Andrea Fraser

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Andrea Fraser performing Museum Highlights

Andrea Fraser (sometimes known by her performance name, Jane Castleton) is a New York-based performance artist, mainly known for her work as an institutional critique artist. Fraser was born in 1965 in Billings, Montana, USA.

Fraser's brand of performance during the 1990s popularized the institutional critique art movement, a loosely-formed artistic practice meant to critique the very institutions that are involved in the sale, display, and commerce of art. Arguably Fraser's most famous performance, Museum Highlights involved Fraser posing as a Museum tour guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1989 under the pseudonym of Jane Castleton. ^[1]

During the performance, Fraser led a tour through the museum describing it in verbose and overly dramatic terms to her chagrined tour group. For example, in describing a common water fountain Fraser proclaims "a work of astonishing economy and monumentality ... it boldly contrasts with the severe and highly stylized productions of this form!" Upon entering the museum cafeteria: "This room represents the heyday of colonial art in Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolution, and must be regarded as one of the very finest of all American rooms."

Fraser's work typically analyzes the politics, commerce, histories, and even the self-assuredness of the modern-day art museum, including the hierarchies and the exclusion mechanisms of art as an enterprise. Fraser's performances, despite having serious undertones, are often presented in a humurous, ridiculous, or satirical manner.

In "Kunst muss hangen (Art Must Hang)" (2001) - featured in Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne - Fraser reenacted an impromptu 1995 speech by a drunk Martin Kippenberger, word-by-word, gesture-for-gesture.

For "Official Welcome" (2001) - commissioned by the MICA Foundation for a private reception - Fraser mimics the effusions offered at art awards ceremonies, while stripping down to bra and thong and concluding, "I am not a person today. I'm an object in an art work".

In her "Untitled" videotape performance (2002), Fraser recorded a commissioned sexual encounter with a private collector in a hotel room, as an act of artistic prostitution. Though the piece represents a scathing commentary on the relationship between artist and patron, there was considerable backlash from its presentation, particularly from feminists and female artists.