Andrea Fraser Down The River Analysis

Andrea Fraser saw what others could not see; she brings into light concepts and situations that cannot be seen with the bare eye, or institutional wrongs that noone dares to point out. For example, have you ever thought of the relationship between a jail and a museum? What about the blurred line between art and prostitution?

In her recent exhibition called “Down the River” in The Whitney Museum, she converts her 18,200-square-foot given space, into a jail. Her goal is to make you see how museums and jails are two sides of the same coin. She wants her audience to think about how there is not much difference between the two. “Art museums celebrate freedom and showcase invention. Prisons revoke freedom and punish transgression.” - she says of her work. Once you think about it, it’s true; museums collect art, but prisons encarcerate vilified people. Fraser also invites her audience to create a conversation on how museums (institutions who celebrate freedom) and prisons (institutions that invalidate freedom) have been growing at the same rate.

“Down the River” consists of a fifth floor with glass walls to overlook the Hudson River, ergo the title of the exhibition: “Down the River.” This location is because the Sing Sing Correctional Facility is just 32

miles from the museum, just across the river, and she wants to highlight the distance of each institution and its differences and similarities between the two.
The breathtaking view of the river is the only object in the room, but you can listen to audios Fraser recorded in the correctional facility. Ambient sounds of the correctional facility gives the audience a feel of what it is to be in captivity. Fraser says that the noise of a prison depends on the cells. If the cells have doors, rather than bars, “You’re hearing the acoustics of an architecture of confinement” she explains. If the cells are bars, the sound travels more, especially some birdsongs. This is due to the fact that the facility hasn’t been renovated since the 1920s, and the cells have windows, where birds stay and sing and some prisoners feed them their food. This alone gives a feeling of isolation and dehumanization of the human spirit, something that is not praised in a museum, which is evidence of how jails and museums are examples of hypocrisy in an extremely polar society.
Fraser’s goal of opening the audience’s eyes and make them know about the “explosion of arts institutions and also… [the] explosion of prisons and incarceration rates” has been met with this exhibition, because of her simple and direct approach to the not-very-popular, but important observation. The use of just audio as the medium sumerges the person in the exhibit to rely on only the auditive and visual sense, similar to the confination and limitation that prisoners have to go through. The exhibition is not your usual art exhibition, where it is rich in colors or scultures and is open to interpretation, but the audio and the view only leaves one to think about the isolation and the “the acoustic space of incarceration.”
Montana-born and California-raised performer and artist, Andrea Fraser attended New York University, studied in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and the School of Visual Arts. Her success has led her to be awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize. Currently, she is still working on her own projects and is a professor at UCLA.
Fraser’s take on institutional critique has been considered provocative, controversial and shocking to the American public since her beginnings, making her a European audience favorite. Her reputation and popularity as an artist evolved much after the 2000s, when she turned her art into body-based performances. Her interest in sexual and nudist works led her to experiment the boundary and relationship between prostitution and art by sleeping with an art collector who paid money to participate in her film called ‘Untitled’ (2003). This led to scandalous reactions in the art world and many reporters and magazines, such as Guy Trebay and the New York Daily News to slam her for her provocative film. However, art critics defended Fraser by saying that she “should be commended for doing something brave, and in the middle of a minefield. Outside the art world she will be labelled a slut and a nut. The art world will likely call her a narcissistic show-off. But the art world is a place that says that you should be free.”
I agree, because art is supposed to make you feel something other than what you feel day to day, whether it challenges your beliefs or morals, it should educate you or show you perspectives that have never come into one’s mind.

That is the work of an artist, to expose what they want to expose and make the audience feel anything, even if it’s different from what the artist wanted to convey in the piece. ‘For me, one of the clearest signs that ‘Untitled’ is a successful piece is that it didn’t only upset people outside of the art world, but a lot of people inside the art world as well’ - Fraser says of her work. Nevertheless, regardless of the feedback, the film ‘Untitled’ (2003) is one of her most-known

creations.
Other of her creations have the same brazen and confident feel to them. ‘White People in West Africa’ (1989/1991/1993) is a photo collection of white tourism surrounded by colonialist circumstances. It serves as a socio-political critique, because of the obvious interracial divisions seen in the composition of the pictures. Another one of her most famous work is ‘Kunst muß hängen’ (Art Must Hang) (2001), where Fraser reenacts perfectly the inebriated speech of the provocative German artist, Martin Kippenberger, whose speech gives hints of homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia. Fraser’s intention is to mock him while reenacting every detail, word-to-word, gesture-to-gesture to perfection, to crititicize that narrow-minded way of thinking and to project how his speech may have influenced others.
In my opinion, Andrea Fraser is a fascinating artist that I will be looking out for in the future. I believe her work is destined to change how society sees art, not as a decoration in life, but as a need/urge to understand the metaphors in the art that can change sistemic thinking. Her work is very loud, which means that there will be positive and negative feedback, like anything, but her art especifically can produce a domino effect of changes, especifically positive.