Little Andrea

Andrea Fraser Works: 1984 to 2003
Catalogue edited by Yilmaz Dziewior and published by Dumont Literatur, 2003

Yilmaz Dziewior and Dumont Literatur

…the excessive perfomance of desire on Fraser´s part in little Frank and his carp, a work where an “over-receptive viewer” (in John Miller´s words) inherits the model of the widly-opened subjectivity first drafted in the characters of Fraser´s earlier critical performances, woven together from a congeries of social and institutional sources… In Litlle Frank and his carp, Fraser had herself filmed with hidden cameras as she enters the lobby of Frank Gehry´s architecturally spectacular Guggenheim Bilbao, requests an audio-guide to the museum, and begins explicitly to follow its instructions…Following the instructions, Fraser smiles resplendently…she presses her hand against her chest…she looks puzzled…her smile grows…invited by the guide to touch…Fraser continues to touch the museum wall, eventually rubbing her entire body against it. She pulls up her dress. She shows off her white thong. She rub her ass. A small crowd gathers…Taking the museum´s desire “literally” and taking “herself as its object might continue to be an accurate description of Fraser´s Little Frank… Fraser follows the museum´s injuctions, only to produce effects that they were never intended to allow. She becomes a subject given over ardently to what psychoanalysis would call “transference”, displacing affect from a (psychically) real to a surrogate object, in this case not the analyst but the undulating museum walls.Transference had been the dynamic that Fraser´s early performances had intended to engage and yet to disrupt, and so the reversal of that project needs to be registered here…While the former layering produced a performance of schizophrenic (perhaps elitist) difficulty, the latter seems now to result in one of spectacular (perhaps popular) trangression… In this, Little Frank and his Carp becomes what Fraser calls a “catalogue” of current “museological seduction”.