Last year there was an exhibition by Andrea Fraser in the Museum of Modern Arts in Salzburg, Austria. The whole second floor was used for the performances by Fraser.

Andrea Fraser is a performance artist from New York City. She is a good actor and irritates people by trying out different roles. She, for example, once played various roles at a museum opening. There she impersonated the curator, then a security guard and so on. Through such acts Andrea Fraser wants to show the complicated structural relationships between the different members of a museum. She be- came famous through her “Gallery Talks” where she does guided tours through art museums in quite an unusual way. She shows the visitors the museum’s toilets and shop and by doing this she aims to expose the power structures that cannot be seen. However, the artwork that got the most attention was an un- titled film with which she wants to criticize the artists’ prostitution for the art market. The film shows the sexual act between her and an anonymous art collector who paid her 20 000 Dollar for the video.

This work was presented on television sets which were distributed over the whole floor with head- phones for the sound.

Most of her works are performances. She is a feminist and critical of the art institution. With her work she questions the term art. The exhibition shows the quintessence of the work she is doing.

However, Andrea Fraser is not the only artist who criticizes the art term. Marcel Duchamp was one of
the first artists to do so by inventing his so-called “Readymades”. Fraser read a lot of books on the topic including about Pierre Bourdieu. She aims to research the social, institutional and psychological struc- tures of and in art. She claims that many artists just make popular art that is easy to sell. This makes them puppets of the art market. The art institution pays them for doing specific artworks and she argues that this can be seen as a kind of prostitution.

Thus, as you can see, in her performances she is really critical towards the art market. When you are an artist, you don’t have that much freedom although it might appear so. In her work you can see a continu- ity of exposing the negative sides of the art market that aren’t easy to spot for the visitor. However, one has to remember that this market that she denounces finances her life too. For her exhibitions she gets quite a considerable amount of money and can make herself a living. So she criticizes the institution that pays her bills.

Fraser was a founding member of the feminist performance group called The V-Girls. The idea of femi- nism, which arose in the 1960s, has brought forward lots of art works created by different women. An- drea Fraser studied at the University of New York and the School of Visual Arts until 1986. There she was heavily influenced by the artworks on that topic. Being a female artist turned out to be quite difficult in this time. This became easier at the turn of the century when feminism and gender studies became more popular. Fraser’s starting points were at a time when the art market just began to open up for feministic approaches.

The exhibition is a little bit confusing at first because there are a lot of video installations. When you take the time to watch the films you will eventually understand what she wants to tell you with her art. This is not the typical exhibition where you look at paintings and images. You really have to take your time to understand the purpose of her works and the meanings behind them.

If you like performance art and are open for new perspectives on art and feminism, then this is a really good exhibition for you to visit.