AV
New Works by Andrea Fraser, Vanessa Place
April 10–June 1, 2014
MAK Center for Art and Architecture
Schindler House
835 North Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
Andrea Fraser’s work engages the institution of art and art institutions; Vanessa Place’s work interrogates notions of criminality and poetry. Language and sound figure into both of their practices as key investigative tools. Working from the disciplines of art and writing, respectively, both employ existing tracts of text and reposition them in the context of art and performance. This exhibition, curated by MAK Center director Kimberli Meyer, presents new work by each artist in two sound installations in the Schindler House.
For AV, Fraser will attempt to activate some of the structural relations between museums and prisons as the bookend institutions of polarized neoliberal social space. Place debuts her installation, Last Words, about which she writes: “Death is a sentence. Silently handed to each of us, spoken aloud to others.” Both works prompt the visitor to ask questions about the notions of absence, presence, power, individuality, freedom, and subjectification.
Related programming:
Sunday, April 27, 1pm
Presentations by Andrea Fraser, Ashley Hunt, and representatives from Critical Resistance Los Angeles, Californians United for a Responsible Budget, No More Jails LA, and others.
Thursday, May 22, 7pm
Performance by Vanessa Place, followed by a discussion with Place, Michael Eng, and Jamieson Webster.
Wednesday, May 28, 7pm
Andrea Fraser talks with Joe Day about his research on museums and prisons.
About Andrea Fraser
Major projects by Andrea Fraser include installations, performances, and surveys for an array of international museums, including the Kunstverein Munich; the Venice Biennale (Austrian Pavilion); the Whitney Biennial; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; the Kunsthalle Bern; the Bienal de São Paulo; Tate Modern; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia; the Kunstverein Hamburg; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; and the Ludwig Museum, Cologne. Her books include Andrea Fraser: Works 1984-2003, Dumont, 2003; Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, MIT Press, 2005; and Texts, Scripts, Transcripts, Museum Ludwig, 2013. Fraser is a professor of New Genres at the University of California, Los Angeles.
About Vanessa Place
The Boston Review called Vanessa Place “the spokesperson for the new cynical avant-garde,” the Huffington Post characterized her work as “ethically odious,” while philosopher and critic Avital Ronell said she is “a leading voice in contemporary thought.” Vanessa Place was the first poet to perform as part of the Whitney Biennial; a content advisory was posted. Other exhibition work has appeared at Denver Museum of Contemporary Art; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; The Power Plant, Toronto; the Broad Museum, East Lansing; and Cage 83 Gallery, New York. Selected recent performance venues include Museum of Modern Art, New York; Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art; Andre Bely Center, St. Petersburg, Russia; Kunstverein, Cologne; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Frye Art Gallery, Seattle; the Sorbonne; and De Young Museum, San Francisco. Recent books include Boycott; Statement of Facts; Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman; and her translation of Guantanamo, by French poet Frank Smith. Place also works as a critic and criminal defense attorney, and is CEO of VanessaPlace Inc., the world’s first poetry corporation.
For more information, visit makcenter.org.
