Son[i]a #229
Andrea Fraser
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 about the challenges and limitations of cultural activism, about the sub-fields of art, the relationship between artists and the market, and the museum in the neoliberal era.
related episodes
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Cuauhtémoc Medina talks about post-colonialism and fetishisation tactics, about the status of museums in global networks, about the role of the market as disseminator, and about how to fight – and try to finally win – the battle for cultural complexity.
Nora Sternfeld
Nora Sternfeld problematises the educational turn and talks about the crisis of the museum model, radical pedagogy, emancipatory practices and alliances, para-institutions, unlearning strategies and collective knowledge projected into the future.
Andrea Fraser
In FONS ÀUDIO #47, Andrea Fraser comments the work 'Little Frank and His Carp', in the MACBA Collection, which registered her performance in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2001. Recorded by five hidden cameras, 'Little Frank and His Carp' follows the artist’s movements from different angles and shows the changes in attitude and emotion generated by the male voice of the audio guide.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Andrea Fraser that we were unable to include the first time around.