The remarkable achievement of Andrea Fraser’s genre-defying career has been to merge the disparate realms of feminist performance and institutional critique, a maneuver aided by the invention of fictional female characters, among them a museum guide, a journalist, an artist and a matron. In many of Fraser’s stories, these characters, plain and simple at first, become increasingly complex as they deliver streams of historical facts and data that are the substance of the artist’s investigations. They may be serious or comical, polite or raunchy, but the speeches they deliver – like the worlds they represent – are real. His expert ability to challenge the status quo was on full display in an exhibit that featured, among several classic concept papers, a selection of three videos including two vintage pieces—Welcome to Wadsworth: A Museum Tour1991; Report from São Paulo, I’m from the United States1998 — and a new tour de force, This meeting is recorded2021.
In the videos from the 1990s, Fraser focuses his attention on the political ideologies of two art institutions: the small civic Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, founded in 1842, and the sprawling international biennial in São Paulo. Her subterfuge, as always, is one in which she seems to blend in, as if in tune with the agenda of the respective institutions she criticizes. As an enthusiastic guide in To welcome, it traces the genealogy of the white founders of Wadsworth and their families while exalting the values of the museum. Yet while she touts the virtues of heritage, tradition, and patriotism, she manages to reveal a more toxic personality, acknowledging that she is a “daughter of the American Revolution.” She then lashes out at the deplorable immigrants living in squalor around Hartford’s historic town square while advocating for a “cleansed America.”
When she was invited to take part in the São Paulo Biennale in 1998, Fraser transformed into a sunny journalist who seems to promote the official agenda of the event, which champions cultural diversity. As well as chatting with one of the artists during the opening, she interviews some of the show’s actual directors, including curators, financiers, and even Brazil’s culture minister. She never challenges or questions them, but simply lets them respond to her softball prompts. By inferring that she is “one of them”, her subjects candidly reveal the antecedents of corporate sponsorships and business arrangements that are their markers of “success”. No one really cares or understands the art, or for that matter the underprivileged populations they claim to educate.
In This meeting is recorded, a ninety-nine-minute single-channel video, Fraser features seven different people, mostly white women, coming together for a “diversity and anti-racism training” session. The artist’s monologues are based on interviews she conducted with several women who, according to the show’s press release, “apply psychoanalytic methods of group relations to the task of examining their internal racism and their roles in white supremacy”. Fraser appears life-size on a large screen; the chair she occupies is the same one we are invited to sit in, and she often addresses the audience directly. We are all entangled in the problematic and soul-carrying excursus that Fraser orchestrates. A character announces with insistence that she is going through a very difficult period. She wants to feel safe, but alienation is her constant companion. She is overwhelmed by issues of male dominance, white frailty, aging, as well as her own racism and self-hatred.
Nothing is spared in this deep dive into how white women constantly and competitively flip each other. The video also delves into their conflicted relationships with black women, their appalling narcissism, their struggles with guilt and privilege, and their disdain for the younger generation. “I don’t want to be told what my politics are, for God’s sake. But if you give me shit, I come, you know…manage your anger. Don’t make it mine. I have a lot of mine.”) She pulls it all off, with extraordinary body language, mannerisms, and expressions that effectively help blur the line between truth and fiction. Her character’s emotions soar as she urges us to examine ourselves. “We are all people, we are all vulnerable. And you! And you!” Are we on the verge of a breakthrough? Sadly, no luck. “We’ve reached our time limit, so see you next week.”
