From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique by Andrea Fraser

This entry is part of my archive of notes on books, articles, & essays.

Introduction

This essay was originally published in ARTFORUM (September 2005 VOL. 44, NO. 1) and can be read online here. I discovered it while writing the support paper for my MFA thesis project, Exhibition by Institution: A Culture Work Simulator. It significantly deepened my understanding of and appreciation for institutional critique. The author, Andrea Fraser, is a practicing performance artist who uses her work to criticize museums, galleries, and other structures of power which are often invisible to the public. I frequently include Fraser's work in my art history survey classes and have made this essay an optional reading for those interested in exploring this essential and thought-provoking art form further.

The Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique by Andrea Fraser on ARTFORUM.

Selected Quotes

• "Art is not art because it is signed by an artist or shown in a museum or any other 'institutional' site. Art is art when it exists for discourses and practices that recognize it as art, value and evaluate it as art, and consume it as art, whether as object, gesture, representation, or only idea. The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art. No matter how public in placement, immaterial, transitory, relational, everyday, or even invisible, what is announced and perceived as art is always already institutionalized, simply because it exists within the perception of participants in the field of art as art, a perception not necessarily aesthetic but fundamentally social in its determination."
• "It also includes the sites of the production of art, studio as well as office, and the sites of the production of art discourse: art magazines, catalogues, art columns in the popular press, symposia, and lectures. And it also includes the sites of the production of the producers of art and art discourse: studio-art, art-history, and now, curatorial-studies programs. And finally, as Rosler put it in the title of her seminal 1979 essay, it also includes all the 'lookers, buyers, dealers and makers' themselves."
• "It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can't get outside of ourselves."
• "It is artists-- as much as museums or the market-- who, in their very efforts to escape the institution of art, have driven its expansion."

  "It's not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It's a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalized, embodied, and performed by individuals, these are the questions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all, ourselves."