Questionable autonomy.

MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS: THE WRITINGS OF ANDREA FRASER 

BY ANDREA FRASER, EDITED BY ALEXANDER ALBERRO

CAMBRIDGE: MIT PRESS, 2005

291 PP./$40.00 (HB)

Viewers might be familiar with Andrea Fraser's "Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk," a 1989 performance at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in which Fraser, dressed as a museum docent, led museum visitors through the collection's masterpieces. The "tour" involved stops at locations such as the drinking fountain, bookstore, and museum lobby and was conducted in impeccable (appropriated) museum-speak. More recently, audiences might also have run across reports of Fraser's 2003 DVD Untitled, which contains a silent video of Fraser having contractual sex with an art collector. What many viewers might not be aware of, however, is the range and extent of Fraser's critical writings. Yet, Fraser's statements, performance scripts, academic articles, lectures, and symposium talks address many of the central issues concerning contemporary art during the last two decades: cultural analysis, professional identity, public institutions, community- or activist-based artistic services, and the ethics of it all.

A new collection, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, brings together a comprehensive array of these texts. As is the case with many contemporary artists' writings, most of these texts were previously available only to limited audiences in exhibition brochures and obscure magazines. The publication of this anthology marks a welcome occasion to reconsider the interweaving themes of Fraser's practice in relation to each other. Alongside Fraser's 2003 mid-career retrospective exhibition catalog, (1) Museum Highlights forms a rigorous analysis of the conditions of contemporary critical artistic practice. What does it mean to claim the status of an artist? What does it mean to participate in the practices of making, exhibiting, curating, promoting, and viewing art, and how are artists implicated in the ideologies and polemics advanced by these practices? For Fraser, the issues are both practical and deeply ethical.

Museum Highlights is divided into four parts. The first section, "Critical Practices," includes Fraser's statements and essays about the ethics of artistic practice. Here, Fraser is at her most challenging--but perhaps most rewarding, inasmuch as this section focuses on the theoretical writing that informs the scripts and speeches that are featured elsewhere in the book. Hence, the articles collected under "Critical Practices" might be more usefully read following the other parts of the book or in conjunction with thematically overlapping articles. "Public Institutions, Private Objects" features performance scripts and essays that analyze the public function of art, especially within the context of art museums. The speeches, lectures, and scripts collected in "Professional Interests" hone in on the institutionally legitimated role of the artist, as well as the function of public arts and museum policies in the context of broader art economies. The function of museums is reevaluated in the last section of the book, "In Conclusion? Onward to the Past, or, Art at the Forefront of Regression," in Fraser's take on the Guggenheim Bilbao.

In typical situations, artists' writings serve to conceptualize (or abstract) the concrete issues involved in their artworks, but in Fraser's case, the artist's writings concretize what is at stake in Fraser's art, spelling out the policies and histories that her performances and installations tackle. The texts participate in debates that are at once microscopically specific (analyzing a particular museum, such as the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and culturally broad (such as the general role of museums in contemporary economies).

Fraser's writings on public institutions and cultural policies have always integrated meticulous research into a conceptual framework about the place of the museum in the broader frame of public culture and the functions of museums regarding their constituencies: audiences, donors, trustees, and professional staff. The essay "A 'Sensation' Chronicle" analyzes the public debates around the 1999 Brooklyn Museum of Art's exhibition "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." The conclusion to this book, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," analyzes the museum architecture and economy that produces institutions such as satellite Guggenheims. "A Letter to the Wadsworth Atheneum," written in preparation for a performance, considers the social history of the Hartford, Connecticut, museum as the foundation for Fraser's intervention. The script for the subsequent performance, "Welcome to the Wadsworth," positions Fraser literally outside the museum, calling attention to the donor histories of Hartford's civic monuments. "Aren't They Lovely? An Introduction," a short article that was written for the exhibition brochure for Fraser's installation at the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, summarizes the target of Fraser's museum interventions as the social relations and "subjective effects" enacted by the "museum's definition of culture" (143). This focus on subject positions that are both constituted by, and constitutive of, cultural institutions definitively characterizes Fraser's embodied institutional critique, and as always, these subject positions both frame and reframe the artist.

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Writing about the subject of the artist as a professional identity, Fraser draws equally from the underbelly of art-world career talk and Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. This combination of influences is anchored by Fraser's acknowledgment of her insider status, or her implication in the social relations that she describes. In the symposium talk "An Artist's Statement," Fraser argues that "my power, as an artist or would-be intellectual, to appropriate objects, texts, representations, and practices symbolically--conferring value and interest where before there was none--is inseparable from the economic power to appropriate them materially. I am the intermediary" (10-11). This power to appropriate is put to use in the performance script "Official Welcome" and the symposium presentation "A Speech on Documenta." Both texts are painfully hilarious takes on the measures of artistic success in the institutionalized art world. In the latter, Fraser outlines the "real" reasons why she (and conceivably any artist) should have been invited to exhibit in Documenta. It was not because "not being invited represented ... [an] exclusion of me, or of the kind of art making I engage in" nor because "it would have provided me with the opportunity to produce a particularly effective work" (149). Instead, Fraser states, she should have been invited "because the invitation would have constituted a moment of professional recognition that I would have found narcissistically gratifying" (150).

Such moments of recognition and gratification--critical or otherwise--structure the social field of art, according to Fraser, and are the foundation upon which she builds her writings as well as her artworks, as indicated by her use of proper discourses in improper museum locations, such as the docent in the "Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk" script describing a drinking fountain in aesthetically elated terms: "'a work of astonishing monumentality, it boldly contrasts with the severe and highly stylized productions of this form....'" (104). Fraser's parodies walk a fine line between implicated critique and distanced ridicule. The flipside of parody is articulated by Fraser in "An Artist's Statement" within her somber analysis of how the artist's position, which might typically seem so uninhibited and flexible, can end up serving ideological ends contrary to the artist's intention. Reflecting upon "Museum Highlights" and her performance as a docent, Fraser concludes:

  While I have the means to identify with museum guides ... such an
  identification remains a misidentification, and a displacement of my
  status within art institutions. And, like all such displacements, its
  function is to obscure the relations of domination of which museums
  are the sites and which its recognized agents produce and reproduce
  (9).

Indeed, for Fraser, to speak from the position of an "artist" means taking up a position of power that is socially and institutionally invested in the figure of the artist. This power is inseparable from the ethical dimensions of the social relations of the art world, relations that both enable and constrict this practice. These ethical dimensions are described as inescapable by Fraser in a tribute to Pierre Bourdieu ("'To Quote,' Say the Kabyles, 'Is to Bring Back to Life'"): "a limit imposed on the exploitation of a form of power we may or may not subjectively experience but nevertheless objectively manifest as holders of a relative monopoly on forms of socially and institutionally recognized competence" (85).

Fraser's focus on conceptualizing artistic "services," as they are currently known, extends her involvement with the ethics of the role of the artist to include the social and economic relations that surround increasing numbers of artists involved in community-based work, activism, site specificity, or what Fraser (with Helmut Draxler) terms "project work" (153). While Fraser makes a convincing case for the heterogeneity of project work--and argues against adopting "services" as a new category of artistic practice--she points out that these artistic practices are nevertheless united by their economic structure; rather than sale of an artwork, artists' labor is compensated through the payment of a fee (154). "How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction" and "What Do I, as an Artist, Provide? (A Speech at the EA-Generali Foundation)" are presentations that elaborate Fraser's own goals for project work, while the two-part essay "What's Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere?" maps out its theoretical and art historical contexts through macroeconomics, conceptual art, activism, and institutional critique.

Ultimately, Fraser argues, the usefulness of the term "services" hinges on its critique and transformation of what she calls "artistic autonomy" (53, 55-57). While the notion of autonomy functions as the perpetual engine of any respectable theory of avant-garde art, Fraser's critique of the notion of autonomy is linked to, and clarifies, the question of ethics raised throughout Museum Highlights. Within Fraser's nuanced analysis, the notion of autonomy is brought to bear on individually based artistic "services" to the same extent as cultural debates concerning public policies. Fraser distinguishes between autonomies that are aesthetic ("disinterested"), social ("professional"), political ("free speech") (180, 205-7), and economic, especially as they concern the ways in which art objects (i.e., commodities) are produced and consumed (56, 65). While autonomy is clearly a central issue for Fraser, it remains a knotty concept. On the one hand, Fraser's "artistic service"-related articles advocate an autonomous self-regulation within the professional artistic community in terms of setting rules and expectations for project work, just as she cautions against the devolution of artistic services into the artist's subservience to institutional needs (154-56). Yet, Fraser argues that artistic autonomy is only possible at the expense of concealing the true social, economic, and ideological interests within the field of art. In fact, on occasion Fraser courts precisely such "instrumentalization" of her work by negating her own highly visible autonomy, as she argues that art institutions--museums and sponsors, in particular--actually benefit from an appearance of artistic autonomy for their own ideological purposes (65, 167, 198). Fraser concludes, "If we are always already serving, artistic freedom can only consist in determining for ourselves--to the extent that we can--whom and how we serve" (160). Autonomy, in other words, is not the answer, just as the perceived loss of such autonomy does not put an end to critical artistic practice.

By simultaneously acknowledging her implicated position in the field of art, even as she forms analyses of and interventions in this relational field, Fraser clears much productive ground for ongoing critical artistic practice. Museum Highlights casts an analytic eye on the belly of this beast: the ethics of the social relations through which the artistic profession is formed. Fraser's thorough, situated analysis of "the conditions and relations of artistic practice itself" (77) make Museum Highlights relevant for working artists or arts professionals, even as it calls their individuated autonomies into question.

KIRSI PELTOMAKI is an artist and an assistant professor of art history at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

NOTE

1. Yilmaz Dziewior, ed. Andrea Fraser: Works: 1984 to 2003 (Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2003).