Tag Archives: performance art

Fraser: Bridging the Gaps

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The Museum Highlights selections really opened my eyes to the art world and its boundaries.  Many people, myself included, fail to realize how divisive the arts have become at the hand of professionalism and academia.  This is extremely important to note and I believe that groups like Kontext Kunst and artists like Andrea Fraser that dedicate themselves to bridging the gaps between writing, thinking, and making presented in the art world are admirable.  Fraser is able to do this through the interconnectedness of her writing, and performances.

One thing that stood out to me about Frasers project art is the way in which it critiques aspects of the culture of art oftentimes simply through representation.  Understanding these cultural tendencies is something that I came to learn through Fraser’s work.  For example, while reading chapter 9 of a performance where Jane Castleton leads a tour group through the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it became undoubtedly apparent to me who and what the Museum deemed important, as well as what type of people the Museum preferred and catered to.  Fraser sums up this notion beautifully in her description of Jane in the end notes where she states:

“as a volunteer, she expresses the possession of a quantity of the leisure and the economic and cultural capital that defines a museum’s patron class.  It is only a small quantity – indicating rather than bridging the class gap that compels her to volunteer her services in the absence of capital…yet it is enough to position her in identification with the museum’s board of trustees and as the museum’s exemplary viewer” (Fraser, 110)

Fraser:  Through the interconnectedness of her writing and performances, Fraser attempts to bridge the division between ‘writing’, ‘thinking’, and ‘making’ that the professionalization of the artist and intellectual created.

Taylor:  Taylor outlines the history of performance art and highlights artists significant to the genre including Abramovic, and Scheemann.

The Local Approach

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Summaries of Readings:

Taylor: Performance art acts as an active medium for the artist to experiment with the body and radical concepts.

Introduction: Albero introduces Fraser’s work as an unprecedented use of literary essays that complement and context her contemporary art work.

A Gallery Talk: Jane acts as an awkward museum guide to provide commentary on the city of Philadelphia and the museum’s structure.

A Letter to the Wadsworth: Fraser’s performances use candid language to criticize the ignorance of class conflict in Hartford and explain its reasoning.

A Sensation Chronicle: Addressing the Sensation controversy, Fraser emphasizes voices in the art world and the different autonomies that govern the field.

Andrea Fraser's 'Box Set'

Andrea Fraser’s ‘Box Set’

Response:

As a conceptual artist, Andrea Fraser mainly uses the active medium of performance for her work. She differentiates herself from other performance artists by using museums as the location to provide commentary on the local community. In Welcome to the Wadsworth (1991), Fraser acts as a tour guide of Wadsworth Atheneum who indirectly explains how the patronage history of Hartford leads to the city’s current ignorance of class conflict. The subject of Fraser’s Welcome to the Wadsworth continues to distinguish her method as she enters an artistic safe haven of Hartford as an outsider and critiques the community. On the surface, her approach seems like a rather rude, creative intrusion. Nevertheless, Fraser creates a tangible subject for her audience, unlike other artists who address more broad subjects. Certain artists decide to tackle overarching themes, such as racism and sexism in America. Such works inform and involve the audience in ignored topics but distance the viewers as they attempt to understand the broad themes which may appear unfeasible for them to influence. Whereas, Fraser’s performance addresses the ignored issue of class conflict on the local level of Hartford. Viewers who are moved by her Welcome to the Wadsworth are more likely to address the issue in the neighborhood than a viewer who feels that they do not have much influence on racism in America.

Nevertheless, Fraser still creates distance between her performance and her audience. In Welcome to the Wadsworth, she makes her tour attendees feel rather uncomfortable as she blatantly expresses disgust for the urban poor and migrants who are changing the scene of Hartford. Her harsh words are meant to articulate the unexpressed thoughts of the middle class and above who are disturbed by the changes. Although Fraser’s statements contain truth, their abruptness catches the tour attendees off guard which can prevent them from understanding her performance. Like the work of other artists’ who tackle broad themes, Fraser criticizes her subject and fails to provide a way for the community to tackle the issue. Hence, viewers of her performance may still feel isolated from the topic of her work, although it addresses more tangible and local issues.

All the Guts, Without the Glory

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Taylor: Performance art, utilized by the likes of Carolee Schneeman and Marina Abramovic, placed the (gendered) body at the center, allowing for a means of expression or critique with no separation between art and artist.

Fraser: In her writings and her performances, Andrea Fraser asks her audience to consider the absurd contradictions of the art museum as an institution, a space that claims to serve the “public” but more often than not serves only the elite few.

Wilson and Corrin: Installation artist Fred Wilson critiques the museum’s overwhelming paucity of representations of people of color (specifically of people of Black or American Indian descent) and seeks to “de-neutralize” the public perception of the museum.

Andrea Fraser’s smart critiques of the institution that is the art museum thrilled me. I found the scripts from her performances amusing but, more than that, refreshing. Admittedly, I speak as an outsider from the “art world”, but Fraser’s playful but politically-charged work seems to me to fill a desperate void. In this “art world”, if I may indeed be so bold as to use such a homogenous image, I have the distinct impression that art and the artist take themselves too seriously. Fraser’s work admits and then critiques that nearly ubiquitous attitude, and the lack of brave, sharp-tongued individuals criticizing their own works or worlds. As an artist, she critiques the existing discourses surrounding art and, more specifically, the art museum… And the most wonderful part is that she does it quite literally within the museum itself! This, for me, is the proverbial cherry on top. She performs this critique from within the structure she is critiquing, speaking to the difficulty of a divorce between art/artist and the museum. She is able to deliver this critique, yes, but only within this sanctioned context. The “over-identification” observed in her work is endlessly fascinating, drawing on social tensions through the brilliant use of raciaized and class-based clichés and familiar “us” vs. “them” rhetoric. Fraser becomes Jane Castleton, the incarnation of the problematic nature of the art museum, the very thing she is fighting against.

Enjoyable and enlightening as these texts were for me, I was, like Fraser, disappointed to read about the “Sensation” controversy at the Brooklyn Museum and the relative silence of the museum. Art and the artist are not defended by what is arguably the most important part of the art world, the museum. Instead, questions of the exhibition of art/artist are chalked up to “consumerism”, and some bland desires to appropriate “pop culture” or “subculture” (which, as Fraser points out, raises even more questions on power dynamics within the museum). One must wonder if critiques of the institution itself, critiques like those from the likes of Fraser  or Fred Wilson, have been heard at all.

Perhaps it is my relative ignorance of art and the “art world” to which I keep referring, but it seems that while many artists rightly criticize the socio-political issues of their time, few seem to have critiqued one of the primary means by which they are able to critique, which is to say, the museum. I am left with the impression that the gaze of the artist rarely turns inward, so artists like Fraser, while they demonstrate incredible courage, are left quite alone in their bravery.

The Conundrum of Feminist Art (joint post)

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Nochlin: Nochlin answers the inflammatory question “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” with an analysis of the sociocultural structures that privileged white middle-class masculinity and blocked the “Other” from excelling as an artist.

Wark: Despite its denigration of the individual, conceptual art provided an ironic inspiration for feminist artists such as Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson.

“The Artist is Present”: Abramovic boldly makes herself vulnerable in pieces like her most recent work “The Artist is Present” as she transforms her own bodily presence into art.

Taylor: Through new and different media, artists were able to rebel against the overwhelmingly male modernist culture and tackle issues such as race and gender.

Many feminist artists provide us with works which might seem cryptic to the audience when taken at face value. Why is it that those who ascribe to a movement meant to exhibit or even explain their identities present their artwork in a way that is less approachable for the viewer?

Feminist art created in the 1960s and 1970s emerged as a response to the ongoing feminist movement in America. Like many social and political movements at the time, the feminist movement ascribed to explain and support the identity of its cause, in this case women, for more progress in the nation. Although feminist artists created their works in response to the movement, the strategy that they use creates a challenge, rather than an easy way, for their audience to understand their identities. Their use of abstract, conceptual art in opposition to the male-dominated modernist movement creates a divide between their audience and their work of art. The mediums which the feminist artists use – installation, film, performance, and etc.- and the abstract way in which they apply them can prove isolating for many viewers.

Performances pieces created by the likes of Abramovic and Schneeman, which the average audience might take at face value as weird and unapproachable, can be a barrier to understanding, rather than providing a window into the experience of the “Other”. Such art can prove difficult to relate to, regardless of shared identities. If feminism truly is for everybody, as bell hooks asserts, then why provide the public with oft-cryptic, even bizarre works? Why not meet the audience halfway, so to speak, so as to bring the message to a greater number of people? Would doing so necessarily have to mean sacrificing the work?

– Tanekwah and Gabriella