivation (as one of her characters intimates, '"Remember me" is what all artists whisper in their work'), her practice has a sharp critical edge that is more than simply competitive. Fraser refuses to wallow in the 'mystic truths' of the 'true artist', opting instead for brazen attempts at heartfelt demystification. As one of the supporters in 'Official Welcome' comments, 'Art with both emotional depth and real political belief is anathema to an art world as cynical as ours.' I suspect that Fraser is able to resist the cynicism - not to mention woolly ineffectual thinking - precisely because she is armed with a rigorous model of the art world that is both the context and the malleable content of her work.
Originally published in December-January 2005-06 / No 292, p42.
