Andrea Fraser Unpacks the Politics of Capital Exchange

Andrea Fraser rearticulates a canonical art-historical moment with her new exhibition at Marian Goodman, Paris. ‘Untitled (Video, Audio, Objects)’ is the artist’s first solo exhibition in France, and only her second commercial show since returning to the market-facing art world in 2023, following a near-ten-year hiatus. The presentation reflects Fraser’s years of working in and critiquing museum contexts.

In the main room, the exhibition begins with the video work Untitled (2003); in the ‘crypt’ space below partially plays the audio from that video, Untitled (2003/4). The former is a 60-minute conceptual piece that examines the transactional aspects of artistic production. It features Fraser performing as ‘the artist’ and ‘making love’, as she terms it in the audio, with a man who has previously bought the video work. Here, he is referred to as ‘the collector’. The hotel room where the engagement takes place is warmly lit, and neither the artist nor the collector wears socks or shoes. The interaction is leisurely; no one is on the clock. The fleshy metaphor for capital exchange in 2003 looks different after 20 years of latency.

Under the stone arch in the crypt, the audio carries clearly. It is a ten-minute edit of the sound from the hotel room, largely featuring speaking and noises made by the artist. There is the sound of laughing, fumbling and awkward jokes. Behind the artist’s voice, the collector can be heard giggling alongside the knocking and creaking of furniture. Further into the gallery, under the vaulted ceiling, the sounds dissipate into whispers and a vague swirling ambience, as though a conversation overheard echoing from the other side of a church. 

Bracketed by these two works are examples of the artist’s recent sculptural practice, ‘Untitled (Objects I–V)’ (2024). Installed in the main underground space, the series consists of the bodies of five sleeping children. They are constructed of metal armature, filled with brown microcrystalline wax, which would usually be prepared for bronze-casting. Here, the models have also been covered with a pale skin of white microcrystalline wax. Under the gallery lights, the dark interior matter shows through, giving the sculptures the look of marble. The infants are laid in different positions of repose on white pedestals beneath Perspex covers. 

Though the children’s faces and positions are peaceful, the mottle on their pallid skin gives the eerie sense that they have been dead for some time. If they were the offspring of the 2003 encounter, as the exhibition literature suggests, they have presumably been drowned by capital. There is a fragility to the works, their bodies softly lolling into their plinths under the effects of heat and gravity. They are, the artist told me, ‘laid awaiting collection’ to be ‘given value and cared for’, speaking to anxieties for the legacy of her wider oeuvre. This sense of art as a traded commodity is reinforced by the showing upstairs of Fraser’s text and data work depicting the place of contemporary art in the annual sales value of luxury goods, for example, a new piece titled Index III (2024).

While the video and audio works are presented as free-flowing forms, ‘Untitled (Objects I–V)’ appear frozen in time. New embodiments of the five editions of the artist’s 2003 video, these works see Fraser replace film – a medium that, according to the 2024 Art Basel + UBS Art Market Report, made up less than one percent of the market – with sculpture, which may access 12 percent of fine-art sales. They ask the collector to invest their capital in the preserved corpus of the artist, now brought into a different and more tangible commodity mode.

Andrea Fraser’s ‘Untitled (Video, Audio, Objects)’ is at Marian Goodman, Paris, until 05 October

^{Main image: Andrea Fraser, Untitled (Object V), 2024, microcrystalline wax, aluminum and steel armatures, dimensions variable. Courtesy: © the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery; photograph: Rebecca Fanuele}