Andrea Fraser Knihy

Best known for her performance critiques of art institutions, art publications, art sponsorship, and cultural transfer--think subversive museum docent--Andrea Fraser is one of the more prominent artists to raise institutional criticism to the level of art itself. Since the early 90s, when she would stage tours through exhibitions or hold discussions on art, her work has developed a more deliberately visual character. Working now mostly in video installation, Fraser produces such imagery as Soldadera , a video in which she plays a revolutionary on horseback, evoking the time of the Mexican revolution and the problem of North-American influence on Mexico in the 1930s. In Exhibition , she appears as a scantily-clad Samba dancer, demonstrating the important place of popular culture in an art context. This monograph, the most complete published on the artist to date, reveals the diversity of her work; also included are her critical texts, documents fundamental to the interpretation of her artistic oeuvre.

Essays, criticism, and performance scripts written between 1985 and 2003 by an artist whose artistic practice investigates and reveals the social structures of art and its institutions.

The second title in the Clarion series spotlights the artist Nikita Gale, whose work applies the lens of material culture to examine the role authority plays in political, social, and economic systems With a priority to immerse the audience in sound, light, and motion, Nikita Gale’s END OF SUBJECT subverts understandings of viewership and prompts spectators to question their subjecthood amongst the installation and each other. Unrestricted by mediums, Gale engages with the architecture of her environment, stimulating all senses through site-specific installation and muses on the boundaries of performance art. She employs abolitionist ideology and institutional critique to simultaneously rupture and rebuild facets of the art institution. With an introductory note by Ebony L. Haynes and a suite of poems by Harmony Holiday, this publication considers historical hierarchies of visibility. A contribution by the esteemed artist Andrea Fraser offers reflections on the various interventions at play during a gathering held in the exhibition.