{"id":400262,"date":"2004-11-18T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-18T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/?p=400262"},"modified":"2024-05-14T17:38:15","modified_gmt":"2024-05-14T16:38:15","slug":"ami-megfoghatatlan-ami-atmeneti-ami-kozvetit-ami-reszvetelre-epul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/nem-tema\/ami-megfoghatatlan-ami-atmeneti-ami-kozvetit-ami-reszvetelre-epul\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Intanginble, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrea Fraser: What’s Intanginble, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere? <\/em>1<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Introduced by Judit Angel<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

The American artist Andrea Fraser has been known since the mid-1980\u2019s for her performances, projects, videos, and print publications, all of which have expanded, and indeed redefined, the field of institutional criticism. Her work is based on intervention in the community, a critical exercise. Through the early 90\u2019s, she used psychoanalysis as a model in the interpretation of the discourses of cultural institutions, primarily museums; later, her work expanded in scope to include an examination of patronage and a definition of the artist\u2019s status and position in society. Beginning with now-famous \u201cGallery Talk\u201d series that she exhibited in the 1980\u2019s at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art among other places, Andrea Fraser has been showing regularly in Europe and Latin America (the Venice Biennale, EA Generali in Vienna, the MACBA in Barcelona, the Kunsthalle in Bern, and the S\u00e3o Paolo Biennale). In 2003, the Hamburger Kustverein presented a retrospective entitled \u201cAndrea Fraser, Works: 1984 to 2003.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

I stumbled upon the text that follows while doing preliminary documentary work for the catalogue of the exhibition \u201cSzerviz\u201d (\u201cService\u201d) that I directed at the M\u0171csarnok exhibition hall in Budapest in 2001. It appeared in 1997 as a reflection by Fraser on the project \u201cSzolg\u00e1ltat\u00e1sok\u201d (\u201cServices\u201d) that she produced together with Helmut Draxler at the University of L\u00fcneburg in 1994. There are several reasons why I return to it in taking up Exindex\u2019 invitation. Frazer\u2019s text focuses on a dimension of artists\u2019 activity as work, and on its pecularities \u2013 on a dimension of services that \u201cServiz\u201d did not examine directly, only implied. Looking back, I see that these two projects \u2013 \u201cSzerviz\u201d and \u201cServices\u201d \u2013 complemented one another, though this was not deliberate on my part, since when I was reading Frazer\u2019s text, my own PR and marketing-based view was already formed. It would be more precise to say that each project is the product of its own \u201cage\u201d: Fraser\u2019s was conceived during the latest renaissance of institutional criticism, while mine came to be in the time that followed, when artistic practice moved on to more subversive forms of criticism and the artist\u2019s role as cultural servant became more and more naturally accepted, more stable. Though both of us used the \u201cservices\u201d model, our goals were different: Fraser was interested in the economic aspects of project work and in defining the societal relations associated with it, while my emphasis was on the relationship between the servant\/service and the \u201cclient,\u201d in response to the Hungarian art scene\u2019s needs in communicating with society at large.<\/p>\r\n

Fraser\u2019s text that follows is interesting from the perspective of the genealogy of art services, and in addition it raises a few questions that are still important today. \u201cServices\u201d is a term Fraser uses in a strategic sense \u201cto identify those areas of artistic activity that do not result in a negotiable product.\u201d Emphasis on this \u201cintangible\u201d segment of artistic activity naturally contains a criticism of cultural commodities and questions of artistic autonomy and of the relationship between the artist and institutions. Even though Fraser\u2019s Marxist economic excursus on \u201cservices\u201d might be overly didactic, its conclusions still have value because she demonstrates the meaning of the use of the concept in an artistic sense. In brief, she calls attention to the organic interdependencies between artistic practice, the positions artists have constructed for themselves, and the economic conditions and societal relationships these imply. Issues like the remuneration for artist\u2019s work in project art are still relevant today. At the same time, it is worth considering the effect of \u201cwages\u201d on the relationship between the artist and the commissioning party or institution. In Fraser\u2019s view, the situation is necessarily fraught with contradiction: \u201cthe precondition for our independence is dependency\u2026 as long as we define the belief system that determines the status of our work by the principle of autonomy \u2013 which precludes the possibility that our job is producing some kind of special practical value for society \u2013 we will be condemned to produce nothing but objects of prestige value. If service is accepted as our function, then artistic freedom must necessarily consist in our determining for ourselves (to the extent this is in our power) whom we will serve, and how.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\r\n

Last but not least, I have chosen this text to shed some light on a practice of artists and curators that is extremely rare in Hungary: the use of individual concepts as models, which makes possible the joining \u2013 or juxtaposition \u2013 of diverse spheres of meaning. Though it was important for me, in \u201cService,\u201d to create a direct communication between art\/artist and public (which proved successful in most cases), nonetheless I consider the \u201chows and whys\u201d of artistic service even more interesting. The press in Hungary covered the exhibition with several articles, yet I still feel a substantive treatment of the \u201cservices\u201d theme has yet to appear. In retrospect, I regret never having had the opportunity to organize a symposium for the exhibition, but there are also advantages to the perspectives brought by the distance of time. I hope that a reading of Andrea Fraser\u2019s text will prove inspiring to those touched by the subject.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Translated by: Jim Tucker<\/p>\r\n

<\/div>\r\n

1<\/a> October, No. 80, 1997, pp. 111 \u2013 116.<\/p>\r\n

2<\/a> Andrea Fraser: How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction. Presented at The Depot, Vienna, October 1994
\r\nhttp:\/\/home.att.net\/~artarchives\/fraserservice.html<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrea Fraser: What’s Intanginble, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere? 1 Introduced by Judit Angel The American artist Andrea Fraser has been known since the mid-1980\u2019s for her performances, projects, videos, and print publications, all of which have expanded, and indeed redefined, the field of institutional criticism. Her work is based on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":630260,"parent":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nem-tema"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400262"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2032370,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400262\/revisions\/2032370"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/630260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exindex.hu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}