Official Welcome

Artist/Creator: Andrea Fraser (Artist)
Date: 2001/2002
ID #: BG4156

Physical Description

Medium: performance
Support: –
Dimensions: –
Object Description: Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome (2001/2002) engages with the rhetorical language and function of institutional opening events. The work is a video recording of a performance that took place at the opening of Fraser’s exhibition at the Belkin in 2002 where she delivered a speech that appropriated the physical and linguistic gestures of patrons, curators, critics and artists. Halfway through the performance, Fraser started to undress and stated, “I’m not a person today. I’m an object in an artwork.” Using the body as a site for intervening within, and responding to, the structure of art institutions, she places audiences and institutions in positions of complicity and discomfort.

Developed for and performed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, January 17, 2002 for the opening of Andrea Fraser: Exhibition.

History

Collection: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Credit Line: Gift of the artist, 2002
Related Exhibitions

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