Museum Highlights: The Writings Of Andrea Fraser

Essays, criticism, and performance scripts written between 1985 and 2003 by an artist whose artistic practice investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions.
Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his foreword to Museum Highlights, is able to "trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself." It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique―as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks―institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology. Fraser's writings form an integral part of her artistic practice, and this collection of texts written between 1985 and 2003―including the performance script for the docent's tour that gives the book its title―both documents and represents her work. The writings in Museum Highlights are arranged to reflect different aspects of Fraser's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of critical "artistic practice" as cultural resistance; performance scripts that explore art institutions and the public sphere; and texts that explore the ambivalent relationship of art to the economic and political interests of its time. The final piece, "Isn't This a Wonderful Place? (A Tour of a Tour of the Guggenheim Bilbao)," reflects on the role of museums in an era of globalization. Among the book's 30 illustrations are stills from performance pieces, some never before published.

Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (Writing Art)

Arts & Photography

Andrea Fraser

Individual Artists

MIT Press]

Everything is made in Mexico, from decorative mirrors to silver jewelry to plastic dolls and ceramic dishware--and contemporary art. Made in Mexico examines recent art produced within and about Mexico. Historically, Mexico has always welcomed artists and writers from abroad as a way of enriching and diversifying the national character. This publication examines the phenomenon from a contemporary perspective for the first time. Made in Mexico highlights the current generation of cultural production within the context of prevailing global and conceptual art vocabularies. Speaking within a larger dialogue, Made in Mexico includes international artists whose work does not necessarily come out of a local experience, yet draws upon a distinctly Mexican vernacular--whether iconographic, architectural, or environmental. Three themes structure the book's organization: "Local Identities" addresses how contemporary artists approach the essential characteristics of Mexican identity as projected through popular imagery, cultural iconography, and traditional art forms. "Mexican Modernisms" addresses the problems of modernist aesthetic ideologies within the context of Mexican architecture, design, and sculpture. And "Social Spaces" addresses artistic inspirations found within the environmental landscape. Included are works by artists such Francis Als, Daniel Buren, Andrea Fraser, Thomas Glassford, Erik G ngrich, Terrence Gower, Andreas Gursky, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Lockhart, Teresa Margolles, Yasumasa Morimura, Gabriel Orozco, Damin Ortega, Pedro Reyes, Sebastin Romo, Daniela Rossell, Santiago Sierra, Melanie Smith.

Made in Mexico

Claudia Fernández

FRANCIS ALŸS

Terence Gower

Thomas Glassford

Erik Gongrich

Andreas Gursky

History & Criticism

Inst of Contemporary Art

Speech Acts

CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA

Keller Easterling

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Kit Hammonds

Installation Gallery

Louise Lawler subjects the concept of art to critical analysis by re-photographing her own drawings, paintings, and sculptures and incorporating aspects of their immediate surroundings into these "copies." Viewed with a certain detachment, her demystified reproductions also reveal the contextual and situational connotations of her artworks, which recede to a certain extent into the background. Lawler also applies these methods to the work of other artists, photographing their art pieces, particularly as they are mounted in private collections. These contextualizing photographs retain fragments of their surroundings, thus clarifying how the presentation and interpretation of artwork is never free of value judgment or environmental influence. This publication offers the first retrospective overview of the artistic accomplishments of Louise Lawler over the past 20 years. Included are a number of very recent works, some of them created especially for this book.

Louise Lawler And Others

GEORGE BAKER

Isabelle Graw

Birgit Pelzer

Philipp Kaiser

Jack Bankowsky

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Andrea Fraser (German Edition)

Sven Lütticken

Shannon Jackson

Sabine Breitwieser

Hatje Cantz Verlag

Best known for her performance critiques of art institutions, art publications, art sponsorship, and cultural transfer--think subversive museum docent--Andrea Fraser is one of the more prominent artists to raise institutional criticism to the level of art itself. Since the early 90s, when she would stage tours through exhibitions or hold discussions on art, her work has developed a more deliberately visual character. Working now mostly in video installation, Fraser produces such imagery as Soldadera, a video in which she plays a revolutionary on horseback, evoking the time of the Mexican revolution and the problem of North-American influence on Mexico in the 1930s. In Exhibition, she appears as a scantily-clad Samba dancer, demonstrating the important place of popular culture in an art context. This monograph, the most complete published on the artist to date, reveals the diversity of her work; also included are her critical texts, documents fundamental to the interpretation of her artistic oeuvre.

Yilmaz Dziewior

DuMont

This contemporary reassessment of the Institutional Critique movement, launched in the late 1960s by artists including Michael Asher and Hans Haacke, grew out of a symposium held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It looks at Institutional Critique's central aim, the exposure and ironization of the structures and logic of museums and art galleries, and recent developments that engage with and echo it. IC has been raised again by Andrea Fraser, Renee Green and Fred Wilson, among others, and has been vigorously reoriented in recent years to address issues such as globalization. Contributors include Alexander Alberro, Mike Kelley, Hans Haacke, Lauri Firstenberg, Andrea Fraser, Renee Green and others.

Institutional Critique and After (SoCCAS Symposia vol. 2)

Jens Hoffmann

Hans Haacke

John Searle

Renee Green

Monica Bonvicini

Mike Kelley

The Yes Men

JRP|Ringier

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Books by Andrea Fraser