Andrea Fraser

Installation video

Fraser’s practice – or as she has termed it, counter-practice – first took shape with Museum Highlights (1989), a videotaped performance in which the artist, in the guise of fictional museum docent Jane Castleton, led visitors on a sly interventionist tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Expertly mimicking the public face of the museum while simultaneously deconstructing it, Fraser came to specialize in deadpan parody, revealing the structural biases, social prejudices and economic underpinnings of established cultural institutions…

Videos

Exposition

Andrea Fraser’s Untitled series stems from a project she completed in 1984, which consisted of a collection of slides superimposing images of Old Masters’ works with those of well known 20th century artists. Having reconstructed these images as photographs, pieces such as Untitled (de Kooning/Raphael) #1 examine the polemics of feminism, historical revisionism, and artistic authenticity. Here, traces of De Kooning’s violently rendered figure scars the beatific Madonna and Child, merging the two disparate examples of the subjectification of women in art history as a Frankenstein-ish amalgamation. Printed in poster size, Fraser highlights issues of sexual commodification and image consumption.