“If you haven’t already done so, walk away from the desk where you picked up this guide and out into the great, high space of the atrium. Isn’t this a wonderful place? It’s uplifting. It’s like a Gothic cathedral. You can feel your soul rise up with the building around you.” These are the first words of the official audio guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao as heard on Andrea Fraser’s video Little Frank and His Carp (2001). Shot with hidden cameras, Fraser’s seven-minute video piece documents an unauthorized intervention into the museum designed by the architect Frank Gehry, the “Little ...

Artists have continually questioned their status and place in society. The widespread vision of the artist as an outsider from the peripheries of social life, a utopia seeker, a celebrity selling works for millions or an erudite nonconformist who voices his or her opinions in the public debate, has spawned many myths concerning their privileges and obligations in the contemporary world. The exhibition formulates a question about the way artists define their status and position in the realm of an ever-widening economic gap: that of the possibility to reconcile dreams of social justice with the needmof artistic freedom and autonomy. At the same time, the show highlights the tension between artists’ rather ...

Exact Imagination is about the experience of art, however one may have it, via gallery exhibitions, social encounters, books, reproductions, academics, or simply by being alive. Taking its inspiration and title from the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno and his analysis of aesthetic experience in which he argues that subjective and objective forces collide to determine a viewer’s perceptual reception of art—how it makes them feel, what they take away from it, what they draw up inside of them to relate to it—it includes art that encourages both concrete and immaterial aesthetic explorations. With this in mind, Exact Imagination investigates the ...

In our initial proposal for “Services,” Helmut Draxler and I offered the term “service” to describe what appeared to be a determining feature of what has come to be called “project work.” We wrote: It appears to us that, related variously to institutional critique, productivist, activist and political documentary traditions as well post-studio, site-specific and/or public art activities, the practices currently characterized as ‘project work’ do not necessarily share a thematic, ideological or procedural basis. What they do seem to share is the fact that they all involve expending an amount of labor which is either in excess of, or independent ...

“L’1% C’est Moi,” written in August 2011 for the Berlin-based publication Texte zur Kunst, focuses on the direct relationship between art-market trends and income distribution. The essay’s title refers to the statement “l’état, c’est moi” (“the state, it is me“), attributed to Louis XIV and often evoked to illustrate the principle of absolute monarchy, as well as to Gustave Flaubert’s famous remark, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

Performing the Sentence brings into dialogue the ways that “performative thinking” has developed in different national and institutional contexts, within different disciplines in the arts, and the conditions under which it has developed in experimental art schools. This anthology is a collection of twenty-one essays and conversations that weave in and out of the two key areas of research and teaching within performative fine art. They bring to light the conventions involved in the production, presentation, reception, and historicization of performance art, as well as the specific cultural and political implications. The various contributions also show how these conventions are ...

The wooden chair sits hard under my bones, my neck is tense. My view is partly obstructed by the heads of students. The projection field is small compared to the size of the art space in Zurich West, where the public event takes place. On view is Andrea Fraser’s 2022 video performance This meeting is being recorded. The artist reenacts parts of Group Relations meetings she had held with other white- and female-identifying people about manifestations of internal racism in the U.S. I am following this well-tempered conversation. And while I analyze the group dynamics in the film from a certain ...

Through her performances, Andrea Fraser (Billings, Montana, 1965) examines the social, economic, and emotional structures of the art world. She turns her critical, self-reflexive, and somewhat ironic gaze on different agents in the art field and analyses their roles, motivations, and contradictions. Fraser’s career has been linked to institutional critique from the outset, and her influences include psychoanalysis, feminism, and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. Appropriation, site specific pieces, performance and body work are some of the strategies Fraser uses to expose the incongruities of the art world while also harnessing its full critical and political potential. SON[I]A talks to Andrea Fraser ...

Andrea Fraser’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial 2012 is an essay, “There’s No Place Like Home,” available to read in the exhibition catalogue and presented here as a downloadable PDF. The form of Fraser’s contribution reflects her longstanding engagement with art discourse, which for Fraser encompasses all that participants in the art world write and say about art and their own art-related activities. Fraser’s previous work has taken the form of museum tours and audio guides, art lectures and panel discussions, exhibition brochures, critical essays, and, indeed, even wall texts such as this (in fact, the artist wrote this text ...

The materials in Toolkit for Cooperative, Collective, & Collaborative Cultural Work trace a process we have been working through for over a year with over 25 collaborators, mentors, and friends whom we admire. As we reached the final stages of compiling this project to share and distribute publicly, we suddenly found ourselves within the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented global health crisis that has shaken our community, our process, and every aspect of our lives. In the wake of the pandemic, we are reminded that at the heart of our work lies the understanding that wellbeing, integrity, equity, and care is ...

This booklet was released at the launch of the campaign Wages For Wages Against on March 2017 during the exhibition Speak, Lokal at Kunsthalle Zürich. It attempts to answer a simple question: why are artists not paid when they provide a service to an institution, in the form of an exhibition or else? It gathers a series of interviews with Harry Burke (artist & Curator at Artists Space, NY), Bathazar Lovay (artist & Director of Fri Art Fribourg), Bea Schlingelhoff (artist & Head of BFA at ZHdK, Zürich), Lise Soskolne (artist & Organizer of W.A.G.E., New York) and Judith Welter (Director ...