Adela Kim

This monographic dissertation examines four decades of works by Andrea Fraser (American, b. 1965) through the homograph “tearing.” In recent years, Fraser has emerged as a key figure in institutional critique—a practice that appeared in the 1960s that addresses the ideological interests underpinning the art world. Focusing on Fraser’s performances like Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), in which Fraser gives a poignant tour of a museum as a docent, scholars have emphasized how Fraser’s works appropriate an institution’s logic to analyze its underlying socioeconomic asymmetries. At the crux of this argument is institutional critique’s long-standing skepticism towards the use-value of art: that notwithstanding its criticality, such a work cannot effectuate any change in our era of diminished agency.

Foregrounding Fraser’s less-explored installations, collective shows, and research works, my project seeks to chart an alternate genealogy of institutional critique by advancing a theory of Fraser’s practice as a tearing critique. I argue that Fraser’s works, in dialogue with psychoanalytic feminisms, object relations, and reflexive sociology, offer us new ways to consider the use-value of art. By not only tearing apart the institutional facades predicated on inequities, but also tearing up—weeping—Fraser’s works beckon us to begin a reparative process of self-reflection. In considering Fraser’s generative tearings and their social sites, the dissertation examines the broader repercussions when the prevailing framework for institutional critique becomes no longer sustainable. Along the way, the project also assesses the convergence of different institutionalisms in Fraser’s works across the United States, Germany, and Brazil.

Broadly, through a parallel process of self-reflexive writing, and in midst of institutional efforts at equity and the skepticisms thereof, my project deploys Fraser’s works to diagnose our contemporaneous desires and anxieties about normative structures.