Andrea Fraser Puts Male Feminism on the Line
Hammer Projects: Andrea Fraser is on view at the Hammer Museum through Sep. 15
Artist Andrea Fraser joined the UCLA Department of Art faculty in 2006 and has served as department chair since 2018. Since the 1980s, Fraser has achieved renown for performances that interrogate social structures with humor and pathos, aligning herself with feminism and institutional critique. Fraser works across a range of mediums including performance, video, installation, sound, and text. At UCLA, Fraser serves as a member of the Hammer Museum’s Artist Council and her teaching and research focuses on institutional critique, feminist practice, group relations, and project-based art. On view through Sep. 15, 2019, Hammer Projects: Andrea Fraser includes Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK, 1972 (2012), a video installation in which Fraser presents this group discussion in a solo performance, adopting mimetic gestures and "masculine" clothing that complicate the institution of gender.
"On a large screen facing five chairs, in a small, darkened gallery at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Andrea Fraser sits, as if in conversation with the audience. Dressed casually, in khaki trousers and a gray sweater over a white-collared shirt, she begins speaking four different roles, indicated by her different intonations and gestures. In Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK 1972(2012/2014), Fraser recreates a 1972 roundtable discussion between self-identified male feminists, reciting the dialogue from memory. The conversation was originally broadcast on KPFK radio. The four men (Lee Christie, Everett Frost, Bob Kreuger, and Jeremy Shapiro) discuss their relationship to feminism and women involved in the feminist movement, touching on their personal insecurities; frustrations associated with other feminists and non-feminists; and their differing perspectives on gender roles in relation to relationships, careers, and politics. The discussion includes remarks like “I have trouble relating to women who aren’t feminists,” “I can cook now,” and “I have the feeling that women are talking about me behind my back.”
Andrea Fraser, Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK, 1972 (2012/2014) Fraser first performed this work in 2012 in a single live performance at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles, as part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival sponsored by the Getty Museum and LA><Art. She found the recording while doing research for a performance commissioned for the Pacific Standard Time initiative focused on the legacy of the Women’s Building in Los Angeles. The radio broadcast reflects the popularity of group discussions and relations in the 1970s, highlighting the emotional reactions of the group members, while addressing the centrality of group activity central to the Women’s Building and Feminist Art Program. Fraser’s performance of the discussion powerfully critiques gendered power dynamics and the ethics of empathy: as a woman speaking as the men, she is both attempting to empathize with them and exposing their failures to empathize with the goals of the Women’s Movement.
In this filmed version, Fraser recites a 50-minute monologue for the camera. She uses the strategies of parody and masquerade to humorously uncover ways in which gender is performed socially. Feminist artists in the 1970s used performance as a means of confronting the traditional role of the woman as the passive object of male desire in Western art and deconstructing this naturalized position, foregrounding women’s agency and authorship in the process."— Olivia Gauthier, Aug. 13, 2019
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Hyperallergic website.
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