Museum Highlights

Andrea Fraser's work, writes Pierre Bourdieu in his preface to Museum Highlights, is able to trigger a social mechanism, a sort of machine infernale whose operation causes the hidden truth of social reality to reveal itself. It often does this by incorporating and inhabiting the social role it sets out to critique--as in a performance piece in which she leads a tour as a museum docent and describes the men's room in the same elevated language that she uses to describe seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Influenced by the interdisciplinarity of postmodernism, Fraser's interventionist art draws on four primary artistic and intellectual frameworks - institutional critique, with its site-specific examination of cultural context; performance; feminism, with its investigation of identity formation; and Bourdieu's reflexive sociology.