Andrea Fraser: Untitled (Video, Audio, Objects)

Andrea Fraser
Untitled (Video, Audio, Objects)

Marian Goodman Gallery Paris is pleased to present Untitled (Video, Audio, Objects), the first solo exhibition of Andrea Fraser in France. Widely regarded as one of the most influential and provocative artists of her generation, Fraser emerged in the 1980s as a major figure in the field of institutional critique. She has used performance, video, installation, text, and a range of other mediums to investigate the social, economic, political, and psychological structures of the art world. Informed by sociology, psychoanalysis, conceptualism, and feminist investigations of subjectivity and desire, Fraser’s works exist at the extremes of systemic analysis and affective embodiment. The result was described by Pierre Bourdieu as “a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself.”

In the ground floor, lower gallery, and vaulted room, Fraser revisits her most notorious projects, Untitled, 2003, and proposes a sequel in the form of a new sculptural installation which, twenty years on, extends her exploration of the intersections of financial and affective economies in the contemporary art world. In the Showroom, a selection of books, texts, and graphic works represent Fraser’s on-going analysis of the political and economic structures of the art field.

Presented in the ground floor gallery, the installation Untitled, 2003 documents an encounter between Fraser and an art collector, who pre-purchased the first of a limited-edition video, in which he is having sex with the artist. For Fraser, Untitled "is about the relationship between artists and collectors, about what it means to be an artist and sell your work—sell what may be, what should be, a very intimate part of yourself, your desire, your fantasies—and to allow others to use you as a screen for their fantasies.” Untitled has been interpreted widely as enacting the centuries-old analogy of selling art as prostitution. However, important to Fraser is that the collector paid for the video, not for the sex. With this, the work highlights the role of art commodities in mediating relations of exchange. At the same time, Untitled performs the intimate entanglement of personal and market valuation that often drives participation in the art world’s steeply stratified economy. The installation presents the silent, unedited, sixty-minute fixed-camera video on a monitor in an otherwise empty room, incorporating the commercial context of the gallery while creating space for reflection on the participation enacted in the process of viewing.

 In the downstairs vaulted room gallery, Fraser presents Untitled, 2003/2004, an audio installation created with the sound captured by the camera during the recording of Untitled. While the Untitled video is silent but unedited, Untitled, 2003/2004 is densely edited, compressing and abstracting the sixty-minute encounter into an emotionally saturated 10-minute ambient soundscape. Including only sounds made by the artist, with sounds made by the participating collector edited out, the audio work renders Untitled an encounter with an absent object, a void to be filled with projections, in fantasy, or by the listener, who is situated implicitly in the position of the collector as the object of the artist’s attention.