2. andrea fraser's venn-detta (2024)

Andrea Fraser's recent essay, published just last week on e-flux, is titled ‘The Contemporary Art Field: A Diagram.’ It's quite a  read: long-form and academic in an emotionally detached prose style; while also entertaining due to its inherent polemics. 

Fraser’s essay serves as both a survey and a diagram, presented through image and text, depicting the field of contemporary art as a patchwork of overlapping subfields. The best analogy I have is a house of cards that has just fallen.

Fraser’s dealt hand appears flat and transparent in the diagram—“transparency” having political associations. The artist calls the diagram a “resource”, not a “polemic”. This is crucial. Fraser’s resource is something she offers to her students to help them orient themselves in relation to their desires and ambitions, when they first learn of this field called “contemporary art”. 

This resource (not polemic!) is deeply influenced and rooted in Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, encouraging individuals—artists in this instance—to reflect on their own social, political, ethical and ideological stance in the world of cultural capital they inhabit and, most of the time, reproduce. However this habitation comes with Bourdieu's social theory of habitus, wherein we reproduce and perpetuate the status quo as we become habituated to the spaces of power and influence we occupy, to end up accepting the power dynamics inherent within them.

Considering Fraser's interest in psychoanalysis—I once read an interview in which she aired an aspiration to become a psychoanalyst—the diagram could be read as a personal tool to reflect upon and orient herself in the uncanny geography of the contemporary art world in which she continues to inhabit as it shapeshifts in time and space via the technologies and vicissitudes of culture. Ostensibly, the diagram and accompanying explication embody a form of self-reflexivity, prompting individual artists to reflect on their own orientation in the art world. It provides a broad yet US-specific—as in American an us and them—overview but serves a singular purpose: to be a resource for individual artists navigating a world that overlaps in complex ways. 

Fraser’s diagram reads like a delta where a river splits out in several directions to form a triangle of small islands or water, depending on rainfall or high and low tide. The river is artists navigating the ebb and flow of the islands of capital: intellectual, artistic, economic. Yet what I witness most in the diagram is the transparent overlapping of subfields in the field of contemporary art, ranging from commercial to activism. Out of Fraser’s resource emerges a polemical point: the subfields of art, along with their ethics and ideologies, are mutually dependent on one another, if not indeed parasitic. 

Fraser best describes the parasitism that takes place in the field of contemporary art via the art fair between potentially mere luxury goods (painting) and art objects or events of a more avant-garde inheritance, and how both help to prop up each other culturally, critically and economically. Without risky experiments in aesthetics, the art market risks becoming merely a realm of luxury goods, “yachts, jets, watches”. Conversely, without those luxury goods—such as painting—unconventional art forms struggle for funding or a market, often falling by the wayside into peripheral or underground spaces devoid of an audience. 

Speaking to such a description of the field of contemporary art more locally, the art scene in which I navigate as an artist and critic is one where market forces are not forces at all, and public funding is the arm under which artists propose and produce work. Here, the subfield of art education, where the cultural capital of the intellect and industry breed and are bred, leads to the foster family of the Arts Council post art school, where the conceptualisation and quantification of art continues in the formulation of art “projects”. A decade ago during a panel on the state of affairs in the visual arts in Ireland, I posited, as a provocation, that the missing ingredient in our art scene was a vulgar private market, which I thought would only help the artist to better reflect the conflicting realities and human desires of society that Fraser’s diagram describes.

And yet Fraser’s agenda is wholesale fragmentation of the field of contemporary art, thus independence from the interdependency on market forces and capitalist agendas. Fraser describes how she proposed an alternative fragmented map of the field of contemporary art for the curated contemporary art exhibition in Germany, documenta. This map—continuing our metaphor of the delta—is not flooded by mutual dependency, but mutual recognition, a map Fraser yields today as impossible. 

Yet, to interpret Fraser's take on the field of contemporary art, we must consider her as an artist traversing these various subfields. Her critical reflections can be viewed as political and personal, presenting a challenge for both her and us to identify the subfields in which we are implicated, ethically and economically. Fraser writes: “The class basis and biases of the art field are glaring to most people. Only art insiders somehow manage to become blind to them.” Yet Fraser, in this instance, doesn’t take into account psychoanalytic disavowal, when the individual is aware of such biases, even disgusted by them, but continues on with the knowledge nonetheless. 

Since the Pictures Generation of the 1980s, Fraser has appropriated the discourse of the art world and its cultural production as a jester in the King’s court of the art institution. In the early days, she was part of feminist collectives, such as V-Girls, but as these collectives evolved into for-profit spaces like Orchard, her individual practice within performative contexts became her primary mode of production.

Fraser emerged from a generation of artists critiquing the institutions in which they work. My first introduction to her work was not via the administrative aesthetic that she is known for, but a visceral performance which saw her rubbing her hips and crotch against a pillar in a museum designed by Frank Gehry. In this performance, her green dress hiked up to indecency in the context of the passers-by (including children), Fraser drew the gaze of onlookers and mine forevermore.

Fraser serves up her own body as a medium for critiquing the institution that employs and applauds her. Recent exhibitions at the commercially successful and critically respected gallery Marian Goodman in New York, supplemented by her position as professor at a “public” art research institution, Fraser herself performs if not wields significant social power and mobility within the art world, breaking the river banks of the art subfields in the delta of influence and reputation. From her own oscillating vantage point, Fraser believes the artist should not have (in a Freudian sense) an uncanny disorientation in the field of contemporary art, with respect to the artistic, ethical and economic drives that undergird their art. Artists should be made aware not naive to the geography of the field of contemporary art, even though awareness doesn’t mean that radical artists will not keep on producing and reproducing the status quo.

I fell in awe with Fraser's work, which can be quite deadpan in its detournement of the art world’s administrative aesthetic, via one piece that stands out from her body of work: Untitled 2003. The video work in question was initiated in 2002 when Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission included a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape to be produced as a DVD in an edition of five, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting.

Fraser thought about becoming a psychoanalyst after she was commissioned to stage and perform Untitled in 2002, but she got a teaching job which saved her from buying a couch for other people to lie on. Untitled is a strange work, one that claims but sits outside of institutional critique, which was always a meta critique of the art institutions that housed it anyway, an in-joke for the gatekeepers. Untitled is not so much an in-joke, but something niche and risky, which is very unlike the administrative aesthetic of institutional critique. 

I’m a big admirer of how Fraser articulates the artworld. She made me become aware of institutions, the institutionalised art world, the institution of the artist, and the contradictions therein. I discovered Untitled much later, which floored me at first, then filled me with questions. Fraser’s Untitled made the New York Times based on the popular and unpopular reception to the 60-minute artwork, a misogynist article that ramped up the spectacle of sex, lies and videotape. Fraser had to warn her parents before the NYT article came out in print, an article her mother hated so much that I wonder if her anger was misdirected. I think when artists talk about risk, Untitled makes them look like formalist snowflakes. Untitled is not meta, because all meta and irony is lost to something much more real, something sacred that is sacrificed to the profane of sale and touch. Unless, as Isabelle Graw writes in response to Untitled, we “rethink the idea of critique as a form of abandon”. 

Fraser revitalises institutional critique by incorporating herself into her performances, what she redescribes psychoanalytically as “enactments”. She undresses literally and metaphorically, revealing a vulnerability and intimacy that feels more personal than distant. This distinction between the personal and political, the private and public, and the risk therein, is crucial in her work.

As a political artist, Fraser can be characterised as the rebel who slept in at the moment of revolt. She is both friend and enemy of the art world. This, in political terminology, is reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s public enemy and Derrida’s private friend. From this political standpoint, the artist engages rigorously with art institutions, revealing the class and racial basis and biases in their collusion with market forces and subfield self-interest, all of which rely on one another to exist, even when ethics and ideologies are at stake. On the personal side of her work, she literally gives up her body to the market for collectors to consume, exposing a kind of damaging perversity in the transaction between the political and the personal, the artwork and the artist. 

Untitled’s extreme gesture feels far removed from the diagram Fraser presents in e-flux. The latter possesses both clarity and coldness, provoking bodily and emotional responses for those artists that take it in, internalise it,  especially when considering one's own undigested position in the field of contemporary art. This diagram is more than a resource if acted upon by artists. It is a polemic in waiting. 

It's fascinating how artists often overlook their complicity in systems they might critique. Fraser makes the private public, not in an everyday sense, but in a profoundly personal way. She highlights how those outside the art world recognize the biases, while insiders remain blind to them, because their desire to remain overrides any potential for rebellious if not revolutionary zeal. When such conflicts are presented, cognitive dissonance is momentary and temporary. This dynamic between awareness and disavowal produces a third image—the phantasm, an image of the field of art that can tolerate holding conflicting feelings and ethics without conflict or the possibility of transformation.

I often reflect on my position as a critic, a lecturer, and producer of exhibitions and printed objects, and how these roles overlap. I think about how my reputation has been built on criticism, and how I have used criticism as a form of cultural capital, for me and them, in the contemporary attention economy. This interplay of conflict and collusion is where it becomes interesting for me as an artist and critic. I shake the boat but don’t roll it over. 

Can we find hope in Fraser’s diagram? Fraser discusses how Bourdieu identifies a subfield without an audience, named “autonomous legitimisation”. This concept claims that those within this subfield rely, not on other subfields for legitimation, but on themselves for mutual recognition not interdependence, economic or artistic. The space of autonomous legitimisation is

where artists find recognition and purpose among those who recognise their struggles and desires as artists, a peer-group sympatico. Autonomous legitimisation is not found on Instagram, however. It’s a private undertaking, what we once called the underground.

Social media complicates the field of contemporary art further, only getting a nod by Fraser in the diagram and essay. It is difficult to discern social media’s influence on the field of contemporary art, yet we know it’s an abomination that transforms the psychology of artists and the physical reception and experience of art. Are artists aligning with the status quo in their crafting of an yet another Instagram profile, or resisting it? (more on this another time).

Is there hope? Hope is probably the wrong word here. Those who hate the field of contemporary art due to its explicit advertising of capitalist drives and desires (how to price your painting workshops etc.), also, on some level—hate is a strong emotion—want to be part of the field of contemporary art for those very same drives and desires. Exclusion does a strange thing to desire and principles. 

We can claim, as Gilles Deleuze claimed, that art is resistance to the status quo. But we would be lying. The moment of the elitist and esoteric avant-garde is past; populism is its contemporary substitute. Artists want to be accepted, not excluded. Gone are the silly manifestos and performative posturing. As Fraser states: “To suggest that art can or should exist outside of the institution that defines it is not critique, but escapism.”

I’m left with Bourdieu’s “autonomous legitimisation” invoked by Fraser in her diagram, and the words of a painter (of all artists in this critical context) who once said to me: “I paint for painters”.