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On Relative Autonomy of the Arts in the Works by Andrea Fraser

Hyunjin Shin 1

1홍익대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Andrea Fraser is an artist whose practice falls in to the category of institutional critique that asks questions on how art production relates with the world. In 1993, she coorganized a project entitled, <Services: Conditions and Relations of Project Oriented Artistic Practice> in which she posited artists as “service providers”. Service, here is defined in her introduction as “labor which is either in excess of, or independent of,any specific material production and which cannot be transacted as or along with a product.”If art practice can be named as services would it mean to give up the autonomy of art as she connects her practice to labor? In later part of the essay, Fraser declared that she would explore the creativity within “relative autonomy of art”. Does relative autonomy of art mean something different than historical avant-garde’s? Can freedom be partially given up or preserved? This thesis, thus, raises questions on what implies by giving up the autonomy of art and Fraser’s relative autonomy’s application to the contemporary art practice by analyzing institutional critique works by Andrea Fraser. Autonomy was the key concept in the opposition between Modernists and historical avant-gardists. While the autonomy of art is the constitutive element for aesthetics,art is subjected to material conditions for historical avant-gardists in principle. In the premise that combining both idealism acknowledging priori truth and materialism acknowledging physical world make up the general ideas in Modernist era, concept of her relative autonomy rings alter-modern, post-ideological thoughts and their conditions to which contemporary art is subjected. Fraser’s relative autonomy of art starts from the premise that art-world, aesthetics’operating system, is already won by capitalism. Instead of claiming the autonomy of art and art world as a whole, she divides up the art world into several art producers(the subjects in the arts) that compete each other utilizing Bourdieu’s logic. Once she clarifies borders between each producer’s authorship, her artistic expression can be protected by freedom of speech. Then she amplifies its impact through her psychoanalytic 안드레아 프레이저의 상대적 자율성이 존재하는 방식 | 신현진 365performance in which her audience can empathize several roles in the art world that she embodies into herself. This empathetic approach works better especially today when the break up of the labor division occurred in the arts: producer (artist/author) ― mediator (art organization) ― recipients (audience) since relational, project-based participatory art practice blur such division the same as seen in the operation of cognitive capitalism.This allows her practice of relative autonomy viewed from the psychoanalytic perspective that passes through the dichotomy of Modernism.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.