BARCELONA.- What do we want from art? This is the question asked by the work of Andrea Fraser (Billings, Montana, 1965), one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her name is inextricably associated with institutional critique. Under the title L'1%, c'est moi, and for the first time in Spain, MACBA presents a solo exhibition with a selection of her works made over thirty years of critical practices. The exhibition includes videos, installations, works on paper, text-based work and documentation. The exhibition is co-produced with the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, where it will be presented from October 2016.

The core of Fraser’s work is the analysis of the social fabric of the art world, examining the motivations of cultural agents such as artists, collectors, gallerists, patrons and public, among others. Her proposals are influenced by psychoanalysis and the theory of social fields by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, as well as feminism. In the words of the artist: ‘It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.’

L'1%, c'est moi
Fraser’s working methods begin with site-specific research processes combined with feminist inquiries into subjectivity and desire. From the beginning of her career she has used appropriation, showing the importance of using real material, as well as performance, where she distinguishes herself by her enormous capacity for staging multiple voices. Transgressive per se, her work shows that institutional critique is understood as that which art does, activating structures and relationships, and is rooted in the psychoanalytic principle that one can only engage structures and relationships when they take place, i.e. immediately. A profound exercise in critical reflection aimed, in turn, at activating critical reflection in others.

The works in the exhibition are grouped under the following generically interconnected headings: ‘Museums’, ‘Globalisation’, ‘It’s a beautiful show, isn’t it?’, ‘Discarded Fantasies’, ‘The Personal and Political’ and ‘Collected and Archived’.

The itinerary starts with Museums, the primary institutional frame of art, and their role in establishing social values and hierarchies. Appropriating their formats and languages, Fraser demonstrates how museums educate and seduce in order to endorse their institutional values. Globalisation focuses attention on the nineties – a time when biennials and art fairs proliferated and helped to turn art into a commodity – and reflects on the effects of this phenomenon. Included in It’s a beautiful show, isn’t it? are Fraser’s projects – influenced by the research of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu into cultural consumption and social stratification – that examine art, taste and social class. Discarded Fantasies shows art as a parade of collectivised fantasies that are crystallised in artworks as well as artistic identities. This section explores these identities as points of intersection between our emotional involvement in art and the political and social contexts in which they take place. In The Personal and Political it becomes clear that while Fraser's works seem to vacillate between the extremes of psychological and sociological, emotional and economic investigations, maintaining the links between each is one of the fundamental principles of her approach. Finally, in Collected and Archived we see how institutional critique developed through a dual critique of the museum as the site of exhibition and the studio as the site of production of art works that must then circulate to museums and galleries to be seen. Site-specific and project-based approaches to art making developed in response to this critique. One consequence of Fraser's commitment to these approaches is that many of her projects exist only as documentation.

Andrea Fraser is a professor of New Genres at UCLA University of California, Los Angeles, and a visiting professor at the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Exhibitions of her work have been presented at: Kunstverein Hamburg (2003); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2013); and Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2015). She has written, among other publications, Andrea Fraser: Works 1984–2003 (2003); Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser (2005; Texts, Scripts, Transcripts (2013; and Andrea Fraser (2015).