33 Artists in 3 Acts (33 page)
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This is not the first time I’ve interviewed Hirst in this house. Back in 2005, after some perfunctory small talk, he took me straight up to his bedroom. The bed was unmade; clothes littered the floor; wet towels were hanging over doorknobs. Afterward, we had lunch with his then girlfriend, Maia Norman, their three sons, and the chauffeur. Hirst hadn’t had a drink in several months, but he ordered a bottle of Bâtard Montrachet, then another, then instructed the waiter to prepare a takeaway crate. Five days later, at 1
A.M.
, I was dragged out of sleep by insistent ringing and met with “Shellllooo Sharah!” In his days as a classic bad boy, the artist was prone to drunk-dialing and, as it happens, mooning. Needless to say, Hirst has long performed for the media with panache.
Andrea Fraser
Official Welcome
2001/2009
A
ndrea Fraser saunters up to a transparent plexiglass lectern in a black cocktail dress with a plunging V-neck. The artist is a petite but muscular brunette with full lips. Her hair is pulled back in a tight bun, reminiscent of ballerinas, librarians, and other good girls. She unfolds a white piece of paper, then surveys her audience with sparkling eyes. A hundred and fifty people, many of them art students from the local Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, have bought tickets for the nominal fee of five euros. They sit expectantly in the vast white space of the Julia Stoschek Foundation, which is hosting an exhibition about the history of performance art.
“Thank you, Julia,” says Fraser upon being introduced. A full-time professor at UCLA, the artist begins with an academic preamble. “Whereas most people who make site-specific art engage with physical spaces and places,” she says with a graceful double-armed wave at the room, “my practice focuses on the immaterial aspects of sites—their discourses, rituals, and, above all, their social relations.” She makes a series of statements about her artistic strategies and expounds on her belief that the personal is political, then says “Thank you!” She quickly folds the paper, places it on the podium, and takes two delicate steps backward.
With a heavier tread, she stomps forward, turns her head dramatically to the right, and bellows in a male voice, “Thank you Andrea,
for that exemplary presentation.” While the crowd laughs, she frowns, standing rigidly upright. Continuing in a baritone, she laments how “the forces of spectacle culture” may have led to the “the demise of radical practice.” Then she segues into a lengthy introduction of an artist who is so complex and convincing, so worthy of adulation, that “it is a historic opportunity to have him here this evening.”
Fraser looks quickly right and left, then gazes at the ceiling. “Um . . .” she says wearily. The stiffness of the previous character drains out of her body. “I don’t want to sound coquettish . . . but, as an artist, I’m always disappointed,” she says, putting her hand on her hip and half-leaning on the reading stand. “I give something to people, but I don’t expect communication. I hope I can make people think, but I don’t want to be didactic,” she says. “So, why am I an artist? I guess it’s because I take a critical position toward the world. It’s not about hope. It’s about showing my disgust for the dominant discourse.”
As if she were shuffling multiple personalities, Fraser mutates into someone else. “How much information can you receive from one artist in a few minutes?” declares this new pundit, before going on to spout absurdly hyperbolic praise for yet another artist. “If masterpieces still can be made, he has managed to make them,” intones Fraser gravely. “Exquisitely realized works of power, vision, and extraordinary beauty, works that rise to a level of humanistic allegory significant to us all, even while we may not know exactly what they mean.”
The crowd breaks out in quiet chuckles and a few unrestrained guffaws. Some people will have read the script, seen a video version, or even experienced a live iteration of this legendary performance. Titled
Official Welcome
, the piece was first presented in 2001 at the Morse Institute of Conceptual Art (MICA), a private foundation whose physical existence consists solely of a heavy wooden lectern in the Upper West Side living room of Barbara and Howard Morse. According to Fraser, the Morses were her only collectors for over a decade. “Even when I didn’t want collectors, when I was against the whole idea that art was bought and sold, they were there, trying to buy.” Since then, she has performed the work thirteen times in eight countries.
Official Welcome
is a kind of surreal one-woman awards ceremony
in which Fraser plays the parts of nine artists who are being introduced and celebrated by nine effusive art-world insiders. Credited with coining the term “institutional critique,” Fraser often explores the institution of the artist in her performance pieces. The script of
Official Welcome
is a carefully researched compilation of art-world voices, based on speeches by and interviews with living artists, critics, dealers, and collectors. Thomas Hirschhorn, Gabriel Orozco, and Benjamin Buchloh (the Harvard professor that Francesco Bonami called the Don Vito Corleone of institutional critique) appear to be the sources of some of the material performed so far. For Fraser,
Official Welcome
is not just about the social roles artists play but about her own psychological responses to them, including her envy of the recognition that other artists have received.
“If I, uh, if I, uh, if I deserve, uh, any of this, uh, I think that can only be because, uh, because I have, uh, finally arrived,” says Fraser, clenching the lectern, her eyes glued to the floor. “Arrived at a point where, uh, my work has become, uh, has become, uh universal.” Fraser has morphed into an inarticulate painter who ums and ahs his way through a string of clichés about desire, freedom, self-realization, and achievement, then concludes, “That’s why I, uh, don’t like, uh, to talk about my work.” The room bursts into eager applause.
After taking a sip of water, Fraser mutates into a curator who wants to pay homage to an artist of “unshakeable integrity,” then an artist who protests, “Oh, stop it! You’re embarrassing me,” then an acolyte who takes great pleasure in introducing “this modern master, my great friend.” For the most part, the alternation between the artists and their supporters feels like one between teenagers and adults, nonchalance and formality, disdain and devotion.
Fraser continues to transmute from artist back into devotee. “We want various things from artists—to be one of us, to be better than us,” says a fan. “The fact is . . . she
is
better than us. She’s more beautiful than we are. She’s more successful . . . with a much more interesting life. She’s our fantasy. She lives our fantasies for us.”
With a vapid grin, Fraser proceeds to lift her dress over her head. She scrunches the garment and tosses it on the see-through lectern, and then adjusts her black bra and thong. “I am not a person today. I’m an
object in an artwork. It’s about emptiness,” she says coyly, then moves a few feet stage right and stands motionless with her chin up and her arms by her side for fifteen seconds.
“Isn’t she great!” says Fraser in a masculine voice as her character walks back behind the podium, seemingly oblivious to the fact that “he” is wearing only underwear and high heels. “It’s fun to sell big artworks, and it’s profitable. In the end, a good artist is a rich artist and a rich artist is a good artist.” For art-world cognoscenti, Fraser appears to be Larry Gagosian riffing on one of Warhol’s adages about how good business is the best art. Her version of Gagosian metamorphoses into a rendering of art critic Jerry Saltz, who takes his turn to gush satirically about another rich artist with an obsession with death. “He’s back, and he’s bigger and better than ever,” says Fraser, channeling Saltz. “He’s staggeringly corporate, breathtakingly professional, and eager to entertain. And I hope he’ll say a few words to us this evening.”
“Yeah, I’ll say a few words,” responds the artist, who takes a large swig and swishes the liquid around in “his” mouth. “I’d just like to say that the only interesting people are the people who say, ‘Fuck off.’” Fraser’s character crosses his arms and glares belligerently, then announces, “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” It’s the title of a neon light piece by Bruce Nauman that Damien Hirst unfailingly declares as his favorite work of art
.
“Okay, here are a few more words,” says Fraser, continuing to perform Hirst. “How about ‘Kiss my fucking ass!’ That’s a great statement anywhere, right?” Fraser walks to one side of the stage and moons the audience, then to the other side, brandishing her buttocks again. In his days as a heavy drinker, Hirst was known to expose himself this way. Fraser swings around, throws her arms in the air, and declares, “I love you all!”
She pauses with her arms outstretched, then resumes her position behind the lectern and shrinks a tad. “You always do your fucking best,” she says in a sweet older lady’s voice. “You were our first major purchase . . . and we considered it an act of sheer courage.”
For Fraser, performing is a craft that is not just about the live event but the whole process of creating the piece: the research, writing, editing, memorization and internalization, rehearsal, and enactment. Although
Fraser never trained as an actor and doesn’t work with directors, she is “invested in her skill set,” as she puts it, even if it is “kind of naïve or even amateur.”
“Attention can be incredibly cruel,” says the next artist to emerge from Fraser’s string of multiple personalities. This self-confessed bad girl removes her bra, then her high heels, then her G-string. “But if you’re really bad you tell the truth and people don’t want to hear the truth.” Although viewers who come with no prior knowledge of
Official Welcome
often gasp when she disrobes, Fraser sees her nakedness as part of the “grand old tradition of nudie performance art.” Indeed, it is such a cliché of transgression that the artist jokes that she is not really naked because she is in quotation marks.
Fraser rests her elbows on the podium, her hands knitted together as if in prayer. Her lean body—pubic hair and all—is visible through the translucent podium, evoking that common anxiety dream of being inadvertently naked in public. “It takes a lot of courage to do what she does,” says Fraser, seeming to be self-reflexive. “She’s an artist who has uncovered structures so pervasive and profound that no one is innocent in her work—not her characters, not her viewers, not even herself.”
After a shift from supporter to artist and back again, Fraser puts on her dress and shoes, then starts crying. “I wanted to be an artist since I was, like, four, because my mother was a painter, a good one, who never had any success,” she says, tears running down her face. As it happens, Fraser’s mother was a painter who never showed her work professionally and gave up in despair at the mounting rejection. The relief that Fraser feels about her own relatively high level of recognition often makes her weep. She has long felt guilty about the incongruity of criticizing art’s institutions while, at the same time, having ambitions to be legitimized by them. “I hope I can convey my sense of gratitude for your attention,” she says, wiping her nose with a tissue, “and for being given the opportunity to be heard.”
Switching to a chipper voice, Fraser says, “Can I ask everyone to give her a big hand?” She looks toward the wings with her right arm outstretched. “Isn’t she terrific?” she says, clapping emphatically. The audience willingly follows the artist’s lead. There is applause all round.
Andrea Fraser
Untitled
2003
“W
e are interested in how the art market and the publicity machine can become an artist’s medium as much as paint on canvas or stainless steel,” says Jack Bankowsky. The former editor of
Artforum
is surveying the busy private view of a Tate Modern show that he has curated with Alison Gingeras and Catherine Wood. The exhibition was originally titled “Sold Out” until one of its participating artists objected. It was renamed “Pop Life,” a compromise that muddies the curators’ thesis. Many of the twenty-one artists included, such as Andrea Fraser, are not exactly what anyone would call Pop. Bankowsky, who is wearing a green polka-dot bow tie, checked shirt, and striped jacket, stands next to a Warhol portrait of Mick Jagger. “Every work an artist makes is part of a complicated performance,” he says in his playful drawl. “Our initial subtitle was ‘Performing the System, Performing the Self.’”