ANDREA FRASER

In the ground floor, lower gallery, and vaulted room, Fraser revisits her most notorious projects, Untitled, 2003, and proposes a sequel in the form of a new sculptural installation which, twenty years on, extends her exploration of the intersections of financial and affective economies in the contemporary art world. In the Showroom, a selection of books, texts, and graphic works represent Fraser’s on-going analysis of the political and economic structures of the art field.

Presented in the ground floor gallery, the installation Untitled, 2003 documents an encounter between Fraser and an art collector, who pre-purchased the first of a limited-edition video, in which he appears to be having sex with the artist. For Fraser, Untitled “is about the relationship between artists and collectors, about what it means to be an artist and sell your work—sell what may be, what should be, a very intimate part of yourself, your desire, your fantasies—and to allow others to use you as a screen for their fantasies.” Untitled has been interpreted widely as enacting the centuries-old analogy of selling art as prostitution. However, important to Fraser is that the collector paid for the video, not for the sex. With this, the work highlights the role of art commodities in mediating relations of exchange. At the same time, Untitled performs the intimate entanglement of personal and market valuation that often drives participation in the art world’s steeply stratified economy. The installation presents the silent, unedited, sixty-minute fixed-camera video on a monitor in an otherwise empty room, incorporating the commercial context of the gallery while creating space for reflection on the participation enacted in the process of viewing.

In the downstairs vaulted room gallery, Fraser presents Untitled, 2003/2004, an audio installation created with the sound captured by the camera during the recording of Untitled. While the Untitled video is silent but unedited, Untitled, 2003/2004 is densely edited, compressing and abstracting the sixty-minute encounter into an emotionally saturated 10-minute ambient soundscape. Including only sounds made by the artist, with sounds made by the participating collector edited out, the audio work renders Untitled an encounter with an absent object, a void to be filled with projections, in fantasy, or by the listener, who is situated implicitly in the position of the collector as the object of the artist’s attention.

Following the reception of Untitled in the 2000s, Fraser stepped back from working actively with commercial art galleries and, for a period, limited sales of her work to institutions only. In the decade that followed, she developed text-based and graphic works focusing on the interrelation of artistic, economic, and political fields. On display in the showroom are Index and L’1% C’est Moi, both from 2011, which examine the link between the art market and wealth concentration, and Index II, 2014, which extends this analysis to parallels between museum and prison building booms in the United States. Her monumental study 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, 2018 examines the interconnection of cultural and political patronage.

Fraser’s new work, Untitled (Objects), 2024, presented in the lower gallery, returns to a reflection on the intersection between financial and emotional economies in the art world. In 2022, Fraser returned to working actively with commercial galleries and joined Marian Goodman Gallery. Reflecting on the parallel between this exhibition and when she created Untitled in 2003, Fraser considered the question of what motivated her to return to the art market now, after more than ten years of declining to sell her work to private collectors. Her response: to make things that are wanted, valued, and cared for in ways that only art objects are wanted, valued, and cared for. For Fraser, whose mother painted intensively throughout her infancy, there is no escaping the equation of artworks and children. They exist, psychologically, in a continuum of attention and care. The five life-size sculptures of toddlers, which Fraser modelled out of wax, may evoke familiar analogies, as literally as Untitled, for what it means for artists to sell their art—and what it means for collectors to acquire it. They may represent the products of the sexual encounter documented in Untitled, with one sculpture for each of the five editions of the video. Or they may be figures less of creative offspring than of the artist, stripped of conceptual and critical defenses against an archaic want to be valued and cared for in perpetuity.