Andrea Fraser radically performs the role of a museum docent to expose the discourse that defines entering an institutional sphere and address its limiting nature with regards to race and class.

I think it is interesting that Fraser decided her identification as a docent became problematic and obscured her authority as an artist and further obscured “the relations of domination of which museums are the sites and which its recognized agents produce and reproduce”.

I am curious as to the responsibility of the artist when performance pieces are received un-ironically. The same question holds for Coco Fusco’s piece, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West. I would like to know the reception of Fraser’s Museum Highlights piece and if it accomplished her original goals.

Similarly, with the informal circulation of the Letter to Wadsworth Atheneum at the museum, I am curious what the audience reaction was. While the letter was addressed to the institution, the audience was in fact the very bourgeoisie population that the letter confronts.

I would also be curious to hear Fraser’s thoughts on what constitutes art. For me, her letter is more a promotion of social awareness.

Both Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson provoke a fundamental question: what role does a museum play culturally, historically and economically. By inserting themselves—as social commentators, as well as performance artists—into the hegemonic body of the museum, they undermine and re-assess institutional power and practices. Museums are, in a sense, responsible for the mainstream definition of the dichotomy between art and mediocrity: a role that curators, benefactors and staff willingly accept as powerful guards of ‘taste’ and institutional ideologies. It is this role, according to Andrea Fraser, that allows museums to perceive themselves as extricated from the nexus of art and economics. However, museums are undeniably linked to their financial backers and, as such, have a vested interest in catering to certain histories, traditions and portions of society. The presupposition that museums are distinct from this system is largely flawed and while Sensation critique condemns collectors like Charles Saatchi for his economic interest in art (and not merely art for art’s sake), museums are very much linked to the lucrative nature of art consumption.

Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser infiltrate this model in separate ways, but to a similar effect: each artist highlights what museums choose to ignore. Mining the Museum draws on one collection to juxtapose mainstream visual traditions with the hidden histories of the American South. By placing racial and social history at the forefront, the artist highlights the historical rejection and exclusion of black history from institutional memory. By adopting the role of ‘curator,’ Wilson is at once an artist, a social critic and a voice of institutional power (selected and funded by the institutions he permeates). Andrea Fraser, as a docent, patron and performance artist, also becomes the voice of the museum by giving tours and highlighting the museum’s role within the community. By considering the context of a museum’s surroundings, patrons and historical role, Fraser calls into question the ideologies that museums create and disseminate. The artists thus raise the question of who museums cater to and which memories they disseminate.

Wilson: Mining the Museum draws upon the collection of the Maryland Historical Society to highlight the neglected past of African Americans, raising questions of historical and racial memory through unique juxtapositions of mainstream and hidden works of art.

Fraser: Fraser puts forth a wide spanning critique of museum politics, self-perceptions, censorship and curatorial choices through satirical tours, eloquent writings and direct communication with museum leadership.

Taylor: Taylor tracks the rise and spread of performance art from the 1960s onward, as well as the genre’s early artists.

After reading the transcript of Andrea Fraser’s performance Welcome to the Wadsworth at the Wadsworth Atheneum and her letter to the museum’s curator, I searched the Internet to find a recording of her performance.  The first video I found was was a brief and poorly-shot tape of someone watching a recording of Fraser’s performance on a television.  The people watching the performance, whom one can hear chatting and laughing behind the camera, seem to be watching the performance with no context or prior knowledge of it’s aims. They didn’t know it was a satire and carefully staged critique.  My immediate reaction was to dismiss these viewers as missing the point of Fraser’s work but I realized that their exposure to the performance was very close to that of the original audience and so their reaction shouldn’t be shrugged off . They hadn’t been prepped with Fraser’s writings and commentary on the work before seeing it as I had which brought me back to a question that had been floating around in my head while reading the performance script.  Does the performance lose power if the audience never catches on that it’s a critique?  Is this kind of commentary intended only for insiders?  If it falls on deaf ears in the original audience does that make the recordings and transcripts even more important?