This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Andrea Fraser.
Born: 1965, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
A pioneering Feminist and institutional critique artist, Andrea Fraser strikes at the heart of the art world system. She has explored (and critiqued) topics ranging from the rhetoric of cultural value upheld by museum institutions, the role of the artist as a purveyor of goods and services in the commodified art world, to the cultural sector’s complicity with racism and structural inequality. In her work, there’s a rare and often vulnerable self-reflexivity regarding her own role in the art world. Her practice invites affective identification and empathy on the part of the viewer in ways that exceed previous parameters of institutional critique.
Childhood
Andrea Fraser’s passion for social justice and institutional critique was rooted in her childhood experiences growing up in what she calls a “lesbian feminist household that was half Puerto Rican.”
In Berkeley, Fraser explains that she and her family “became hippies very quickly.” Her mother became a lesbian and got involved in the women’s movement. “My brothers, I think, were selling drugs when they were 10, 11? We were all pretty precocious.” Fraser remembers making banners for gay pride marches in her mother’s kitchen. She grew up reading poems by the influential lesbian poet and essayist Adrienne Rich and perusing publications such Our Bodies, Ourselves (first published in 1970), a groundbreaking text that foregrounded issues of women’s health and sexuality.
Despite Berkeley’s liberal atmosphere, however, her mother struggled with becoming an artist in the white male-dominated art world of the United States at the time. According to Fraser, her mother “stopped painting when I was about three because she got one too many racist, sexist rejections, and then she turned to doing performances and to writing.” As a child, Fraser said that she also internalized the “pain of exclusion.” The experience would shape her ambivalence toward the art world when she herself became an artist.
Fraser recalls that her first museum experience was at the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco, where she enjoyed the interactive exhibits. She reflects, “I think that probably influenced my sense of the most valuable thing to me about museums, which is the opportunity for experiential learning in an embodied way, in a space about culture, identity, and social interactions”.
Her first memory of visiting an art museum was at an exhibition of “hard-edge minimalist painting” at the SFMOMA. She recalls, “I was reading the wall labels, and I was running around from label to label, saying, ‘Mommy, Mommy, all these paintings have the same name! It’s Unifield.’ But it was Untitled.” Years later, she would develop two series of artworks that took the form of museum/gallery exhibition labels. She also has memories of skipping school at the age of thirteen to take the bus to San Francisco to see Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-79), a key feminist artwork, which showcased the contributions of women to society in history.
With her mother’s support, Fraser dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen, and shortly thereafter moved to New York. When she first arrived she would visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art about four times per week, spending the entire day there. She says, “I was encountering this powerful, normative, legitimate, elite culture that I wanted something from, but that I also felt crushed, alienated, and dominated by. […] That love/hate relationship to art museums and to what they represent is really what defined the course I took as an artist with institutional critique.”
Education and Early Training
Fraser moved to New York’s East Village at the start of the 1980s, what she calls an “end of everything” decade.
In 1982, at seventeen, Fraser began studying at New York’s School of Visual Arts, where she stayed until 1984. She then entered the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The program was a hotbed of critical theory, psychoanalysis, and postmodernism. There Fraser studied with feminist artist Barbara Kruger, who praised her “incredibly brilliant mind.” The following year she enrolled in New York University. Some of her most influential teachers included leftist art historian Benjamin Buchloh and post-modernist art critic, gay activist, and feminist theorist Craig Owens.
In New York, Fraser developed a close circle of artistic friends that included writer, artist, and activist Gregg Bordowitz, writer, art historian, and critic Joshua Decter, conceptual artist Mark Dion, and artist and photographer Collier Schorr. She dated Bordowitz for a time. He later remarked that “Andrea was scary brilliant. Frighteningly brilliant, very intimidating. And at the same time, very fragile, because I think she even scared herself sometimes with what she saw and understood about the art world and its terrible contradictions.”
Reflecting on her artistic formation in the 1980s, Fraser said, “[It] was an ‘end of everything’ decade. It was the end of painting, the end of the avant-garde, the end of modernism. Everything was ending. I think one of the challenges was: What parts of those avant-garde traditions against the institution can be carried forward, and what parts of those were just myths? What parts of them were just narcissism? I did absorb that there was a potential for internal critique that had been established by avant-garde traditions. But there was also this component of rejecting an aspect of avant-garde narratives that are rooted in the Oedipus complex of the boy – that we have to overthrow our predecessors.”
It was during these years that Fraser and her friends developed the concept of institutional critique. The term refers to artists and artworks that are critical of galleries, museums. and other institutions, calling attention to how they are run, where their funding comes from, and how they impose restrictions or limitations on artists. In the mid-late 1980s, Fraser developed artworks that grappled with the aura of high art, such as an artist book that appropriated images from art history. She engaged with performance, creating a breakthrough piece Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk in 1989. In the piece, she performed as a museum docent and satirized the language and protocol of veneration in art museums. She also wrote art criticism and would continue writing and research as part of her artistic practice throughout her career. In 1990, she held her first solo show at the Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Germany.
Mature Period
In the late 1990s, when museums and the art world in general were becoming increasingly corporatized, Fraser felt a sense of “crisis” regarding her work, particularly as she found the idea of institutional critique to have become more problematic, as artists engaged with institutional critique more and more became embedded within the system they sought to critique. She explains that she was also “fed up with the art world, [..] fed up with being poor and being broke and being in debt and struggling to live in my own apartment in New York.”
Fraser was considering leaving the art world altogether to pursue a PhD in anthropology when she received a tenured teaching position at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which alleviated her financial stress. She is currently the Department Head and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studio of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture.
In addition to UCLA, Fraser has taught at numerous other art programs in the United States. Reflecting on her teaching practice today, Fraser notes, “I do sense a shift away from the traditions that defined my approach to things, which came from European Marxist thinking. It was colonial, and it was white, and it was partially male. What I’m seeing among the younger generations of artists now is a radical turn […] toward a politics and ethos of inclusion, of affirmation and radical care that is coming out of queer feminist, Black feminist, and disability and decolonial theory. And I think it is very powerful, and I feel very challenged by it.”
Fraser is currently based out of New York and Los Angeles. She lives with her husband, Andy Stewart, and their toy poodles Winnicott and Bowlby. She serves on a number of museum boards and councils and is often called upon to provide guidance to museum professionals on matters relating to ethics and challenges facing art institutions today (many of her art world friends with a similar equity and social justice vision are now, like her, in positions of power). She sees her role in this regard as a continuation of institutional critique, but as a veteran making changes from within.
The Legacy of Andrea Fraser
Through both her artistic practice and writing, Fraser explores a wide range of issues related to institutional critique. Not only does she investigate arts institutions and their inner workings, but she also expands her critique to other forms of institutions, such as prisons and slavery, and the less-tangible institution of racism as historically built into the social and political fabric of the nation. Exposing the interconnectedness of such institutions with the art world, she carries on the work of earlier pioneers of institutional critique, such as conceptual artists Hans Haacke and Daniel Buren, as well as artists and scholars working in the fields of feminism, psychoanalysis, and sociology, especially the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who explored class strata and the art world in his academic scholarship. Fraser’s approach is known for being “biting and often very funny,” writes curator Leora Morinis. The use of acerbic humor combined with her trenchant critique has allowed Fraser’s body of work to stand out among her theory-driven peers as an example of an accessible and impactful translation of theory into art.
But perhaps Fraser’s biggest contribution to the discourse of conceptual art and institutional critique is her use of her own body as a medium, which brought into the discourse the vital power and vulnerability of Performance art as well as issues of gender and sexuality. Unlike her male predecessors, Fraser, with her interest in psychoanalysis, also openly acknowledges her own stakes, whether “emotional, economic or otherwise,” in the art world. “Fraser made herself the site of her art,” writes art historian and curator Zoë Lescaze, “and explored her own fragility in the process, effectively redefining the genre.” Curator Scott Rothkopf concurs: “one of the things that makes her work so important is that the clarity and the depth and the rigor of her thought is matched by tremendous emotional breadth.” Her work’s affective power opens up a connection with viewers through a “radical empathy,” writes curator Connie Butler, who sees this as her “great innovation.” In these ways, Fraser has influenced a younger generation of artists, especially those concerned with contemporary institutional critique and feminism, such as performance artist Emma Sulkowicz, who cites the way Fraser “mocked the masculinity of the museum space” as an inspiration for her work.