the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar
Video
Andrea Fraser
From the Critique of Institutions to Institutional Critique
This lecture took place on November 27th, 2007 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union
Lecture introduction
Andrea Fraser talks about “institutional critique,” an approach to art making that emerged out of conceptual art in the late 1960s and has been associated with the work of Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Louise Lawler, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, and others.
Fraser discusses the work of these artists as well as her own, and provides an overview of some of the theoretical, and practical issues raised by this kind of work and the continued need for it in today’s art world.
About Andrea Fraser
Andrea Fraser’s work has been identified with performance, video, context art, and institutional critique. Major projects include installations for the Berkeley Art Museum (1992); the Kunstverein Munich (1993); the Venice Biennale (Austrian Pavilion, 1993); the Whitney Biennial (1993); the Generali Foundation, Vienna (1995); the Kunsthalle Bern (1998); the Sprengel Museum Hannover (1998); and the Bienal de São Paulo (1998).
She has created performances for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1986); the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1989); the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford (1991); inSITE, San Diego/Tijuana (1997); and the MICA Foundation, New York (2001). She has also performed solo work at the Whitechapel, London; the Dia Art Foundation, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other venues.
A survey of her video work was presented by the Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, in 2002. In 2003, the Kunstverein in Hamburg organized the retrospective Andrea Fraser: Works 1984-2003.
Her essays and performance scripts have appeared in Art in America, Afterimage, October, Texte zur Kunst, Social Text, Critical Quarterly, Documents, Artforum, and Grey Room. Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, was released by MIT Press in 2005.
Fraser was a founding member of the feminist performance group, The V-Girls (1986-1996); the project-based artist initiative Parasite (1997-1998); and the cooperative art gallery Orchard (2005-2008). She was also co-organizer of Services, a “working-group exhibition” that toured to seven venues in Europe and the United States between 1994 and 2001.
Fraser has received grants from Art Matters, Inc., the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.