Andrea Fraser. Projection

Since the 1990s, the American artist Andrea Fraser has been one of the most significant protagonists in the art of institutional critique. She analyzes the functions of art and the art business in her work, taking sociological, psychoanalytical, and feminist perspectives. In her performances, texts, video and audio works, Fraser reveals covert personal and social conflicts within the art business. She works humorously and provocatively, and with great acting skill. 

The two-channel video installation Projection unites key aspects of her entire oeuvre. Two fifty-minute videos are based on records of the artist’s intensive psychoanalysis sessions. Fraser plays both roles - on the one hand herself, an artist critical of the institution with all her fantasies, self-doubt, and paradoxical involvement in that system. She also plays the psychoanalyst who questions the function of art from the perspective of a social “super-ego.” This leads to a dramatic and multi-layered dialog, in which the visitors are included as they stand inserted between these two life-size projections. The receiver thus takes up the position of the partner, to whom Fraser demonstrates the whole spectrum of inner conflicts in the light of an art system driven by success and overloaded with idealism.