A Talk with Andrea Fraser

Andrea Fraser has spent 30 years analyzing the systems and structures of the art world—often through performance and, more recently, through psychoanalytic work with groups. Currently the subject of a traveling retrospective organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in Spain and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, her work also featured this year in the “Open Plan” series at the Whitney Museum, where she showed Down the River (2016), a sound installation of recordings made at Sing Sing prison. During our conversation, which took place in September in the courtyard of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, she elaborated on the current state of museums, her role as an educator, and the relevance of group relations to her art.

- Anne Doran

Anne Doran: Between your first gallery talk piece—which you did in 1986 for the “Damaged Goods” show at the New Museum and for which you created the persona of museum docent Jane Castleton—and Down the River, you’ve created many works addressing the art museum as institution. What is the critique around museums today and how has it changed in recent years?

Andrea Fraser: In the 1970s and ’80s a lot of the critique of museums and museum funding focused on corporate sponsorship, thanks largely to Hans Haacke’s work. In the ’90s, individual patronage regained the prominence it held for museums in the United States up to the ’70s, and the corporate populism of the ’80s turned into the mass marketing of elite taste. In many ways the struggle between elitism and populism has defined the history of museums in the United States, from P. T. Barnum’s museum to the Museum of Fine Arts founded by Boston Brahmins to John Cotton Dana’s workingman-focused Newark Museum. With the New Deal, museums swung to progressive populism, then after WWII, to cold war elitism, then back to progressive populism in the ’70s, with the rise of public funding, then to corporate populism in the ’80s.