Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk

This film is depicts early lesbian sexuality, using reenacted scenes from the experience of a 12-year old girl as the platform for a meditation on forbidden desire, transgression, and Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of identity formation. Raw adolescent memories counterpoint staged scenes, exploring mechanisms of power and submission.

A single channel video featuring the American artist Andrea Fraser as she walks around the atrium of the Guggenheim Bilbao listening to the institution’s audio guide. After an initial shot of the entrance, the video shows Fraser wearing a short green dress and high heels picking up an audio guide inside. Once she begins listening to the guide the soundtrack changes so that the viewer also hears the same male voice as the artist (and without any background noise). Shot with five hidden cameras – one on Fraser herself and four others operated by assistants moving around the atrium – Little Frank and His Carp depicts Fraser from varying angles and proximities as she initially follows the audio guide’s instructions closely, her emotions visibly changing in response to the material she hears. Told that modern art is ‘demanding, complicated, bewildering’, she appears anxious, but when the guide tells her ‘the museum tries to make you feel at home’, she immediately seems reassured and happy.

Official Welcome begins as a thank-you speech by an artist at an event organized in her honor. After the initial Thanks however, the Artist´s position changes from speaking about her supportersto speaking as her supporters about herself. She continues as eight different pairs of Artists and supporters with a script based on artists´ interviews, patron profiles, critics´ essays and curators´ speeches. Official Welcome attempts to engage the contradictory desire of artists tobe loved and admired even as we critique and transgress. It catalogs the play of bad faith and sincerity, cynicism and commitment, denial and ambivalence that haunt the rituals of recognition of human accomplishment in the arts. Commissioned by and first performed in 2001 at the MICA foundation in New York, this DVD documents Fraser´s opening performance at her mid-career survey at the Kunstverein in Hamburg.

Andrea Fraser’s 1991 performance May I Help You? explores the relationship between cultural consumption and social class. During a 15-minute monologue, the performer shifts through six voices representing different perspectives on art.

A performance-based video installation that examines race, gender, and age in an intergenerational group of seven White women, including Fraser herself. Based on transcripts of six 90-minute discussions organized by Fraser in 2020, the women apply psychoanalytic group relations methods to the task of examining their internal racism and their roles in White supremacy.