Andrea Fraser

Andrea Rose Fraser (born 1965) is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of institutional critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is a professor and area head of the Interdisciplinary Studio of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fraser was born in Billings, Montana and grew up in Berkeley, California. She attended New York University, the Whitney Museum's independent study program, and the School of Visual Arts. Fraser worked as a gallery attendant at Dia Chelsea.

Fraser began writing art criticism before incorporating a similar analysis into her artistic practice.

Fraser was co-organizer, with Helmut Draxler, of Services, a "working-group exhibition" that was conceived at Kunstraum of Lüneburg University and toured eight venues in Europe and the United States between 1994 and 2001.

Museum Highlights (1989) involved Fraser posing as a museum tour guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art under the pseudonym of Jane Castleton. During the performance, Fraser led a tour through the museum while describing it in verbose and overly dramatic terms to her tour group. For example, in describing a water fountain, Fraser proclaimed it "a work of astonishing economy and monumentality ... it boldly contrasts with the severe and highly stylized productions of this form!" The tour is based on a script that pulls from an array of sources: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment; a 1969 anthology of essays called On Understanding Poverty; and a 1987 article in The New York Times with the headline "Salad and Seurat: Sampling the Fare at Museums".

In Kunst muss hängen ("Art Must Hang") (Galerie Christian Nagel/Cologne, 2001), Fraser reenacted an impromptu 1995 speech by a drunk Martin Kippenberger, word-by-word and gesture-for-gesture.

For Official Welcome (2001)—commissioned by the MICA Foundation for a private reception—Fraser mimicked "the banal comments and effusive words of praise uttered by presenters and recipients during art-awards ceremonies. Midstream, assuming the persona of a troubled, postfeminist art star, Fraser strips down, [...] to a Gucci thong, bra and high-heel shoes, and says, I'm not a person today. I'm an object in an art work."

Her videotape performance Little Frank and His Carp (2001), shot with five hidden cameras in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, targets the architectural dominance of modern gallery spaces. Using the original soundtrack of an acoustic guide at the museum, she "... writhes with pleasure as the recorded voice draws attention to the undulating curves and textured surfaces of the surrounding space." Fraser's sexual display towards the architecture reveals the eroticism of the words used on the audio tour to describe the museum's structure.