The work of Andrea Fraser held a privileged position within Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton’s ambitious survey of appropriation and institutional-critique practices from the 1970s to the present. The first gallery featured Fraser’s performance video Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989, in which the artist, posing as a docent, offers a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that draws attention to the imbrications of aesthetic forms and class relations manifest in the institution’s architecture and displays via a script composed of appropriated texts. Hectoring the show throughout was an expanded version of her Notes on the Margin, 1990/2013, comprising thirteen wall texts of censorious language borrowed from US legislators in the debates over public arts funding during the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. And finally, Official Welcome, 2001–2003—a video of a speech parodying the self-congratulatory and self-deprecating public statements often given by artists and curators—was projected. In one of the show’s public programs, Fraser confessed her continuing allegiance to institutional critique as a “rearguard” activity, but her works seem as trenchant today as when they were first made. It may even be that the time for Fraser’s work, and for the work of the thirty-five other American artists in the show, has yet to come.

The exhibition located these practices at the intersection of appropriation (the title’s “take it”) and institutional critique (“leave it”), a nexus that defined advanced artistic discourse in 1980s and ’90s America. In a boldly feminist curatorial move, the forefathers of institutional critique—Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke—were excluded to highlight, alternatively, foremothers Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, and Adrian Piper, who opened a space in critical aesthetics for personal identity and desire. This omission underscored the fact that, for the artists on view, critique necessarily originates from a determined subject position and is libidinally charged, a point made poetically in Robert Gober’s 2005–2009 drawings of embracing couples executed on photolithography of the September 12, 2001, issue of the New York Times, or more violently in Sue Williams’s simultaneously hilarious and harrowing painting The Art World Can Suck My Proverbial Dick, 1992, which catalogues misogynistic art-world aggressions faced by the artist and her cutting responses to them. Above all, the curators argued that criticality—defined here as the investigation and revelation of the power structures and ideological contexts in which art is “produced, viewed, and distributed”—is a “cornerstone” of American art. Thus we were given Haim Steinbach and Louise Lawler but not Jeff Koons and Richard Prince.

Another remarkable aspect of the organizational gambit was the inclusion of recent works, such as site-specific installations by Barbara Kruger and Rirkrit Tiravanija, to support an argument for the continued relevance of these practices. And indeed, in the show’s midst, the platitude that art has reached a “post-critical moment” seemed preposterous. Stephen Prina’s The Second Sentence of Everything I Read Is You: Mourning Sex, 2005–2007, a modular mobile music lounge, called to mind efforts of a younger generation of practitioners, such as the Public School and Triple Canopy, to turn from the critique of institutions to the production of institutional alternatives, while Gretchen Bender’s mind-blowing video installation Total Recall, 1987, cried out the need for monographic exhibitions and more extensive scholarship on the artists and critical devices on display.

By the last gallery, the question of how exactly a work occupies the intersection of appropriation and institutional critique seemed almost irrelevant in the face of so many rich models of practice that have yet to be fully appreciated. The curators’ framework became overwhelmed not simply by mounting affect (in Prina’s pop-song homage to Felix Gonzalez-Torres that echoed throughout the final gallery, for example) but by gestures of generosity and care for the historical legacy of which many of these artists, and no doubt the curators, feel they are a part. Mike Kelley’s collection of worn loveys (Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991) led to Tom Burr’s erotic Minimalism (Single Partition Platform, 1997), and, finally, to Christopher Williams’s dual homage Bouquet, for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo, 1991, a photographic still life of Dutch flowers mounted on a specially constructed wall. In the face of this last work, one could overhear Fraser in Official Welcome confessing, “We love you for all you have given us.” It was almost enough to make one weep alongside Fraser’s character—not in despair, but in gratitude and relief.

—Natilee Harren