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What is art? Prostitution.
- Baudelaire1
The premise of Andrea Fraser's controversial performance/video Untitled (2003) is that the artist has sex with the art collector who paid for the creation of the artwork. Unabashedly provocative, Untitled has been oversimplified by writers and critics unwilling or unable to consider any significance beyond its literal description. From its initial exhibition in Fraser's 2003 retrospective at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, the work has met with a barrage of accusations about its status as pornography and its apparent use of prostitution as the basis of artistic creation. These claims about Untitled have not, however, been sufficiently addressed or debated. Even in his excellent catalogue essay for the aforementioned exhibit, art historian and critic George Baker admits, "it is hard to know what to say about Fraser's most recent work, Untitled, and so I will refrain from saying much."2 Untitled has been reduced to its least relevant details - most frequently its rumored (and undisclosed) price tag - while critics have also often overlooked its resonances with Fraser's previous work and her larger project of institutional and social critique. Resonances that might be located in what curator Yilmaz Dziewior calls Untitled's "surplus value of excess meaning,"3 which is to say, a value beyond the monetary cost of production and purchase price.
To date, only three interviews with Fraser consider this work beyond a trite equivalence: the first with Miwon Kwon (published in Documents in 2002), the second with artist Gregg Bordowitz (in a June 2004 edited email correspondence available from Fraser's gallery, Friedrich Petzel) and the third with Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey (published in The Brooklyn Rail in October 2004). All of the interviewers pressed Fraser for more information about Untitled and discussed its relationship to her artistic practice, but many of their questions also remained unanswered. In response to the critical lacuna around Untitled, this essay examines the work's connections to Fraser's previous performances and to the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his concepts of habitus and symbolic violence, thus positioning the work in a broader web of sociological meaning.
Pierre Bourdieu's theories are ubiquitous in Andrea Fraser's writings and artworks. Indeed, there is a kind of collaborative practice between Fraser and Bourdieu. After...