Have We Finally Caught Up With Andrea Fraser?
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. This fall, Fraser met with the New York Times T Magazine to discuss her career and experience teaching at UCLA.
"IT WAS NEARLY closing time at the museum: Long shadows had already devoured most of downtown Los Angeles and the hangar-like space was hushed. Andrea Fraser stood before a small TV watching “Official Welcome,” one of her landmark performances. Onscreen, she appeared in a tasteful black dress at the opening of her 2003 exhibition in Hamburg, Germany, making remarks from a lectern. She thanked the curators who had made her retrospective possible; she thanked her mother, who had flown all the way from California for the event. The crowd clapped on cue. But then the woman went rogue, as though a computer virus had infected her gracious-artist software. “Thank you, Andrea,” she boomed in a deep male voice, morphing into the first of more than a dozen art-world personae who take over the speech — a piratical dealer, a fawning patron, an artist best known for pickling a shark. Before it’s over, she has shed her dress and then her Gucci bra, thong and stilettos to address the audience fully nude. “It takes a lot of courage to do what she does,” she said, assuming the voice of an approving critic. “She goes far beyond where most artists have the intelligence or audacity to operate.” The 30-minute piece — funny, brash and often excruciating — ends after the woman, back in her dress but somehow more exposed than ever, breaks down in sobs.
Andrea Fraser photographed at the newly renovated UCLA Margo Leavin Graduate Art Studios in Culver City. Tears pooled behind Fraser’s glasses as she watched her younger self. But the moment passed quickly, and she returned to critiquing the work on view, at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, with cleareyed detachment. “I could have given that a little more time,” she said, catching herself rush a beat.
“Official Welcome” is a case study in the intellectual rigor, physical bravura and satirical wit Fraser brings to diagnosing the collective delusions, material excesses, fraught politics, grandiose rhetoric, bumptious egos, ingrained biases and sundry pretenses of the art world. For the past 30 years, she has reigned unchallenged as the doyenne of institutional critique, a branch of conceptual art concerned with the internal machinery of museums and other social constructs. Lately, that machinery has been the subject of intense public scrutiny. This year alone, activists have stormed the exhibition halls of elite museums, targeting their private funding sources. The Louvre scrubbed the Sackler name from one of its wings following demonstrations condemning the family’s ties to the opioid crisis just months after the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as the National Portrait Gallery and Tate in London, embargoed Sackler donations. This summer, the businessman Warren Kanders resigned from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s board of trustees amid outrage over his company’s production of tear gas canisters used on migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border."— Zoë Lescaze, Dec. 3, 2019
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the New York Times T Magazine website.
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