33 Artists in 3 Acts (48 page)

Andrea Fraser

Projection

2008

SCENE 16

Andrea Fraser

A
ndrea Fraser is sobbing. “I’ve always been ambivalent about my field. I made a career out of that ambivalence, to some extent, but in the last couple of years, it’s gotten extremely difficult. I just don’t think that I can do it anymore,” she whimpers. The artist is wearing green leggings and sitting in an orangey-yellow Arne Jacobsen “egg chair.” She is projected life-size in high definition on one wall of a dark room in Tate Modern. “I feel like I’m producing this for you,” she says. “I am trying to figure out what you want.”

Fraser fades from the right wall, then reappears on the left. She’s wearing the same clothes but her demeanor is completely different. “So, here’s a situation where you’re not being represented,” says this new character with cool confidence in a lower voice. “There’s no one looking out for you to make sure you have a seat.” Titled
Projection
(2008), the two-channel video installation is based on transcripts from Fraser’s real psychotherapy sessions. Specific nouns have been replaced with indefinite terms like “here,” “this,” “you,” “me,” which create fruitful ambiguity. Sometimes the members of the audience, for whom there are stools in the middle of the room, feel like they are being addressed directly; other times, they feel like interlopers, privy to the artist’s personal traumas. The work progresses by way of twelve short monologues,
a bit like an ultra-slow-motion tennis match in which artist and shrink slog it out in convoluted volleys.

“Sculpting yourself into a kind of heroic figure, hoping someday to be recognized,” says Fraser-as-therapist.

“Like a lot of artists, I live in a very, very privileged world that I’m a kind of guest in,” says Fraser-as-patient, slipping off a shoe, pulling her leg up on the chair, and appearing to withdraw.

Suddenly, the volume dips to inaudibility, then rises dramatically. I peer out of the darkened space to find Valentina Ravaglia, a new member of Tate’s curatorial displays team, next to a “time-based-media technician” who has his head in the equipment cupboard. They are fine-tuning the installation in advance of Fraser’s imminent arrival. Ravaglia sees installing the show of “that pillar of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser” as a “professional rite of passage.” We chat about her job and this area of the permanent collection that the staff calls the “surrealist hub.” Then I tell her about my research and ask: what, for you, is an artist? She looks pained, so I tell her to take her time, mull it over. She shakes her head. “No, please,” she replies. “The more you think about it, the worse it gets!”

I go back into the darkened room to sit in the crossfire of projections. “The conflict
here
is between different sides of yourself,” says the therapist with a slightly dismissive flick of her hand. “Sometimes it is useful to hear your own arguments so you can discern your own bullshit.” She leans forward as if to coax her patient into trusting her. “I think this is a form of ritual suffering,” she says. “That’s how it comes across.”

“This is a kind of surgery,” replies the artist-patient eventually. “It’s not about stirring my soul. It’s about rearranging my mind.”

I see a silhouette in one of the doorways. Fraser’s hair is shorter than it was when she shot
Projection
, but otherwise it’s as if a third Fraser character has joined the installation. The living artist turns to Ravaglia, who has also entered the space, and says, “The distance between the two screens is not optimal. I’m used to seeing it with a different sense of scale. Here I look larger than life.” The curator makes an affirmative noise. “The colors are too contrasty and the images are flattened,”
continues Fraser. “The two images are in such different light conditions. Are you sure they are in the same relationship to floor?”

“They are within a centimeter,” replies Ravaglia.

“The distance between the screens should be twenty-five feet,” says Fraser.

“This is twenty-two feet,” says Ravaglia. I follow the women out of the space while the curator explains that they can improve the lighting conditions and contrast. They stop next to the wall text about the work to discuss a few corrections. Ravaglia is taking it in her stride. She is wearing a vinyl necklace representing an anatomically correct heart. Fraser never wears jewelry. When they have concluded their negotiations, Ravaglia says, “You didn’t bite my head off, so that is a victory!” Fraser smiles affectionately at the young curator. “I’m a perfectionist and control freak,” she says. “But I don’t want to be
that
kind of an artist—even if I have it in me.”

This part of the permanent collection is a little quieter now. When I arrived, forty or so French high school students were stationed in front of a work that I can now see is Pablo Picasso’s
Weeping Woman
(1937). The painting depicts Dora Maar, a photographer remembered as Picasso’s tortured muse. Fraser and I walk the other way, toward Picasso’s
The Three Dancers
(1925), in which the central pink-fleshed naked woman has her arms outstretched above her head. We sit on a wooden bench and the artist pulls out her silver thermos of green tea.

“Tate is a great populist institution,” says Fraser, who is astonished by the mobs roaming the museum. “It is really difficult to negotiate the presentation of art in this context, to create intimacy in the midst of these crowds, to expect some depth of experience between spectacles.”

Fraser tells me that the particular kind of psychotherapy that formed the raw material of
Projection
is always videotaped so that the therapist can present, with the patient’s consent, clips in professional contexts. “The therapist is supposed to occupy the position of a toxic superego, to provoke a kind of cathartic anger. That never happened in my therapy, although I certainly ended up being annoyed about the whole process,” says the artist. “It is me—a highly edited me,” explains Fraser of the
patient-character. “We are different versions of ourselves in different situations, and therapy intensifies certain versions of ourselves.”

The formal structure of the face-off is similar to that used by Marina Abramovi
in
The Artist Is Present
and also recalls Francesco Bonami’s display of Hirst’s sharks and diamond skulls in Doha. What does Fraser think about these other instances of confrontation and mirroring? “My basic feeling is that there are no wrong interpretations,” she replies. “Marina Abramovi
is not somebody that I’ve ever felt particularly connected to.” She doesn’t like the way Abramovi
’s focus on transcendence sweeps away social, economic, and political issues. With regard to Hirst, Fraser declares, “I wouldn’t say that he’s not an artist, but he belongs to a different art world than I do.” She views Hirst and those once described as “Young British Artists” in relation to the British class system. “They represent strategies for navigating class conflicts that are extremely cynical and have some dire artistic and political consequences,” she says, adding that they make her think about “how artists perform their complex relationship to wealth—that umbilical cord of gold.”

Fraser’s work is unusual in its stringent criticism of her profession. “Artists are not part of the solution,” she says firmly. “We are part of the problem.”

What is the problem? I ask. “Give me a minute,” she says, looking dramatically off to one side, giving me her profile while she summons the right words. “Whether we are talking about cultural capital or economic capital,” she says with an intake of breath, “art benefits from inequality and the increasingly unequal distribution of social power and privilege. The avant-garde has been trying to escape its own privilege for the last hundred years, but the art world is increasingly a winner-take-all market.” She stops and shakes her head. She feels that we are at “the beginning of a new epoch,” citing the enormous expansion of the art market as well as art schools and museums that cater to the public’s demand for spectacle as much as scholarship. “These things make all the contradictions of being an artist much more intense,” she explains. “When I’m not feeling totally pessimistic, I think this is a very exciting time to be an artist.”

A guard approaches us and asks us very politely to leave the museum
as it is closing time. I turn to Fraser and start framing a question about the “Remember me” speech in her work
Official Welcome
. The artist interrupts me and performs the whole passage. “‘Remember me’ is what all artists whisper in their work,” she recites. “It’s a mark you want to leave in the world. It is still you even when you’re not you anymore. If my work really has brought me love, that’s what it means. If not, it has failed me at the deepest level. So remember me.” She pauses. “That’s a partial quote from Ross Bleckner, the painter, something he said in the eighties.”

How do you want to be remembered? I ask.

Fraser’s eyes flood. “I don’t know,” she says, then covers her mouth with one hand, looking truly mortified. “Hopefully in a positive way, but not too positive. I don’t want to be sainted.” She peels her hand away from her face, then flicks it theatrically. “I’m not unique. I’m just a particular instance of the possible.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My heartfelt thanks to the many artists who gave me interviews. I could not include everyone in the “group show” of the main text, but I nevertheless learned something from all the encounters. Suffice it to say that I hope to write about many of them in future.

Thirty-three is symbolic of a lot. In the interests of economy, the final book features fewer than that.
*
Those artists who became full-blown characters deserve extra thanks. They had to put up with intrusions that took many of them outside their comfort zones. Artists generally like to control their own projects, so it wasn’t easy for them to subject themselves to mine. I appreciate their indulgence.