CRITIQUEUS INTERRUPTUS

by Jerry Saltz
 
Andrea Fraser, Feb. 8-Mar. 10, 2007, at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, 535 West 22nd
Street, New York, N.Y. 10011

"Andrea Fraser is a whore": That’s how a fellow critic responded when I told him I
was writing on Fraser’s current show. As evidence he cited Untitled, Fraser’s one-
hour silent video shown in 2004 in which she has what she called "just regular sex"
with an art collector who reportedly paid $20,000, "not for sex," according to the
artist, but "to make an artwork." The collector, collaborator, co-star, John, or whatever
you want to call him, was a sturdy white man in his early 40s. Fraser -- who in recent
years has regularly appeared nearly or completely naked in her work -- is this cute,
nerdy looking librarian-type above the neck but some ultra-worked-out Super Theory
Woman below the shoulders.

The sex in Untitled is stilted but sweet. After sitting and talking, he awkwardly
touches her, she kisses him, then initiates most of what follows. After mutual oral sex
they have intercourse in several positions. He apparently ejaculates inside her (which
seems pretty intimate to me). Defending Untitled to my angry critic acquaintance, I
talked about women taking control, Baudelaire’s idea of the artist as prostitute,
institutional critique art that risks being vulnerable, reality TV and reminded him that
men like Chris Burden and Vito Acconci did illegal and sexual things in their work
and no one ever called them "whores." He wasn’t swayed. Fraser had evidently
crossed some sort of ethical-esthetic gender-specific line.

Which brings us to her current, succinct exhibition of seven color photographs based
on pictures made more than 20 years ago and one excellent new 12-minute videotape.
This outing does three things well. First, it shows this leading light of so-called
institutional critique smartly stepping back from the line she crossed with Untitled and
avoiding anything overtly sensationalistic. Second, it traces Fraser’s knotty trajectory
from being an appropriation artist who, however competent, veered too close to tropes
already in use by artists like Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Martha
Rosler and Adrian Piper, to becoming an intermittently singular maker of something
abberant, deeper and complicated. Finally, it demonstrates Fraser’s nimble melding of
theory, weirdness and psychoanalysis with autobiography, performance and her own
batty sensibility.

The seven photos are all new. All, however, are derived from slide projections she
originally made in 1984. Each medium-sized picture is a kind of Frankensteinian
combination of two or three images overlaid to make something jarring but oddly
familiar. We see amalgams of some of our favorite painterly things from different
artistic eras, a de Kooning or Pollock projected over a Titian or Raphael. Thus we get
images of women by men redeployed by a woman in love with but skeptical of these
pictures. In one photo you see a Titian Madonna and Child with the sexual drawing of
one of de Kooning’s wild busty Women over it. The Christ child appears to reach out
for these two huge De Kooning orbs, while De Kooning’s Woman drawing makes
Titian’s Madonna turn into a sort of whore. There’s that word again. Whatever, it’s
porn for theory mavens and theory for art lovers. Remarkably, these pictures are
pretty good -- although as lovely as they are, they’re still too literal.
Her new video, A Visit to the Vatican, on the other hand brings us back into the thick
of Fraser’s strangeness. We see her with the thronging crowds walking through the
Vatican Museum on her way to the Sistine Chapel. The action is as sweet and stilted
as Untitled and its money-shot is just as buried. The soundtrack is the museum’s
Acoustiguide. To strains of baroque music, a guide commands Fraser where to look
and reminds her to "be pious." Fraser dutifully tries to comply, which sets up a
wonderful ironic Bondage & Domination call-and-response. As Fraser makes her way
from gallery to gallery, she’s led through various gift shops and bookstores.
Meanwhile, tour guides from every country constantly signal to their charges. It all
turns into a religious Disneyland. I won’t spoil the Sistine Chapel-ending except to
say that not only does it capture some of the magic of this room, it shows how much
Fraser respects and adores art. In her own uncanny way she is always asking, "What
do we want from art?"

This questioning, vulnerability, strangeness and love distinguish Fraser from most so-
called "Institutional Critique" artists. By now, and despite the fact that every work of
art is a critique or theory about the way art should look or be displayed, the
"institutional critique" mode is so in vogue that one has to wonder how any artist can
purport to critique institutions that are so utterly enamored of the very critique the art
is making. Criteria should be applied to this kind of art, like whether this work makes
serious inquiries that are not grounded in belly-button-gazing, too many pre-approved
esthetic orthodoxies, insider-to-insider insularity, or above-it-all pretenses of being
"outside the market" while exhibiting within a gallery or institution. Examining the
mechanisms of the system is important. Artists, however, shouldn’t just be content to
bite the hand that feeds them. More artists might consider critiquing the power
structure the way Hogarth did -- with style, wit, ferocity, guile, doggedness and a
knife that cuts in many directions. These are the things that give Fraser’s art its edge.

Unraveled Tapestry
Two videos made waves in June 2004. Andrea Fraser’s one-hour tape of her having
sex with a collector and Eve Sussman’s 89 Seconds at Alcazar, a dreamy 10-minute
reenactment of the events leading up to Diego Velázquez’s towering masterpiece Las
Meninas, took the art world by storm as part of that year’s otherwise only OK
Whitney Biennial.

Sussman had been around the art world for years, but 89 Seconds deservedly made her
an overnight sensation. Now she’s back with a massively ambitious new work, The
Rape of the Sabine Women (screening at the IFC Center during the Armory Show).
Like 89 Seconds, Rape takes a famous painting as a starting point, here Jacques-Louis
David’s crystalline neo-classic 1799 canvas of the same name (although the film
looks more like Poussin’s more turbulent version). While 89 Seconds was elaborate,
mysterious, captivating and avoided the gimmicky hokeyness that usually surrounds
re-staging famous paintings, Rape is an over-the-top, over-produced 80-minute
hodgepodge that borders on portentousness, cliché and artiness.

Sussman, a control-freak’s control-freak, essentially made four or five different films,

all of them promising. The last 12-minute segment is ravishing, although quite
reminiscent of 89 Seconds. Together, Rape is an unraveled tapestry of influences,
effects and high-styling. Sussman’s amazing feel for texture, sound, color, slo-mo and
blocking is present. Her sense of scale, timing and mystery, however, are eclipsed by
overblown schmaltziness. With a cast of as many as 800, Rape was shot in fantastic-
looking locations and features men in black suits and women in A-line shifts. There’s
a lot of pensive looking around, standing about and struggling, and enough
telegraphed angst to fill five high-school productions of Our Town. Unfortunately
there’s also a lot of unprocessed references to and borrowings from Bill Viola,
Matthew Barney, Sharon Lockhart, Stanley Kubrick, New Wave Cinema, Shirin
Neshat, Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. Sussman is talented. Rape is merely a failed
experiment, albeit an insanely expensive-looking one. She just needs to regain the
concentration, internal scale and exquisite enigma of 89 Seconds and steer clear of
this kind of directionless spectacle.

JERRY SALTZ is art critic for the Village Voice, where this review first appeared.
He can be reached at Jsaltz@VillageVoice.com

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