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Collage of five diverse artworks from the Hammer Museum Collections side by side. From left to right: 1) Contemporary painting of two embracing figures with surreal elements. 2) Post-impressionist style painting of trees with vibrant blues and greens. 3) Black and white illustration of a face with intricate patterns. 4) Japanese woodblock print style image of a figure in a checkered robe. 5) Photograph of a couple dancing, the woman in a black dress and the man in white

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Digital Archive Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology
Art Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk
Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, by Andrea Fraser, 1989

Andrea Fraser, Artist
Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk , 1989

Medium
Single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), color, sound
Dimensions
30:00 min.
Credit Line
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase. Photograph by Brian Forrest

In her performance and video works, Andrea Fraser often takes on personae that function both as character studies and as critical investigations of the sites for art, revealing the layers of context and construction (of class, gender, politics, etc.) that ground their very existence. In Museum Highlights, Fraser borrows the form and conventions of a museum tour, playing the role of Jane Castleton, a fictional docent. The tour is composed entirely of quotations from a variety of sources, including brochures from museum archives and art reviews as well as writings by authors as diverse as Immanuel Kant and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Rather than take visitors through an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Castleton points out elements of the institution's infrastructure and typically overlooked spaces, drawing attention to questions about pedagogy, aesthetic criteria, and systems of judgment at work within museums.