Museum Highlights: The Writings Of Andrea Fraser

by Andrea Fraser, Alexander Alberro (Editor)

Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique -- as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks -- institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003 -- including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title -- both documents and represents her work.The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical "artistic practice" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.

Genres: Art

291 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jacob Wren]

Andrea Fraser writes:


You could say that all my work is about the repressed fantasies of our field and about the desires produced and pursued through those fantasies. I do think that you have to understand the structure of that field and its fantasies in order to get at those desires – which I’ve also considered in more political and sociological terms as interests. And I do think that such understanding takes a certain amount of research, and that certain reading lists can be of help. But you can’t get at those fantasies and those desires through intellectualizations. Psychoanalysis would consider that just another mechanism of repression. In the end you can only get at them by subjecting yourself to their excesses, to their slippages, to their irrationalism, to their sometimes viscous ambivalence, to their contradictions. And in those contradictions there is violence and there is also absurdity and there is also pleasure. And there may also be a kind of beauty.


and:


...the ambivalence of artists who want to be wanted and loved for what they do, even in their transgressions and their objectifications and their critiques. One of the things that critique is, after all, is a test of love.




.

[Loren · Rating 5 out of 5]

read this the fall after graduating from a studio art program. I left with a lot of questions, this book answered some of them - I wish I had come across it sooner, maybe in class even!

[Jeremy Hurd-McKenney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fraser sure knows her stuff, and her prose is astute and full of a sly, ascerbic wit. Her idea of critiquing the establishment from a position from within the establishment is unique and well executed, particularly in the titular performance. However, only a small audience is really in on the joke, in a way perpetuating the concept she is lampooning: the exclusionary nature of museums and other public art spaces that are supposedly intended to be accessible to the average citizen.

While I found the articles and performance transcripts to be individually interesting, reading them in one giant compendium eventually became somewhat of a slog. Outside of the overarching theme, the book was padded with the prerequisite dull examinations of the NEA battle, Cincinnati, and Sensations commonly explored by 90's art critics. Towards the august of her career, Fraser has also seemingly fallen prey to the boring trope of the performance artist taking off their clothes at any opportunity. Humping the wall of the Guggenheim is no longer shocking.

[june · Rating 4 out of 5]

was familiar of andrea fraser's controversial "Untitled (2003)" as read through some articles reappropriating schneider's "explicit body," but I only learned about her critical writings while perusing my college's library in the section on galleries and museums. this book establishes fraser's "institutional critique" against the concept of the museum and those that exploits art as capital (a la Bourdieu which is fraser's beloved almost mentor, where an in memoriam chapter is found in this book). And its not like she does not provide alternatives, the chapters on the concept of "service" and "project work" as art forms were very interesting. Her writing is a good foundation to become more critical of 'art' institutions against their own artists or art in general. However, the long chapter on the brooklyn art museum debacle vs. Giulani was I felt like where fraser finds her great intellect and affective rhetoric come in fruition. Her wit, clever, and knowledge merge as if in performance. Speaking of performance, I decided to watch her body works alongside the transcript in the book and I highly suggest one does that because, sadly, the transcripts dont do justice fraser's prowess as a performer—my god, "Official Welcome" was so good. overall, a delightful read would love to see more of fraser's performances.