Andrea Fraser

AK

I want to start with how you got into making art back in the 1980s. How did you first encounter art, and what did it mean when you first started making it?

AF

Really? I mean, you know how many interviews I’ve done! [Laughs.] It’s funny because we know each other well and we’ve been having a lot of other conversations.

AK

You can give a short and sweet version just for our readers of the magazine who may not be familiar.

AF

I can’t answer these kinds of questions without reframing them. How is art defined in this question? Like most kids, I encountered art with finger painting as a two-year-old. If we’re talking about art as it is presented in museums and exists in the field of contemporary art, my first encounter with art is more complex. My mother was a very serious painter who, by the late 1960s and early ’70s, had branched out into performance, Conceptual photography, installation, and other experimental art forms. From the time I was born until she stopped engaging in those kinds of activities, when I was about five, that was part of my life. I didn’t necessarily understand it within the context of post-war modernist avant-garde movement, which, of course, I wasn’t aware of as a five year old, but I understood it as art.

By the time I was seven or eight, I was looking at her art history books and even some of the contemporary art magazines that she subscribed to. We didn’t go to a lot of museums. The first visit to a museum that I remember was an exhibition of Minimalist painting. I was just starting to read and I was running around looking at this wall label, looking at that wall label and said something like, “hey, all of these paintings have the same name!” I was reading it as “unifield,” but in fact they were all called Untitled, which, of course, is a funny story in connection with what may be my most famous artwork.

AK

That mix-up—misreading Untitled as uni-field—feels prophetic, considering how deeply you’d engage with Bourdieu’s field theory.

AF

The first art exhibition that I remember going to more on my own was the pre-opening of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party at SFMOMA, when I was about thirteen. I went with a friend from school whose mother worked on the project. In terms of what I was making in my teens, I did some drawing, but mostly I was making ceramics and working with stained glass. Craft was big in California, but really I was making things that I wanted to have that I couldn’t buy. I made furniture for myself and clothes. It wasn’t until I dropped out of high school that I decided to apply to art school, partly because I didn’t think any other institution of higher education would have me. I stopped going to high school shortly before I turned sixteen and then moved to New York two months later, in November 1981, after taking the GED and SAT tests and putting together a portfolio. I didn’t apply to art schools until I got to New York. I applied to the School of Visual Arts and I may have applied to Pratt and Parsons. I got into SVA largely, I think, because it’s a for-profit institution that basically takes everybody who can pay. I spent the two months between the time I arrived New York and started at SVA going to the Metropolitan Museum every other day, if not every day. I was also working in a ceramic studio in Greenwich Village. It was an enactment of a romantic archetype of being an artist in New York, but circa 1950 or even earlier. I didn’t see much contemporary art in New York until after I started art school, and maybe not even until my second year at School of Visual Arts.

AK

What was it like engaging with the New York art scene at the time? After having grown up with an artist mother and, as you mentioned, having a romanticized vision of what an artist might be?

AF

It was intimidating, of course. It took me a while to get to MoMA. I don’t have a clear memory of my first visit to MoMA or the Whitney, which one would think would be significant in the life of an artist moving to New York. When I started going to art galleries, the first show that I remember having a big impact on me, which is embarrassing, was an Anselm Kiefer show at Mary Boone Gallery. It was his first major show in New York. I didn’t start looking at the kind of art that one would expect that I would have been looking at until I encountered Tom Lawson, who was my drawing teacher, Dara Birnbaum, who was my video teacher, and Craig Owens, who was my “Ideas in Art” teacher. When I got to SVA, I wanted to be a sculptor. I drew, but I never painted really. But it wasn’t a time for sculpture. Sculpture was 1970s. In the ’80s, in New York, it was all about representation, representation, representation. So that’s what I got sucked into.

I became aware of the work of the Pictures Generation. I saw David Salle’s work; that definitely had an impact. I saw Troy Brauntuch’s work and started making drawings on black paper. I started frequenting Metro Pictures. At a certain point, I became aware of the Dia Art Foundation. I worked a substitute gallery sitter at the Dia Art Foundation spaces in Soho. I sat with the Earth Room. I sat with the Broken Kilometer. I sat with Warhol’s Death & Disaster series. When Dia opened its building on 22nd Street, I was hired as the supervisor of all of the gallery attendants. For a while. Until they fired me, which... that’s another story.

AK

Starting art school and having these encounters with art in New York must have felt like a departure from your childhood. You were creating ceramics, and then you were supervising gallery attendants in a matter of few years. How did that change register to you?

AF

Before I went to art school, I wasn’t interested in art so much as I was interested design. I was interested in fashion design. I was interested in furniture design. I got my mother to give me a subscription to Architectural Digest for my birthday. I don’t know how I was thinking about art at that point, as art is defined and distinguished from design and craft in most aesthetic traditions. That wasn’t a framework for me until I got to New York. I can’t reconstruct now when that shift happened.

AK

The ambiguity feels significant–the way your early relationship to art was not yet bound by the discursive, symbolic, or economic parameters.

AF

I often cite Bourdieu, who’s citing Bachelard, about being a particular instance of the possible—of the structures and relations and histories in which we’re embedded and which produce us. I don't want to individualize my experiences as unique, but to use those experiences to get at how subject positions, investments, and trajectories are shaped by those structures. These, in turn, define how we live our lives and how we participate in various institutions, fields and economies. My relationship to the art field goes back to my mother’s relationship to the art field, or my fantasy of my mother’s relationship to the art world that I experienced as a young child. One of my projects in the past year and a half has been to collect images of all of my mother’s work and to put together an inventory and portfolio. I’ve been showing it to people in hopes of securing a museum exhibition at some point, hopefully before she’s ninety-five. She’s ninety-two now. I think she’ll live to be 110, but there might not be a huge amount of time. I’ve been revisiting that and thinking about my early childhood experience of her, engaged in creating an incredibly ambitious and impressive series of large-scale shaped paintings. I’ve been thinking about what that might have been like and what impact that might have had on my emotional and psychological development as well as my relationship to art making and to being an artist.

AK

This feels like an opportune moment to turn to your recent show at Marian Goodman in Paris. I’m curious to hear what prompted your return to object-making, and how you came to the decision to exhibit Untitled again after so many years.

AF

I’ve basically never shown in France at all. There’s been almost no reception in France for my work. And so I thought, why not? I’ll make a splash. I’ll show Untitled. Then there was the question of what I would show with Untitled. Initially, I thought that I would return to a critique of the art market with a focus on neoliberalism and the luxury goods sector, which defines the France context, and trying to link that to the rise of the far right in France and other parts of Europe. But then I thought, wait, I’m having this show at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris. I do hope they sell Untitled to Pinault or Arnault. So it’s like, “what am I doing here? Let's be honest!” It’s become clearer to me that this is a fundamental part of my methodology and my values as an artist: basically, honesty is the best policy. One of my biggest frustrations with the art world is the way that art discourse, art theory, and what we might call art politics have become little more than rationalizations and justifications for participating in things that we also abhor.

If I was going to do a market critique, I wanted to acknowledge the fact that I was trying to participate in that market. So I looked at my history of participating and not participating in the art market. I realized that there was a parallel between the time I did Untitled and the time of doing that show in Paris. Untitled was my second show with Friedrich Petzel Gallery. I joined Petzel after a period of not working with commercial art galleries in the 1990s, when I was pursuing my services model. The reception of Untitled has been frustrating because people tend to think of it only in terms of its primary metaphor, rather than as what it is. Yes, I’m evoking prostitution as a metaphor, but what was bought and sold was not sex but a video, and this is the essential point. What I sold, and what the collector paid for, was not a service, which is what prostitution is, but a commodity. That's what makes Untitled what it is and also what determines its significance in the context of my work. After almost a decade pursuing the services model and rejecting the commodity form, I was re-engaging with the commodity as something that mediates relations of exchange and creates a distance that does not exist with a service. It enables an artist to produce something that they own, at least until it’s sold. That process of sale is a second phase, as opposed to a primary and concluding phase, as in the sale of a service.

So, Untitled was my second show with Petzel after a decade of not working actively with commercial galleries, and I realized that my show in Paris was my second show with Marian Goodman Gallery, which I joined after a period, again, of ten years in which I wasn’t actively working with commercial art galleries. I left Petzel Gallery in 2011, after writing “L’1% C’est Moi” about the link between the art market and the massive wealth concentration of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. I continued to work with Nagel Draxler Gallery in Germany after that, but I hadn’t had a show with them since 2014 and I had instructed them that I wouldn’t sell my work to individual collectors, only to institutions. When I decided to work actively again with commercial art galleries, and to show with Marian Goodman, I dropped that as a requirement.

AK

That’s a crucial shift. What led you to reconsider that position?

AF

Why I decided that I would sell my work to private collectors?

AK

Yes, and in that vein, I’d be eager to hear your thoughts on the circulation of your work in the market and in public or private institutions.

AF

Well, I’ll respond to that by taking a detour through my most recent essay, which is called the “Field of Contemporary: A Diagram.” It elaborates a framework that I’ve been developing for close to ten years now. The art market is usually understood in terms of primary and secondary markets, but another division with the art market is between an institutional market and the market of private collectors. For the kind of work that I do, for video, and basically for anything that’s not painting or works on paper, the market among private collectors is minuscule. So I realized that taking a position of selling or not selling my work to private collectors is basically a moot point. Most of the very few collectors who collect video, installation, and even sculpture are collectors who have public ambitions. They have foundations. They have public exhibition spaces or are putting together collections with a vision of transferring them to some kind of publicly-accessible institution or creating one themselves.

AK

It’s a different type of recognition that’s at stake here.

AF

You can talk about it in terms of recognition, but I’m talking about something else. There are secondary markets for just about every kind of art except video. There are secondary markets for photography, for some kinds of conceptual art, even for ephemera. Some more sculpture installation art gets to the secondary market. But there is zero secondary market for video in any form, at least that I’m aware of. If there’s no secondary market for a particular art form, media, or genre, it means that it’s not going to be subject to speculation and that collectors will not be bringing a speculative interest to their engagement with art works in those forms.

AK

Could you elaborate on the phrase “speculative interest”? I’m curious to hear whether you think there’s speculation on the symbolic value of a work—which would underscore yet again how the work’s economic value is intertwined with its legitimization within the field.

AF

I don’t think it has much to do with the relationship between symbolic and economic values, just a basic financial interest in a return on an investment. The more symbolic, or aesthetic, aspect of this might be understood in terms Bourdieu’s analysis of homologies between fields of production and fields of consumption. Even if artists are not directly pandering to a market, their work will find buyers to the extent that there are parallels in the structures and dynamics of the field of collectors and those of the field of artists, and these parallels produce certain kinds of affinities, certain mutualities. The collectors of conceptual art historically were professionals whose status depended on educational and cultural capital, not the titans of finance and manufacturing. The artistic struggle between conceptual artists and producers of large-scale painting and sculpture mirrored the socio-economic struggle between collectors of different “dominant class fractions.” The collectors that I don’t like and might refuse to sell my work to are not the collectors who are going to be interested in my work in the first place, while the collectors who are interested in my work are generally smart, progressive people who I tend to like and respect. There aren’t many.

Anyway, back to the show in Paris. As I wrote in the press release and say in my conversation with Chris Dercon at the show, what I asked myself was “Why have I decided to go back to a commercial gallery and participate in the art market now?” This is part of my methodology. When we make decisions to do something as artists, I think we should have an honest understanding of what our motivations are and not jst what Bourdieu called specific, highly sublimated, and euphemized “interests”—in this or that kind of art, theory, politics, or what have you. No, what are our interests? Our direct, immediate, material, affective interests in doing what we’re doing? For me, this is fundamental. It’s essential to ask that question and answer it for oneself honestly, and then to look at what the relationship is between those material interests and motivations and the euphemized, specific, and highly sublimated interests that we say our work is “about.”

AK

The word “interest” seems to abound in the art world. I notice this particularly in critical reviews. I wonder to what extent discussing and theorizing the “interests” of the artist or the work allows critics to displace their own stakes—discursive, material, or even affective. This includes myself, too, of course.

AF

I try to stop my students from using the words “interest” and “interested in.” They almost never refer to interest in any strong sense, such as a material interest or a desire—a want, a wish, a fear, a drive, a need, and so on.

Thinking about the show in Paris, what came to me was that my interest in working more actively with commercial galleries again had to do with a desire to make things, to have made things, that are valued, wanted, and taken care of the way that only art objects are. So that led me to thinking about my history with artworks and having the experience as a young child of competing with paintings for my mother’s care and attention. I don’t remember thinking of it as a competition at the time, but I must have experienced it that way. She was certainly deeply engaged in her work.

AK

It reminds me of a similar experience I had as a child. My dad is a musician and at one point, when I was very young, our whole family was asked to do an interview. The interviewer asked me, “what is it like to have a dad who plays music?” I started crying and said, “he never plays with me.” There was a sense of yearning.

AF

Yeah, there you go.

AK

Yeah, they cut that out of the interview. They didn’t know what to do.

AF

They cut it out of the interview? Your father did?

AK

No, the interviewers. The interview was broadcast and that part never made it in. They wanted to present a perfect family with musicians.

AF

It would be very surprising, at least in my fantasy of a Korean context, if they had left it in.

AK

Yes, that sort of slip is not allowed in Korea or maybe here even.

AF

There were a lot of really great things about having a mother who was an artist. I would not have had it otherwise. It made me who I am.

AK

I want to return to your “Diagram” article. I’ve been grappling with the diagram you propose. It challenges the very premise of artistic autonomy, or at least the fantasy of it that persists in much of the discourse in the art world today. How does your insistence on accounting of your own position, desire, and fantasies within the art world intersect with the notion of artistic autonomy? Doesn’t that reflexive methodology depend on autonomy?

AF

It’s funny because I presented that text at the Whitney Independent Study Program the day it was published. I wish I presented it before it was published because then I would have been able to include things that come up in the response. The main questions had to do with autonomy. I had to refer people to another essay I’ve written, which you’ve probably read: “Autonomy and its Contradictions.”

AK

Yes, that was published back in 2012.

AF

Autonomy can mean so many different things. In that 2012 essay I break it down into four or five different dimensions. I don’t make it that clear in the “Diagram” essay. I’m going to expand that essay for publication as a book and I’m going to add a section on autonomy.

AK

Oh, that’s exciting.

AF

Mostly, I think of autonomy in Bourdieusian terms, which is always relative autonomy, and specifically the autonomy of a field relative to other fields. It’s not a pure autonomy. However, the specific historical conditions of the relative autonomy of cultural fields, which Bourdieu describes as the “economic world reversed,” supported an idea of pure autonomy, an idea which is part of what constitutes the artistic field as it is. The social autonomy of fields thus is related to, but, for Bourdieu, distinct from formulations in philosophy, et cetera, of autonomous aesthetics or aesthetic autonomy, terms he never uses. Instead, he analyses autonomy in this aesthetic sense, what he calls an aesthetic disposition, as a manifestation and enactment of social class determined by both economic capital and cultural capital.

In addition to these social and aesthetic dimensions of autonomy, I write about political autonomy, including mainstream forms like freedom of speech and radical forms like Italian autonomism. I also write about the economic dimensions of autonomy, particularly the complex and contradictory role the market has played in creating the conditions for the development of the relatively autonomous fields of art in the modern era. That was a primary concern for me in thinking about services and the role of the cultural commodity in art production. This connects to Frankfurt School or Adorno-ian traditions, in which autonomy is opposed to instrumentality.

AK

Yes, I find that the tension between autonomy and instrumentality is particularly generative in the Frankfurt School. It stresses the critical promise of aesthetic autonomy—to resist being reduced to exchange value and instrumentalized.

AF

Right. Bourdieu, makes a different distinction, between autonomy and heteronomy, which is different from instrumentality. In that essay, I also mention a psychological dimension of autonomy. In psychoanalytic terms, autonomy is opposed to dependency and has a very different value, if you will, than it does in Marxist traditions. Autonomy in psychoanalysis is often seen as a figment of the Imaginary or part of an omnipotent fantasy that defends against the narcissistic insult, or trauma, of infantile dependency. Anyway, it was interesting to have that conversation at the Whitney Program, and the question came up: If autonomy goes out the window, then what are the conditions of critical practice?

AK

That has certainly been a central question for institutional critique.

AF

What I clarified in that discussion is that my understanding of the conditions of critical practice is related less directly to the relative autonomy of the cultural field than to what I call the structurally ambivalent condition of the field of art. Bourdieu locates cultural fields in the field of power—his version of the ruling class—but importantly in a dominated position within the field of power. From my perspective—and he doesn’t use these terms—this renders cultural fields structurally conflicted, or structurally ambivalent social spaces. I have hypothesized that this attracts and creates a social and cultural space for people with conflicted experiences of social space, which manifests in both psychological and political conflict or ambivalence, that is, the coincidence of conflicting affects and impulses in relationship to the same object. It is this, I believe, that produces what we think of as critique or the conditions of what we call critical practice.

AK

In recent years, you’ve reflected on ambivalence in this psychoanalytic sense—of holding both love and hate—in relation to your critical practice and the art world writ large. Can you speak a bit about this?

AF

My thinking about ambivalence goes back to 2000, when I started reading Klein and Winnicott and object relations theory. Official Welcome was conceptualized as an examination of artistic ambivalence. In Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry? I start to theorize institutional critique as an enactment of an ambivalent relationship to the field of art and its institutions, and that continues through Projection and There’s No Place Like Home. I’m not sure that I’ve linked that directly to the conditions of artistic critique. I’d have to reread those essays. There’s No Place Like Home is partly a critique of critique as a form of defensive negation in a Freudian sense, which is a partial overcoming of repression but still maintains a defensive function through the distancing or disowning of the pole of ambivalence that holds desire.

AK

This particular quote from your essay on Sandback has stayed with me: “Art is an impossibility.” You then move on to speak about how you can only exist in the field as a compromise.

That brings to mind another dimension of critique you were exploring at the onset of your career. I was revisiting some of your earliest interviews–thanks to the 2019 compilation. I believe it was your first, or one of the first, interviews. It was with Joshua Decter.

AF

Yeah, I think that’s the first one in there.

AK

In that interview, you said you didn’t want to articulate the interests of a public on behalf of the public. That seems to stem from a reluctance to claim authority at the time–to say what’s right or wrong, or to determine what’s best for others. I’m curious how your thinking has shifted through the radically different sociopolitical landscape we find ourselves in now.

AF

Yeah, that’s interesting. I haven’t thought about that perspective in a long time. At that point, as a very young woman, I was very preoccupied with the paternalism of art institutions. I was concerned with how paternalism can be infantilizing but also how artists who might be critical of paternalistic institutions can still end up being paternalistic their own discourses and practices.

AK

Absolutely. I think now, we’re seeing the public put pressure on the artist about the type of politics that the artist should have. I feel there’s almost the reversal of the dynamic here.

AF

The old paternalistic vision of cultural institutions as agents of a cultural re-education of the public is completely dead. It was killed off by neoliberal corporate populism as well as by more progressive critiques of elitism. And now by social media. It’s inconceivable now.

AK

We’re almost mourning for the conditions in which art was still imagined to “do” something in the public sphere–however problematically. It’s been a while since you’ve done a site specific project at a public institution. Right?

AF

Yeah, I’ve been in dialogue with a couple of institutions about doing one, but it hasn’t panned out yet.

AK

Well, maybe, in the next few years we’ll see something. Okay. On ambivalence, I’d be remiss not to bring up Group Relations. You have been affiliated with the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems and you have been involved in organized Group Relations conferences: experiential learning events that provide participants with opportunities to learn from and about group dynamics. How has Group Relations informed your practice.

AF

Well, that’s a big question. Actually, I haven’t been very involved in Group Relations for a few of years now.

AK

The last time I saw you in that context was for a screening of This Meeting is Being Recorded near Columbia. I think it was right around October of 2023.

AF

That was not actually a Group Relations event. That was an all-day workshop designed around the screening and processing of the video at the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society’s annual conference.

AK

You’ve initiated a lineage of artists engaging with Group Relations, like Alan Ruiz. Nikita Gale, too, comes to mind. Increasingly, curators are participating as well. It seems that it has found a particular resonance within the art world. I’m curious why you think Group Relations has taken hold in this way.

AF

I found it very valuable. From the very beginning of my work as an artist, I’ve been trying to understand not only the historical, social, and economic conditions of art institutions, but also the psychological and emotional conditions of our relationships to institutions. I started out with my own version of that, attempting to combine Lacan and Bourdieu. And then I stopped reading psychoanalysis. I got really fed up with Lacan and focused just on Bourdieu’s work, but I always brought a psychoanalytic lens to reading Bourdieu. I wrote an essay called “Psychoanalysis or Socioanalysis,” where I considered Bourdieu’s uses of psychoanalysis and the parallels between his theory and psychoanalytic theory. Then I connected with group relations, which developed at the intersection of psychoanalysis and social science specifically to understand the unconscious and emotional dynamics of groups and organizations. Interestingly, I had known about group relations since my early twenties, when I read Experience in Groups, a series of essays written by Wilfred Bion in the 1940s and published as a book in the ’50s. It became one of the foundational texts of what came to be known as the Tavistock Method and, more broadly, as group relations.

AK

Do you recall how you first came across Bion and group relations?

AF

Through psychoanalysts I knew at the time. They described group relations conferences as Lord of the Flies in conference centers, where people had psychotic breaks and were carted off to psychiatric hospitals. Actually, I think that only happened once in the US. Anyway, Experiences in Groups made an impression. I shared the book with The V-Girls and even took a bunch of them with me to Cologne in the fall of 1991. The group of people that I was connected to there was having all these problems and conflicts and breaking apart. So I brought a half dozen copies of Bion’s book and passed them out to friends, including Helmut Draxler, who later got very involved with group psychoanalysis, although not group relations specifically.

AK

You were convening your own unofficial form of group relations already.

AF

No, just some of the theory behind it. It wasn’t until 2007, after I moved to LA, that I heard about an actual group relations conference taking place, and I went. It was probably the most intense thing I had ever experienced. I was hooked. In 2015 I entered the A.K. Rice Institute program to train as a group relations consultant. In 2015 and 2016 I helped organize two conferences in Los Angeles at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, which included a lot of artists and a lot of psychoanalysts. I joined the board of GREX, the organization that does group relations conferences on the West Coast, and was even president for a few years.

There are four dimensions to my application of group relations. One is teaching. One is performance. One is in thinking about institutions and groups. The fourth is the understanding of social identity developed within group relations, which cuts across all of those other categories. Group relations started to influence my approach to teaching right away. Group relations defines itself as an experiential learning method, and I went to my first conference not long after I became full-time faculty at University of California, Los Angeles. Group relations had a significant history at UCLA and, at that time, was still a standard component of training for residents in psychiatry. In 2011, I designed a graduate seminar around a conference, which all of the students in the class were required to attend. That was difficult and complicated. Most importantly, I developed a group critique method based on group relations. I’ve written that up in a couple of essays, only one of which has been published: my piece in Nikita Gale’s exhibition catalog published by 52 Walker. Nikita was my student at UCLA.

AK

I had the opportunity to participate in this one.

AF

Right, you were there. The influence of group relations on my thinking about institutions has been more implicit. It certainly influenced my two installations in museums of audio recorded in prisons, especially Down the River at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016. We did a semi-public group relations event in that huge fifth-floor space, which was intense.

There is really only one text that I’ve published about institutions from a group relations perspective, which is called “As if We Came Together to Care.” It was for a book edited by Beatrice von Bismarck about hospitality and curating. It’s not about institutions broadly so much as about relationships with and within institutions, but it’s a nice little intro to group relations for art people.

It’s something that I want to go back to because group relations is incredibly useful in understanding institutions. An important element is that a primary function of institutions is to contain anxiety.

AK

That understanding of institutions as containers of anxiety and where people project fantasies seems particularly topical now, with so much uncertainty everywhere. It helps explain why so many responses to institutions today seem so affectively charged.

AF

And politically charged.

AK

Sure. Historically, liberals have been the ones to critique institutions. Now we’re seeing the complete reversal where liberals are the ones who seek to defend institutions.

AF

Centrist positions have always been pretty pro-institution. Radical-left positions have historically been anti-institutional. Radical-right positions are anti-institutional in the sense of institutions as social structures of delegated authority, as distinct from structures in which traditional or charismatic authority is naturalized as a kind of divine right to power.

AK

I think it’s important to distinguish between critiquing institutions and adopting an anti-institutional stance. Leftists, after all, were never advocating for the complete dismantling of institutions. But framing institutions as containers complicates that binary. Does it shift how we think about being for or against institutions if we understand them as sites for holding our anxiety?

AF

Generalizing in that way of being pro or against “institutions” already suggests that you’re not relating to concrete social institutions but to what Group Relations people call the institution in the mind. You’re relating to “institutions” as a fantasy and as a container for projections of good things or bad things.

AK

You’re suggesting that when we engage institutions as psychic objects, the stakes of critique shift? That is becomes about managing our identifications and projection?

AF

For the radical right and parts of the radical left, institutions become containers for projections of everything that’s bad about society. In the center, traditionally, people see institutions as a positive force, so institutions become containers for idealizing projections.

AK

And neither position allows for a conflicted relationship to the institution.

AF

As I’ve written and said before, not a question of being for or against institutions. It’s about what kind of institution.

AK

That makes me think about how your performance over the years has explored these very questions–not only institutions, but also the kinds of positions and identities enacted within them.

AF

I think of my early performances, like Museum Highlights and Welcome to the Wadsworth, as more or less conscious enactments of social and psychological relations to institutions that are usually unconscious and unthought. That is, the process of internalizing, embodying, and performing institutions. In many ways, those two works are structured as narratives in which that process unfolds.

With May I Help You? I shifted to multi-voice performances, which I conceptualized at the time as performing social fields as Bourdieu understood them: as matrices of relations between positions that are structured according to distributions of specific forms of capital. I was thinking about institutions as fields, and I wanted to perform the dynamics of those fields as they determine the positions that are enacted within them.

In Inaugural Speech, it was performing positions within the field of an exhibition. In Official Welcome, it was performing artistic positions within the field of artistic positions.

What shifted after I got involved with group relations, with Projection and then especially Men on the Line, Not Just a Few of Us, and This Meeting is Being Recorded, is that I started thinking in terms of intersubjective fields as well as social fields. I also started to think more explicitly about performing groups as intersubjective fields in which identity positions are actively produced and enacted through mechanisms of projection and introjection.

AK

Could you say more about how you conceptualize social identity within intersubjective fields?

AF

I understand social identity as distinct from biological identity and also from an individual sense of self vis-a-vis biography and individual history. Social identity is identity that is produced socially through the projections that one receives. These may be unwanted an imposed, but they only become part of identity to the extent they also are taken in. Social identity then becomes an internalized object that pre-exists you but that you also identify with on some level, consciously or not.

But an important point in Group Relations is that the person doing the projecting also identifies with what they project, unconsciously. Groups are matrixes of projections and the internalization of projections or, more technically, of projective identifications. I understand projection as what is sometimes called “one-body” phenomenon. One projects onto something or someone, as a screen, a surface. Projective identification is projection into someone who takes it in and becomes a container and thus becomes an intersubjective phenomenon.

Projective identification also has become central to how I understand performance and art more broadly, especially in connection with the related concept of enactment in the psychoanalytic sense, that is, behavior as forms of realization, or attempts at realization, of unconscious fantasy that is shared through the mechanism of projective identification.

The more recent performances, which aren’t that recent anymore, but especially Men on the Line, Not Just a Few of Us, and This Meeting is Being Recorded, were all attempts to perform those dynamics with a focus on race and gender. The work that I’ve done that’s most directly influenced by group relations is, of course, This Meeting is Being Recorded. It's based on recordings of meetings of a group I convened of seven white women, including myself, all of whom were involved in group relations and all but one of whom was a certified group relations consultant.

The group was an experiment with applying group relations methods, and its understanding of mechanisms like projective identification, to anti-racism work. The performance-based video installation was an attempt to share this work in a way that challenged viewers to consider their own projections and enactments, including with the video itself.

But all of these multi-voice works are also explorations of performance as a more conscious, or least consciously framed, enactment of these processes of projection and introjection, which also encompass the traditional acting techniques of empathy and embodiment.

AK

How has this framework on social identity and enactment shaped your pedagogy, with its own special conditions of intersubjective relations? What about in group critiques?

AF

My group relations group critique method developed out of a desire get at the unconscious and the unthought rather than just encouraging the production or reproduction of discourse as a means of rationalizing and justifying a practice. Most frameworks for engaging with art in group critiques and other contexts either focus on what art is, materially and formally, or what art means, in terms of iconography or signifying systems.

I wanted to get at what art does—and not only what artists and others say it does. And my way of understanding what art does is that art activates structures and relations of various kinds. What art is and means become secondary questions, which the work itself may or may not activate.

There are some artworks that activate an intellectual process of semiotic decoding, including almost all art assembled from readymade objects and images. Other artworks activate an engagement with their materiality or with the perceptual or physical experience of them, and challenge semiotic reading, like almost all Minimalist art.

If what art does is activate structures and relations, it does so in ways that are registered and enacted by those who engage with it. From this psychoanalytic group relations perspective, this happens as they take in and enact what the artist is projecting through the work.

While this enactment may only be internal to an individual who is silently engaging with an art work, it tends to manifest externally in a group critique situation. So, my prompt to students when I do group critiques is that I will consider everything that occurs in the room during x period of time we are considering a particular artwork as having been activated by that artwork.

I think this actually functions as a kind of suggestion in a psychoanalytic sense. I then instruct the participants to try to register, reflect on, and articulate their sense of what the work is activating in them. My role is to observe and reflect on how the group is enacting the work. I don’t talk about the work myself directly at all.

AK

Your point on what art does—its activation—brings up the question of art’s agency. Would you say that the artwork is a subject in its own right—akin to an active participant in the intersubjective field?

AF

I wouldn’t call the artwork a subject or an active participant, no. It’s a container of a fantasy that is being shared, or not, realized or not, by those who engage with it. In a way, this is what Freud says in his notorious paragraph on art in Two Principles of Mental Functioning. To the extent that the artist’s fantasy is shared, it is realized, and no longer just a fantasy.

And one of the most prevalent of the fantasies about art these days is the fantasy of art’s agency, that art can control or compel the viewer in some way. And this also is the fundamental fantasy of projective identification, as Melanie Klein first conceived it.

That always takes me back to something my old friend Allan McCollum once did in the very early days of the internet: he searched for the phrase “forcing the viewer.” He put together a little catalog of hundreds of instance in which this phrase was circulating in the 1990s.

AK

Wow. And this was a work? I need to look this up.

AF

No, he didn’t make a work out of it. It’s just something that he did for fun and sent to me. And when you stop and think about that for a minute: Forcing the viewer? How strange is that? It’s really pretty bizarre that artists are thinking about what they do in terms of forcing the viewer to do this or to do that.

AK

The phrase “forcing the viewer” certainly presumes–or attributes–an authoritative power inherent to art.

AF

You can still find variations of that everywhere in the claims that are made about artists and their work by writers, curators, and artists themselves. On some level, there’s always an implicit, if not explicit claim for what the artwork is doing, for the impact the artwork is having emotionally or intellectually on the viewer or within social space. But those claims are almost never critically evaluated or tested. Often those claims are in direct contradiction with other aspects of what artworks are and how they exist, which is part of my frustration with art.

My engagement with psychoanalysis started out with considering psychoanalytic practice as a practice of effecting psychic change, which I hoped could be a model for how art could effect change. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand how analysts understood the therapeutic action of analysis, from the analysis of desire, to the analysis of defenses, to transference, to mutative interpretation, to holding environments and containing functions and corrective emotional experiences. I’ve been thinking about this since the 1980s.

AK

You’re drawing out the different kinds of work that happen through artworks. There are the claims made by different participants in the art world–artists, curators, and academics like myself. Separately, there is art’s own activation. I find that these two registers can become blurred, at least for me, since what art activates in me is inevitably tied to the discourse around it.

I wonder, is it possible to isolate what art does?

AF

From my perspective, no, at least not in any objective or essential or transcendent sense. It’s always relational and situational. I think a lot of what art is doing is often repressed in a psychoanalytic sense, or rendered illegitimate or irrelevant by art discourse, and the overblown claims made for art play a role in that.

The broader question then becomes: what aspects of artworks are recognized and articulated and what aspects are unrecognized, unthought, or repressed? How does the artworld itself enable or even structure that repression? How can it break through the repression structured by art’s institutional and discursive frames?

AK

This is where your application of Group Relations for group critique becomes valuable. It offers a framework for parsing through what the artwork demands from us, and what it activates in us.

AF

Group Relations can be framed as learning about unconscious and emotional dynamics in groups and organizations, or about authority and leadership, or other things. But from my perspective, the most important and valuable learning in Group Relations is not “about” things but the learning of skills: the development of the disposition and capacity to sit with and reflect on one’s experience of what’s going on in a group and within oneself as that experience is unfolding. That involves containing the tendency to discharge a reaction or get pulled into a group enactment. It also involves building the capacity to tolerate anxiety, frustration, and shame—first of all at having an unconscious that you don’t know and can’t control. This is all actually extremely difficult to do, especially in the midst of intense group dynamics.

The basic thing that I instructing my students to do in my group relations group critiques is to reflect on and articulate their experience as they are having it, because that’s what will generate knowledge about the artwork, not the repetition of some legitimate and legitimizing art discourse.

AK

[Laughs.] Ironically, I may now be guilty of doing just that–speaking with you in the format of an interview, reproducing more legitimizing discourse about your practice. You mentioned that you observe the group’s enactment of the work. How do you conceptualize your own role in this group relations critique model?

AF

I model my role in group critique the role of a Group Relations consultant. My task is to reflect on what emerges in the groups and to link this to the artwork. I make it clear that my role is not to lead or to facilitate or to speak about or interpret or respond to the artwork directly.

Because the artist presenting the artwork can’t talk during the critique, another consequence of the role I take up is that the students can’t lean on the authority that is almost always in place, from classrooms to museums, to tell you what art is and means and how to understand it. As in Group Relations, this withdrawal of familiar authority can trigger quite a bit of anxiety.

AK

Yes. I remember the triggering slate of emotions when we did it at 52 Walker. A terrifying moment, really, with a silence looming over us and neither you or Nikita speaking.

AF

There are some people who are very confident about engaging with art and talking about it, but most people are just preparing the account of that artwork as presented by the artist, the institution, the curator, or the critic. In an art education situation, it’s usually the professor who has the authority to interpret and to speak about the artwork.

So I withdraw from that position and authorize myself, or ask for authorization, to take on another role and task of consulting to the participants about their response to the artwork and about how they might be enacting what the artwork is activating. What is particularly useful about this in an art education context is that it creates a situation in which respondents must grapple with their own authority in relation to their experience of the artwork as well as the authority of the artist as it manifests in the work.

AK

Well, it was a harrowing experience when I did it. There was no clear authority established in the group, most of whom I didn’t know. I felt completely panicked—skeptical of my own voice. I wasn’t sure what I would attain by speaking. But by staying silent, I was upset by what I later perceived as my fear of taking up authority, which then brought up my own positionality as an Asian woman and the attendant stereotypes.

AF

Group Relations is not about safe spaces. Group Relations holds that any kind of group, for any person, is going to trigger regression and anxiety, unless there are structures to mitigate that and to contain the dynamics and emotional forces at work in groups. Usually, these include leaders of some kind that replicate a parental role.

In the absence of such leaders, groups will struggle to produce them. I’ve seen it over and over again. Social structures, institutional structures, organizational structures are there in part to mitigate that anxiety and regression, or to exploit them.

AK

Yes, that makes sense. In your application of Group Relations, anxiety itself becomes a powerful medium—one that exposes uncomfortable unconscious dimensions of our social relations, without promising to resolve this anxiety.

AF

The social structures that mitigate anxiety also mitigate and obscure the emotional investments that we have in those groups and institutions. One of the things that made Group Relations so compelling and important to me is the way that it reveals and confronts you with the emotional stakes that you have in participating in groups and being in any kind of social space.

And that’s something that I think I’m always trying to get at with my work.