
Andrea Fraser
The remarkable accomplishment of Andrea Fraser’s genre-defying career has been to meld the disparate domains of feminist performance and institutional critique, a maneuver assisted by the invention of fictional female characters, among them a museum docent, a news reporter, an artist, and a matron. In many of Fraser’s narratives, these personae, uncomplicated and guileless at first, grow increasingly complex as they deliver streams of facts and historical data that are the substance of the artist’s investigations. They might be earnest or comedic, polite or raunchy, but the discourses they