T H E F U T U RE I S O U RS. AND SO How queer artists are remapping the present by reimagining history as we know it IS THE PAST.

THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE Holiday December 8, 2019 IT WAS NEARLY closing time at the museum: Long outrage over his company’s production of the video. Fraser swears at parking meters like a shadows had already devoured most of downtown tear gas canisters used on migrants at the U.S.- New Yorker (she was based in the city for 25 years) and the hangar-like space was hushed. Mexico border. and rhapsodizes about gardening like the Los Andrea Fraser stood before a small TV watching Fraser is a fierce critic of the status quo, Angeles transplant she has become (she’s lived there “Official Welcome,” one of her landmark but her approach is different from that of most since 2006 and currently shares a home in the San performances. Onscreen, she appeared in a tasteful artist-activists. For most of her career, she has Fernando Valley with her husband, Andy Steward, black dress at the opening of her 2003 exhibition fused archival research, psychoanalysis, sexuality and their toy poodles, Winnicott and Bowlby). in Hamburg, Germany, making remarks from a and humor in diverse projects that examine the All of Fraser’s works combine a trenchant and lectern. She thanked the curators who had made art world’s subconscious — the web of desires that unsparing intellect with a magnetic physical presence. her retrospective possible; she thanked her mother, shape its economy, power dynamics and social She stands with the alert posture of a dancer and who had flown all the way from California for relationships — and her own place within the system. passes through the world with the kind of fluid, feline the event. The crowd clapped on cue. But then the In 2001, she spoofed the museum world’s fetish awareness that makes it difficult to imagine her woman went rogue, as tripping or dropping her keys. At 54, her face is though a computer virus practically unlined. Intently impassive when had infected her gracious- she is listening to others, her features fly into artist software. “Thank motion when she is discussing matters close you, Andrea,” she boomed WITH FRIENDS to her heart, from psychoanalytic theory to in a deep male voice, samba dancing. Listening to Fraser speak in morphing into the first of the measured timbre of a veteran academic, more than a dozen art-world as she often does, is a bit like listening to personae who take over the an opera singer softly hum a tune — it can speech — a piratical dealer, be suspenseful, knowing just how much a fawning patron, an artist power she is capable of unleashing, how best known for pickling a shark. much voltage is being kept under control. Before it’s over, she has shed For over 30 years, Andrea Fraser In “Official Welcome,” Fraser’s her dress and then her Gucci bra, has waged a conceptual battle physical powers are on full display as thong and stilettos to address the she stomps and strips and mimics audience fully nude. “It takes a lot against elitist museum boards, the gestures of recognizable art-world of courage to do what she does,” grandiose patrons and the murky figures. (For the script, Fraser culled she said, assuming the voice of an excerpts from actual speeches approving critic. “She goes far beyond ethics of the art world. Has the and interviews, seamlessly melding where most artists have the intelligence culture finally caught up to her? them with her own writing.) “You or audacity to operate.” The 30-minute know, it’s fun to sell big artworks piece — funny, brash and often By Zoë Lescaze — and it’s profitable. In the excruciating — ends after the woman, Portrait by Michael Christopher Brown end, a good artist is a rich artist,” back in her dress but somehow more she bellows as she swaggers exposed than ever, breaks down in sobs. across the stage as an Tears pooled behind Fraser’s glasses unmistakable heavyweight as she watched her younger self. But the dealer. Minutes later, she moment passed quickly, and she returned to morphs again: “Most of the critiquing the work on view, at the Geffen work we collect is about Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary sex or excrement,” she Art, with cleareyed detachment. “I could have chirps in the perky tone given that a little more time,” she said, catching of a prominent West herself rush a beat. LIKE THESE… Coast collector. “We like “Official Welcome” is a case study in the to think of ourselves intellectual rigor, physical bravura and satirical wit for glitzy new buildings by grinding sensuously as connoisseurs of art’s subculture.” Fraser brings to diagnosing the collective delusions, against the curvaceous limestone walls of the Frank The art world is easy to roast — its most absurd material excesses, fraught politics, grandiose Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao, her acid-green characters are often the most oblivious — and it rhetoric, bumptious egos, ingrained biases and dress hiked up around her waist, driven to ecstasy tends to skewer itself without any outside assistance. sundry pretenses of the art world. For the past 30 by the audio guide. Two years later, she filmed a But Fraser’s work is not mere polemics or parody. years, she has reigned unchallenged as the doyenne sexual encounter with a collector to create her most She bares her own insecurities as she examines of institutional critique, a branch of conceptual notorious work, “Untitled,” a piece some praise those of museums, galleries, viewers and patrons. art concerned with the internal machinery of as the ultimate comment on art as empty commerce “Official Welcome” may mock the art world’s museums and other social constructs. Lately, that and others dismiss as an attention-grabbing stunt. rituals of florid praise and faux humility, but the machinery has been the subject of intense public Fraser’s occasional bouts of nudity often eclipse performance also reflects Fraser’s lifelong sense scrutiny. This year alone, activists have stormed the her careful choice of costumes, reflecting a savvy of being an outsider — a position she consciously exhibition halls of elite museums, targeting their that extends to her civilian life — clothes are the only draws upon in her work. “Yeah, it was fun to private funding sources. The Louvre scrubbed the belongings Fraser accumulates other than books. write,” she said, “but to some extent, this piece was Sackler name from one of its wings following They are props people use to perform themselves, driven by my sense of resentment and envy of my demonstrations condemning the family’s ties to and Fraser’s eye for the subtle ways that they professional peers about whom all these great things the opioid crisis just months after the Solomon R. broadcast self-assurance or camouflage fragility were said.” To Fraser, this sort of vulnerability Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan helps give her work its bite. In the language of and self-examination is crucial if a work is going to Museum of Art in New York, as well as the National her art, clothes serve as verbs — active and dynamic engage viewers. “Art functions through empathy. . . . Portrait Gallery and Tate in London, embargoed forces. Her outfit at the Geffen that hot day in [When you] see someone else who’s struggling with Sackler donations. This summer, the businessman late September — a floral jumpsuit, suede mustard- something and grappling with something, that Warren Kanders resigned from the Whitney colored mules and violet toenail polish — delivered creates a space for finding that in yourself,” she said.

124 Museum of American Art’s board of trustees amid a jaunty riposte to the little black dress she wore in For her, these performances are not idle exercises Andrea Fraser, photographed in Los Angeles in September. Hair by Danni Katz at Tracey Mattingly using Unite. Makeup by Grace Phillips at Tracey Mattingly using

Chanel Beauty. 125 Left: Fraser’s installation of chicken and rice at Fraser saw herself quite differently. “At the Whitney “Um Monumento às a tiny Jamaican spot program, my image of myself was that I was just, Fantasias Descartadas” (“A Monument to in Culver City. “We like, hiding under the seminar table in fear,” she said. Discarded Fantasies,” became hippies very 2003). Below: a still quickly, my mother got BEFORE FRASER CAME along, institutional critique from Fraser’s “Museum Highlights: A Gallery involved in the women’s was the domain of older, mostly male European Talk” (1989), with movement, became a artists who had launched the movement in the late the artist in character lesbian a bit before that. 1960s amid the protests sweeping the Western as a docent at the Philadelphia Museum My brothers, I think, world. In 1969, activists wrestled in a pool of bovine of Art. Opposite: were selling drugs when blood inside the lobby of the Museum of Modern a still from they were 10, 11? We were Art to censure two trustees, Nelson and David “Projection” (2008). all pretty precocious.” Rockefeller, who had wartime manufacturing ties The artist grew up to jet fighters and napalm. The German artist memorizing Adrienne Rich Hans Haacke made these demands for accountability poems, browsing “Our his very practice by presenting a mordant installation Bodies, Ourselves” and in an exhibition at the museum the following crafting banners for gay pride year. His piece, “MoMA Poll,” asked viewers to drop marches in her mother’s ballots into boxes to indicate whether Nelson’s kitchen. She remembers cutting failure to denounce President Nixon’s Indochina class and catching a bus policy would be grounds for them to vote against into San Francisco to see Judy him (he was up for re-election as governor of New Chicago’s major feminist York). By the end of the exhibition, nearly twice as installation “The Dinner Party” many participants had answered yes than no. Haacke’s at the age of 13. Two years project reflected the broader anti-establishment later, she quit going to school ethos of the time, but he and the other architects of altogether (her mother wrote her institutional critique, including the Belgian artist a note) and made her way to New Marcel Broodthaers and the French conceptualist York’s East Village, where she Daniel Buren, were also reacting to a specific applied to the . transformation in the history of museums and the While she waited on her art world at large. acceptance, Fraser visited the Met If the old museum was a mausoleum safeguarding three or four times a week. “I was dusty treasures for the enjoyment of the educated pretty freaked out about having few, the new museum that emerged in the 1960s and dropped out of high school and what ’70s courted broad audiences with blockbuster was going to happen to me,” she said. shows, expensive advertising campaigns, new wings, but dogged attempts to change audiences and the “I had to sort of redeem myself.” Soon, Fraser knew after-hours events and gift shops. The methods larger ecosystems they inhabit. And, if the events of most of the museum by heart, from the lavish of Thomas Hoving, the freewheeling director of the

the past year are any indication, these provocations period rooms to the Greek and Roman marbles. She Met between 1967 and 1977, exemplified the tactics RHEINISCHES COPYRIGHT PHOTO: COLOGNE, , INSTALLATION, 2003, DESCARTADAS,” ÀS FANTASIAS ANDREA FRASER, “UM MONUMENTO FROM LEFT: PERFORMANCE, 1989, TALK,” A GALLERY DRAXLER; ANDREA FRASER, “MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS: AND GALERIE NAGEL OF THE ARTIST COURTESY KÖLN, BILDARCHIV VIDEO TWO-CHANNEL 2007, OPPOSITE: ANDREA FRASER, “PROJECTION,” OF THE ARTIST. COURTESY & MASSA PHOTOGRAPHY, KELLY PHOTO: PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, DRAXLER AND GALERIE NAGEL OF THE ARTIST COURTESY INSTALLATION, have worked — even if most audiences don’t fully was attracted to “East Coast cultural institutions realize that the world has caught up to Andrea Fraser. and status codes,” despite feeling, or precisely because she felt, “deeply illegitimate — as a high school “WHAT DO YOU need to know about me to dropout, as a hippie kid, as a half-Puerto Rican kid . . . understand my work?” Fraser asked six of her I think I was able, from the very beginning, to graduate students. It was the first day of fall classes recognize, even if I couldn’t use the words at the University of California, Los Angeles, where ‘ambivalence’ or ‘conflicted investments,’ ” she said, Fraser is a tenured professor in the Department of assuming a deep professorial register to mock Art. They sat in a half circle in a stark white room her own preferred terms, “how much I wanted from illuminated by the eye of a large projector. Fraser, in these institutions . . . and that I could find a kind of a black dress and multicolor Issey Miyake scarf, legitimacy in that world. And, at the same time, I did was explaining early sources of her critical approach, feel absolutely crushed by it.” and the lecture had the riveting, unpredictable At S.V.A., Fraser found her tribe: a group of young atmosphere of one of her performances. “That I was artists, including Mark Dion, Tom Burr, Gregg the youngest in a family of five,” she continued. Bordowitz and Collier Schorr, who gathered around “It was extremely competitive, and fairness became Craig Owens, the art critic and gay activist, among extremely important to me from that position. other postmodernist teachers. Fraser stood I had to defend my little share, right? My little piece out from the start. “Andrea was scary brilliant,” said of the pie.” Her obsession with equity, she said, Bordowitz, who became Fraser’s boyfriend. again tearing up, partly “comes down to that, to “Frighteningly brilliant, very intimidating. And at being the runt.” the same time, very fragile, because I think she Fraser was born in Montana in 1965 and grew up even scared herself sometimes with what she saw on the West Coast. Her parents married two months and understood about the art world and its terrible after they met in New York, where her father, the contradictions.” At 18, Fraser left S.V.A. for the museums began deploying to ratchet up their son of a cattle rancher, was studying philosophy at Whitney Independent Study Program, then a theory- attendance and revenue. A 1969 multimedia Columbia University and her Puerto Rican-born intensive boot camp. There, she studied with the exhibition titled “Harlem on My Mind,” for instance, mother was taking painting classes at the Art Students artist Barbara Kruger, whose work critiques systems was unabashedly intended, Hoving wrote in his League. The family moved to the Bay Area in 1967. of power and control and the cultures they create. 1993 autobiography, “to chronicle the creativity of “Pretty quickly, the context of Berkeley began to (They now teach together at U.C.L.A.) Kruger the downtrodden blacks and, at the same time,

126 unravel the family,” Fraser later told me, over a tray praised Fraser’s “incredibly brilliant mind,” but encourage them to come to the museum.” This was also, and not coincidentally, the moment when the contemporary art market exploded. As early as 1960, the dealer Peggy Guggenheim was lamenting how “the entire art movement has For Fraser, her become an enormous business venture.” performances are not Collectors, she wrote, were spending “unheard-of” sums “merely for investment, idle exercises but placing pictures in storage without even dogged attempts to seeing them, phoning their gallery every day for the latest quotation as though change audiences and they were waiting to sell stock.” This the larger ecosystems approach became a method in 1973, the year a New York-based collector named they inhabit. Robert Scull flipped 50 works by American artists for $2.3 million (about $12 million in today’s dollars) that he had bought several years earlier for $150,000 (about de Land. (Later, in 2002, she started $860,000). These figures seem minuscule showing at Petzel, a larger New York by today’s standards, but the sale gallery.) But participating in the gallery nonetheless announced a new era: the world sat uneasily with Fraser, who age of art collecting as investment continued to dissect its systems from the strategy. As museums chased mainstream inside. She produced her videos in audiences, they assumed a paradoxical unlimited editions, undermining their role as the seemingly moral counterparts value as rarefied commodities, and to the marketplace — temples to art occasionally renounced making salable untainted by dollar signs — but were objects altogether. “I’ve been in and hardly immune to the wealth reshaping out of strategies of trying to manage my the industry as they pursued funding conflicted feelings about the market, streams for high-profile expansions and about selling art,” Fraser told me. She big-ticket exhibitions. then shook her head, a little amused, Fraser wove her predecessors’ critical perhaps, by the self-inflicted agony of threads into her own practice but with her struggle against a commercial two key differences: None of the early sphere in which countless artists are practitioners of institutional critique had glad, even grateful, to exist at all. used his own body as his primary medium, or acknowledged his own stake (emotional, ONE OF FRASER’S (many) problems economic or otherwise) in the systems with the art world is that relationships he examined. Fraser made herself the site are rarely genuine, and much of her of her art and explored her own fragility work deals with questions of authenticity. in the process, effectively redefining the Artists, dealers and patrons often genre. “I think phrases like ‘institutional “perform” fictional friendships, she said, critique’ can have the whiff of academic theory,” Castelton) shifts seamlessly between lofty praise “but fundamentally, they’re transactional.” Fraser said Scott Rothkopf, the chief curator of the Whitney, for the masterpieces on display (“resplendently described collectors who believed certain artists “and one of the things that makes her work so amazingly flawless”) and the museum itself (“a place and dealers were their friends, only to get hurt important is that the clarity and the depth and the apart from the mundane demands of reality” that when they hit a rough patch and couldn’t afford to rigor of her thought is matched by tremendous provides “a training in taste”) to grim accounts of keep buying. “That’s not something I want to emotional breadth.” Fraser emerged from the the squalid poorhouses that appeared in America participate in,” she said. Whitney program armed with strategies plucked at the same time that the country’s oldest art She mined her conflicted feelings about the from feminist performance, postmodern theory museums were being established (“The inmates market to create “Untitled,” which, to the artist’s and psychoanalysis that she used to form a fresh, are lodged in rooms of about 22 feet by 45 feet . . . exasperation, is often seen as her defining work. hybrid approach. Her great innovation was a and are classed according to their general habits In the video, Fraser has sex with a collector, who “radical empathy,” said Connie Butler, the chief and characteristics, separating the more deserving prepurchased a copy of the recording. Shot from curator of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. from the abandoned and worthless”). The video, a single camera mounted near the ceiling of a New Fraser can, and is willing to, probe “difficult, complex which is roughly 30 minutes long, is a disturbing, York hotel room, the unedited footage shows issues” by fully assuming diverse, and sometimes spellbinding portrait of a country whose long Fraser greet the unidentified man and offer him a repellent, voices and positions. “I can’t think of history of inequality haunts its cultural institutions. glass of wine. They appear to talk a little (there anyone else who does that,” she said. By inhabiting At the time that Fraser made “Museum Highlights: is no audio), and then they undress, sleep together the figures and roles Fraser saw as legitimate, she A Gallery Talk,” that inequality was approaching its and talk some more. The piece avoids pornographic also discovered a means of negotiating her own present levels. Reagan- and Bush-era cuts to clichés — there are no close-ups; it’s as though the fraught participation in the systems they represent. cultural funding meant that museums increasingly encounter had been secretly filmed by a security “It was an artistic strategy, but it was also a life had to seek corporate sponsorship and private camera. The whole thing takes an hour. “You strategy,” Fraser said. donors. Fraser’s piece ostensibly targeted the robber- see, like, a penis!” Fraser exclaimed, baffled by the Her big break came in 1989, when she was invited baron philanthropy of the Gilded Age, but she scandalized reactions that “Untitled” continues to give a lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of was also implicating museums’ current embrace of to inspire. “You see a teeny, tiny, little speck for Art and proposed a subversive performance instead. free-market capitalism. about two seconds like three times. You see boobs.” Leading the camera through the august galleries, Soon, Fraser was participating in prestigious When the video went on display at Petzel in

Fraser (in the guise of a ladylike docent named Jane biennials and working with a New York dealer, Colin 2003, the work shocked the art world. The press 127 was harsh. There were gratuitous comments on wife.” But the price, which was widely, incorrectly, Fraser’s appearance — Jerry Saltz noted in Artnet reported as $20,000, overwhelmed any Magazine that Fraser is “in excellent shape for considerations of Fraser’s agency. “So that’s what a 39 year old” and “gives an attentive blow job.” “I was the most painful for me,” said Fraser, “being think some people felt that the piece was almost exposed publicly in the art economy as cheap.” too literal and didn’t have the complexities of The experience was alienating in other ways as some of her other performances, and I think she well. In the two years Fraser spent formulating felt very misunderstood,” said Tom Burr. “There’s “Untitled” and exhibiting it at Petzel, she remembers The United States, an emotional, personal side to it, where you get only two people asking her about the work battered and hurt by all of these kinds of conditions directly. “And this was a period when I would hear Fraser writes, has become that you’re trying to speak about. You still want secondhand that people were having heated a plutocracy, and its to be liked.” arguments about it, everybody was talking about it. Nobody talked to me about museums have effectively it.” One of the paradoxes of become pay-to- “Untitled,” she said, is that while it is, in part, about intimacy, play country clubs “the experience of doing it was for millionaires. incredibly isolating.” “Untitled” occupies an uneasy place in the contemporary canon. On one hand, it followed in a long tradition of radical feminist performance and video art that includes the late Carolee Schneemann’s “Fuses” of 1964-67, of artist as prostitute, and implicated everyone a montage of the artist and her involved: the dealer as pimp, the collector as john, husband having sex, shot from the the viewer as voyeur. The work threatened the perspective of their cat, and Martha high self-opinion of the art world, which rarely Rosler’s footage of a male doctor questions its own integrity. Fraser tried, however measuring and clinically reporting bluntly, to tear down pretense and expose the the dimensions of her naked hips, ways in which intimacy is performed. In the end, it limbs and breasts in “Vital Statistics was the piece that got torn apart. of a Citizen, Simply Obtained,” from 1977. Women had long used their BY 2006, FRASER was on the brink of quitting. “I was bodies to critique social relations and really fed up,” she said. “I was fed up with the art hierarchies, but the fact that so much world, but I was also fed up with being poor and being of Fraser’s work had existed within an broke and being in debt and struggling to live in intellectual framework, steeped in my own apartment in New York.” She was considering discourse and terminology, meant that pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology when salvation no one really knew how to contextualize came in the form of U.C.L.A., where she has taught her more explicit use of her sexuality. for the past 13 years. Tenure alleviated the financial By 2003, critics and audiences alike had strain of operating outside the commercial art essentially decided that women artists world. She cut ties with Petzel in 2011 and never could use their bodies, or they could use signed with another American gallery. But Fraser’s their brains. Fraser never felt that she work has always made more sense in museums, Fraser considered the backlash a compliment to had to choose between the two. her contentious muses — especially now as these the work. “For me, one of the clearest signs that These days, Fraser warns her students against institutions reinvent themselves all over again. ‘Untitled’ is a successful piece is that it didn’t only including five kinds of content in their art — cute Today, museums are scrambling to redefine the upset people outside of the art world but a lot of animals, babies and young children, popular music, canon and compensate, as much as they can, for people inside the art world as well,” she told The sex and certain kinds of violence — because they centuries of exclusion with a surge in exhibitions Brooklyn Rail the following year. Today, she’ll tend to overwhelm viewers’ ability to think about art devoted to women and artists of color. Tokenism admit that the experience was harrowing, mostly in nuanced or complex ways. She acknowledges the and hollow attempts at mere correctness abound, because the price the collector paid became an consequences of breaking her own rule. “Artists are but so do real revelations, as every exhibition season obsession for viewers. For Fraser, the amount was responsible, I believe, on some level for . . . what their brings overlooked artists to light and recognizes symbolic, which is why she will never disclose work activates in other people,” she said. “And so on neglected icons: Most recently, a remodeled MoMA it; the piece was about the desires and fantasies some level, I’m responsible for the responses — to opened its fall season with shows by two black that drive artists, patrons and dealers to collude ‘Untitled’ and to other works of mine — that I abhor.” artists, the 64-year-old performance maverick in a market that reduces art to a transaction and What continues to unsettle people about Pope.L and the pioneering assemblage artist Betye a meditation on the experience of selling intimate “Untitled” isn’t the sex, though — the art world likely Saar, who, at age 93, was also getting her first solo parts of one’s self. “Untitled” can be read as a lost that last bit of innocence in 1991, when Jeff show at the museum. For these overdue efforts to comment on the exploitation artists suffer at the Koons exhibited a series of graphic works portraying continue, and for museums to ensure that they, hands of profiteering collectors and opportunistic himself in flagrante delicto with his porn-star wife as institutions, remain relevant to contemporary dealers, but ironically, Fraser was worried about — it’s that the piece calls out art-world commerce audiences (in more profound ways than as selfie the patron. “I had a tremendous amount of power for what it is: commerce, plain and simple. People backdrops), curatorial and staff diversity is essential. in that piece,” she said. “I used to joke it started in almost any industry would prefer not to dwell In New York, diversity reporting has become out as a prostitution piece and could become an on the transactional basis of their relationships with requisite for museums to receive city funding. Trustee extortion piece — I have a videotape of a man having others, but that’s what Fraser asked her peers to diversity remains elusive, however. A 2017 study

128 sex in a hotel room with a woman who’s not his join her in doing when she took up the old metaphor commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums SUZY POLING, PHOTO: FRANCISCO , PERFORMANCE, SAN 2001/2012, ANDREA FRASER, “OFFICIAL WELCOME,” OF THE ARTIST COURTESY VIDEO, 2001, OPPOSITE: ANDREA FRASER, “LITTLE FRANK AND HIS CARP,” OF THE ARTIST. COURTESY found that 46 percent of all American museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City, who organized Hammer, where Fraser sits on the artist council. At boards are 100 percent white. Meanwhile, Fraser’s 2016 exhibition there. “She discovered a moment when more boycotts seem inevitable, institutions’ acceptance of questionable money that we’re in serious trouble.” But Fraser came Fraser has become one of the artists that museum hasn’t changed much since Haacke’s day. The away from the project convinced that the bigger people will occasionally call to get off-the-record inherent hypocrisy of museums — as protectors of issue is that the super rich — political affiliations advice on difficult issues — including where, culture, funded by the very people compromising aside — run the country. The United States, she or how, to draw a line when it comes to patronage. that culture’s values — is increasingly unacceptable writes, has become a plutocracy, and its museums “We have to think differently about who our to audiences. This is a transitional moment, and it have effectively become pay-to-play country supporters are and where those funding streams isn’t yet clear what museums might become, only clubs for millionaires. come from,” said Butler. Previously, when it that they are changing. As galleries increasingly Critics of the book tend to state that Fraser came to accepting donations, “the line seemed display work representing a breadth of backgrounds, “doesn’t offer solutions” or “doesn’t go far enough.” to be like, unless you could prove criminality boardrooms are the last parts of the museum in And while she doesn’t propose specific reforms, and murder, you would take the money, you know? need of urgent reconsideration. she has been busy pursuing answers to the problems I think the fact that we’re having a more nuanced Recently, Fraser’s analysis of museum governance that have underscored her practice. She believes, discussion about this has a lot to do with the has become more explicitly political. When Steven for instance, that museums need to democratize research that Andrea has done.” Mnuchin, a trustee of MOCA in Los Angeles at internally, and would benefit from artist, staff and the time, became the national finance chairman for the community councils with board representatives. NOW THAT HER study is finished, Fraser is Trump campaign, Fraser began to wonder what She has sought these roles herself. “I’m on three preparing two new performances, including a the politics of other museum patrons really were. boards and two councils, so it feels like I’ve gone to museum tour — her first since 1991 — for the Art The result was a 950-page study titled “2016 in seed or something,” she said. “But it’s sort of the Institute of Chicago. She had been invited to do Museums, Money, and Politics.” The book breaks part of the evolution of what I do and institutional a tour there but didn’t have a hook until she began down the donations of 5,458 museum board critique — realizing that you also have to step up.” thinking back to her earlier work. In 2016, Fraser members to party-aligned organizations during She believes collection artists should call “not just created an audio installation at the Whitney’s the general election. Fraser was horrified, she said, for a protest, but for a meeting” with the board recently opened building in Lower Manhattan on by the realization that people who supported members and staff of the museums that hold their the Hudson River, playing sounds she had recorded institutions professing diversity and equality could work, to discuss how boards might come to include in a cell block of Sing Sing Correctional Facility simultaneously fund candidates with conservative more people who are not “defined by their wealth.” 32 miles north. That piece, as well as her early positions on issues like immigration. (Steven In the wake of recent protests — including reflections on poorhouses, was on her mind when she Cohen, the billionaire hedge-fund manager who sits one in October at the new MoMA’s opening party found a focus: “Prisons are the new poorhouses,” on the board of MOCA and MoMA, for instance, where people picketed an entrance over the board she said. The tour might limn the unlikely parallels gave an estimated $6,793,500 to Republican causes member Larry Fink, whose company invests in between museums, which encourage transgression, — including Paul Ryan’s congressional campaign — private prisons in the country on behalf of its clients and prisons, which punish it. Since the 1970s, in 2016 and in the first half of the 2018 midterm — other museums are anticipating their own day the number of both institutions has tripled in election cycle.) “She uncovered the false notion that of reckoning. “You can’t possibly know everything the United States. museums are Democratic,” said Cuauhtémoc about where every cent of every donor’s money Another new performance, this one for the Medina, the chief curator of the University Museum is invested,” said Butler, the chief curator of the Hammer, may involve Fraser assuming an array of disparate voices with Fraser in her 2001 the chameleonic prowess video “Little Frank she brought to “Official and His Carp” at the Guggenheim Welcome.” As we left the Bilbao. Opposite: Geffen, we passed the monitor the artist playing that ferocious piece performing “Official Welcome” at the one last time. Fraser originally San Francisco thought she would still be Museum of Modern performing “Official Welcome” Art in 2012. at 60 and that, as she continued to shed that Gucci thong, the aging of her body would become part of the work — a means of confronting the way the art world deals, or doesn’t, with older female artists. But the last time Fraser performed the vitriolic monologue was in 2012. By then, her position had changed, and even she had to admit she had secured a spot in contemporary art Valhalla. “Performing it,” she said, “just began to feel kind of sour and ungracious.” Watching it, though, is still a poignant experience, partly because Fraser doesn’t want to give up on the art world, no matter how disagreeable it gets. “I want to believe that it means something,” she said, as she opened the door to the warm California air. “It’s something that I hold on to, testing the art world to be true

to my hopes for it.” 129