@thehammermuseum / thehammermuseum.tumblr.com
“Because images do stand in for and motivate social change, the arena of representation is a real ground for struggle.” -Carol S. Vance, “The War on Culture,” 1990
My new review of “Take It or Leave It: Institution. Image. Ideology” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles now online at SFAQ. Go see this show before it closes on March 18th. It’s a great one!
Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989. Single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), color, sound. 30:00 min. Courtesy of the artist.
In her performance and video works, Andrea Fraser often takes on personae that function both as character studies and as critical investigations of the sites for art, revealing the layers of context and construction (of class, gender, politics, etc.) that ground their very existence. In Museum Highlights, Fraser borrows the form and conventions of a museum tour, playing the role of Jane Castleton, a fictional docent. The tour is composed entirely of quotations from a variety of sources, including brochures from museum archives and art reviews as well as writings by authors as diverse as Immanuel Kant and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Rather than take visitors through an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Castleton points out elements of the institution’s infrastructure and typically overlooked spaces, drawing attention to questions about pedagogy, aesthetic criteria, and systems of judgment at work within museums.
