In 1989 Andrea Fraser, a New York based performance artist, was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to create Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk. Using the structure of a gallery tour, Museum Highlights placed Fraser in the position of the docent Jane Castleton, providing information to visitors about both the museum and its collection. Beginning at the information desk in the foyer, Fraser's tour, advertised as part of the museum's daily programming, invited the visitor to accompany her as she guided them through the building and its various exhibits. Fraser began with a seemingly innocuous tour, introducing the visitor to the museum and its membership and acquisition policies through comments that were largely drawn from the institution's publications. It quickly became evident to the visitor that Fraser's talk was not the ubiquitous tour they were anticipating. Instead, drawing on the history of the Philadelphia Museum as a public institution with conflicting social and economic demands, Fraser as Jane Castleton personified the non-expert volunteer from an upper-class background. Invited by the Museum to perform the critique, Fraser described the project as a service-product project, involving "services‚"[1] provided by an artist for the consumption of the institution, but whose forms defy the potential ownership of the product: Fraser's project was situated in the gallery space and its subject was the institution itself. Fraser's performance is part of a lineage of institutional critiques that Hal Foster describes as the "crossing of institutions of art and political economy, of representations of sexual identity and social life" (Foster, "Subversive Signs," 1065). Like Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Dan Graham and Hans Haacke had done through the 1960s and 1970s, Fraser's performance placed the institution as both subject and object of her project. The lineage of this form of critique began in the 1910s with Marcel Duchamp's analysis of the status of the art object; but in the 1960s the epistemological investigation of the object was vacated by Asher, Buren, Haacke and Graham in favour of the treatment of art institutions as both "target and weapon" (1066). These critiques have since performed a ubiquitous and necessary function within the history of the museum seeking to critique the institution from within the institution itself. But when critiques are offered as "services‚" and invited and legitimated by the institution, do they still have a potential for success? How is the success of these projects defined? When the subject and object of the intervention is the site of the intervention itself, does this construct a limiting framework for the possibility of a developed critique? Or, like Herbert Marcuse's conception of "repressive tolerance,"[2] are these critiques part of the liberal toleration of dissent as a symptom of post-modern relativism and disorientation?

Museum Highlights was developed as part of the Philadelphia Museum’s "Contemporary Viewpoints Artists Lecture Series" in February 1989, and the final script of the performance was printed in October magazine in the summer of 1991. As the introduction to the script describes:

Fraser is not alone in her displacement of the subject-object dichotomy, or in the rearrangement of discursive elements to emphasize contradictions. In 1993 African-American artist Fred Wilson was invited by the Maryland Historical Society to create an exhibition that would investigate the museum's collection and acquisition policies, and their relationship to Maryland's history of slavery. Mining the Museum, as the project was called, took existing objects from the museum collection but altered their traditional forms of display, calling the viewers‚ attention to the way in museums construct knowledge through the installations themselves: "the meaning the installation communicates derives not only from the objects themselves, but also from how the museum deals with them"(Stein, 113). Wilson did not introduce new objects into the space of the museum, but changed the physical space of the exhibition, shifting referential points, altering juxtaposition between objects, displacing the titles of works, all in an effort to include the "real institution's acquisition history"(110). Baltimore repoussé silver goblets and rusty slavery shackles were exhibited together in a case labelled "Metalwork, 1723-1880," and a gallery spotlight periodically revealed the figure of a slave child while a taped voice repeated: "Who combs my hair? Who calms me when I’m afraid? Who makes me laugh?"(113) Similar to Fraser, Wilson offered a service-product project and his intervention also defied the commodity-based ownership that would allow for a tangible ownership of the project. But, unlike Fraser, Wilson's project relied on the displacement of the tangible object. His service illustrated an object and text based intervention that had hoped to introduce: "a history which the museum and the community wouldn’t talk about: the history of the exclusion and abuse that African-American people experienced in that area"(Wilson, 120). The objects were displaced from their initial narrative; they were both physically and discursively altered through their new juxtapositions. Wilson's critique and intervention relied on, and functioned through,the displacement of the object - his intervention was limited by this object-based displacement. But, because of the clear and literal displacement of the object, the viewer was aware of the manner and form of the critique and the purpose of the intervention.

Wilson’s critique performed a ubiquitous and necessary function in addressing the exclusionary status of museums, and was successful partially because of the reception and understanding of the museum visitor.[3] Wilson’s intervention altered the mandates of the Maryland Historical Society and Wilson, in his capacity as political activist and installation artist, has since been repeatedly invited to duplicate his project. However, in Sins of Omission Judith Stein comments on Wilson's paradoxical position as an institutionally sanctioned and legitimised artist whose projects take up the subject of the institutions to which he is linked: "A cultural critic now eagerly courted by the institutions he critiques, Wilson is not unaware of the irony of his new situation"(Stein, 114). Wilson's status as an artist and curator is owed in part to Mining the Museum, and has afforded him the same status as those within the institution he critiques; he is a privileged individual. The project at the Maryland Historical Society provided Wilson with an opportunity to reflect on his status:

In order to understand Fraser's artistic strategies in Museum Highlights, it is important to discuss the spatial and temporal dimension of the project. What I would like to argue is that rather than the project being situated in the actual site of the museum, it is performed in a liminal site, where the institutional demands are simultaneously suspended and reinforced. Victor Turner, in Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, defines liminality as discernible by three phases: separation, margin and reaggregation(Turner 231-2). Separation‚ is marked by the detachment of the individual from a "fixed point in a social structure or from an established set of cultural conditions (a "state")"(232). During the intervening period following this separation the subject or individual occupies an ambiguous position, existing "between all fixed points of classification," before finally entering into the final stage of reaggregation‚" where the subject "re-enters into the social structure, often but not always at a higher status"(232). The purpose of this symbolic passage is that it allows the individual to suspend social structure. For Turner, it represents the transition between "status-sequence," between the points of outsiderhood and the undifferentiated whole(237). Yet liminality only exists in reference to society, and relies on its status as relational. In reference to this concept of liminality, Fraser's Museum Highlights relies on an outsiderhood status, meaning that the space marked out by Fraser for the performance must simultaneously exist within the framework of the institution, while marking its outsiderhood status. Fraser's service-product projects rely on this process of liminality in order to evade being subsumed by institutional demands. The process of liminality allows Fraser to critique the institution from outside the museum framework, constantly shifting between the site of artistic production and consumption. By looking closely at the project itself as a means to illustrate Fraser's reliance on this form, it becomes apparent that the actual form of the intervention, the tour itself, both spatially and temporally reiterates its liminal status.

Like Wilson's Mining the Museum, Fraser's project functions through displacement, but unlike Wilson’s intervention, the subject of displacement is language and utterance. The performance began with Fraser as the docent Jane Castleton: "Good afternoon, uh ... Everyone? Good afternoon. My name is Jane Castleton, and I’d like to welcome all of you to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'll be your guide today as we explore the museum, uh, its history, and its collection" (Fraser, "Museum Highlights," 106). Jane Castleton as docent constructed Fraser in the eyes of the audience as part of the institution, and provided her with an authoritative voice as a museum member. Jane became the identity through which Fraser spoke. By Fraser introducing herself as Jane Castleton, she consciously altered the audiences‚ perception of her identity. This was the first phase of her liminality, her "symbolic behaviour signifi[ed] the detachment [...] from an earlier fixed point in the social structure" (Turner, 232). In a footnote Fraser clarifies the strategy she implements in her construction of Jane: "While Jane is a fictional docent, I would like to consider her less as an individual 'character,' with autonomous traits than as a site of speech constructed within various relations constitutive of the museum"(Fraser, "Museum Highlights," 107). Jane simultaneously reinforced Fraser's project as performance, while also becoming a discursive site of language and speech. Jane physically existed as Fraser, but the content of her tour constantly displaced the audience's relational-positionality to Fraser: so that the audience is repeatedly forced to negotiate between Fraser-Jane and Fraser-Museum and Jane-Museum.[4] Through stating her identity, Fraser rendered a performative utterance, that is "the uttering of the sentence as part of the doing of an action" and the "the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action"(Austin, 42). As J.L. Austin writes: "If a person makes an utterance of this sort we should say that he is doing something rather than merely saying something"(42). Fraser's role became ambiguous, she was marked in the intervening liminal period between all "fixed points of classification,"(Turner, 232) and her identity oscillated through her own conscious displacements and through the altering perception of the audience through the space of the tour.

In order to call attention to the institutional framework, Fraser, through language and gesture, oscillated between various discursive positions by assuming multiple identities that allowed her to place herself in conflicting discourses in relation to the institution. As Fraser constantly displaced the position of the museum, she also subjected herself to the same displacement.

Museum Highlights is filled with these bizarre, contradictory moments, which culminate in Fraser rapidly approaching the yet-unnamed gift shop near the entrance to the museum: "...for $750,000 you could name the Museum Shop. You know, I’d like to name this shop, um ... Andrea. Andrea is such a nice name." Fraser steps away from the group, turns around and re-address them: "This is our Museum Shop, Andrea, named in 1989 by Mrs. John P. Castleton, a onetime museum guide and eternal art appreciator"(120). Recreating the response of the audience to her tour is limited to Fraser's comments. During a visit to Vancouver in late 1999,[5] Fraser was asked about the visitor reaction during the performance. She drew attention to the differences between those visitors "in the know‚" versus those that had stumbled upon her tour unaware, and indicated the anxiety that manifested between the two positions. An anxiety she also felt in her awareness that she was actively alienating one group to the purpose of the talk. While the visitor is aware that it is Jane Castleton who addresses them, at no time can the visitor clearly separate Andrea Fraser from Jane Castleton. Through the textual manipulations, the visitor is forced to reconstruct a contesting identity.

Performativity, discussed by Judith Butler first in Gender Trouble and later in the reformulated Bodies that Matter, is a concept directly related to Fraser’s strategies. Performativity, according to Butler is: "...not a singular act, but a repetition and ritual which achieved its effects through its naturalisation in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration"(Butler, Gender Trouble, xv). In other words, through the naturalised repetition and ritual of constructed behaviours and gestures, an expectation is created that "...produc[es] the very phenomenon that it anticipates"(xiv). The notion of repetition and ritual is reiterated through Fraser's role as Jane Castleton. The tour marks out a space of difference in the museum, both through its assumption of an alternate form of information-presentation, and through Fraser's repetitive displacement of language. The audience is aware, at least by the end of the tour, that this is in fact a parodic manipulation of an actual tour. Yet, this does not negate the project’s possible "success."[6] Butler is specifically concerned with the performativity of gender, but the notion of performativity is not confined to that of gender, and by extension of identity-politics,and can be used in relation to the performativity of any socially constructed or implemented identity. When Fraser adorns her body with carefully chosen items, she is aware of the importance of the audience's perception of her identity during the performance. But, Fraser's repetitive performativity of an alternate identity, namely Jane Castleton, in Museum Highlights is a manufactured identity, a drag show in Butler’s theorisation.

For Butler, the drag show is the manufactured-externalisation of an internalised identity:

InSITE 97: Inaugural Speech (1997) was part of an exhibition-project situated between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico. The mandate of the exhibition proposed, through culture, to foster greater relations between the United States and Mexico. Fraser's performance took the form of a welcome speech, addressing the numerous patrons and visitors that had been invited to the opening day festivities. Fraser wanted to draw attention to the economic, social, racial and political demands that defined the InSITE project, to show how the exhibition was constructed by and for specific groups and individuals. During the speech Fraser assumes five separate identities, both male and female. She begins as Andrea Fraser‚ with the use of humour, and the engagement of the audience is immediately apparent:

What both Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson are advocating is an increase in audience participation and awareness. If the institution is serving the audience, then their desire is that the audience must be aware of the ways in which they are being served. It is the manner in which they choose to subvert passivity that is most interesting. Jurgen Habermas argued that the "commodification of the content of culture is central to the shift from an active, educated or trained culture-debating public to a passive unenlightened culture-consuming public"(Ward, 77). Fraser is actively resistant to passivity, but her performances are subversively constructed, and their concealment of sources and their textual manipulations only function as critiques through the awareness of the audience. For a passive audience, Fraser's speeches have the possibility of being received as fact. At the moments of humour, as in InSITE 97, the audience is aware of participating in a critique. But in Museum Highlights, the manipulations are so carefully hidden, that Fraser’s speech has the ability of being received as information, leaving the audience feeling disconnected from the action.

When I first began this project, I felt that this possible disconnection of the audience from Fraser’s performance signalled a communicative failure. I felt that the alienation that manifested in the audience reaction in InSITE 97 meant that the audience was unaware of the purpose of the intervention, and using Butler's notion of performativity, I constructed an argument with the assumption that Fraser played with it, but ultimately implemented it. By adorning her body with carefully chosen items, Fraser was aware of the importance of the audience’s perception of her identity during the performance. However, by carefully looking at Fraser's strategies it becomes apparent that she is using Butler's performativity for its subversive potential. By Fraser naming herself as an alternate identity, it is not sufficient to say that she re-creates that identity. The act of naming, a reiterative practice in Fraser's work, constructs a boundary, while also repeating an "inculcation of a norm"(Butler Bodies that Matter, 8). "I’m the redneck son of a poor dirt farmer"(InSITE 97). Who is the perceived speaker? Fraser’s physical presence exists within a gendered space, she is an artist, a woman, and as she adamantly points out, a woman of Puerto Rican descent. So who is the redneck son of a poor dirt farmer? Fraser’s identities are constructed through the synthesis of associated gestures, language and speech, and most importantly, through the reiterative practice of naming. As is apparent with the audience's reception, simply calling herself "Gayle's husband‚" is perceived as a performance by the audience, and as entertainment. Yet the possibility for a critique is not subsumed by the perception that it is a humorous performance. In fact it is at the point of possible alienation that agency becomes inscribed both onto the body of Fraser and in the perception of the audience: just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalised performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself(Butler, Gender Trouble, 186). Fraser's assumption of identities becomes the focus of her critique - allowing her to call attention to the performative status of the naturalised identities constructed through the institution, and the naturalised position the institution assumes. Fraser's performative utterances and her performativity through reiterative, linguistic rituals construct an identity through which she speaks. By invoking a collective memory the alternate-identity exists in the memory of the audience through the referential citations, and the performativity of associated gestures and ideologies that she constructs through speech.

This conception of agency is related in part to Butler's distinction between parody and pastiche. In the moments of humour in the performance, the audience is forced into an active position: practices of parody can serve to reengage and reconsolidate the very distinction between a privileged and naturalised gender configuration and one that appears as derived, phantasmic, and mimetic - a failed copy as it were(186). In Fraser's construction of the alternate identity, does it appear as "derived, phantasmic and mimetic?" The answer to that question is not as simple as it sounds. Fraser's physical presence does not allow her to be completely subsumed by the alternate identity. Yet, her speeches are constructed so that the audience cannot separate her authoritative voice from the identity speaking. So when it is Governor Wilson speaking, the audience is simultaneously listening to the words of Andrea Fraser and understanding the politics of Governor Wilson. And, when the audience's laughter becomes strained and resistant, it does not mean that the project fails, rather it is at that point that its success becomes most apparent. The discomfort, which I call alienation, is a repelling, but also a coming together‚ recognition of participating in a critique. Museum Highlights provides little help in reconstructing the audience‚s reception of her project, but InSITE 97 illustrates the oscillation that occurs between the receptive and resistive possibilities. Fraser's projects function in this audience reception, she addresses the audience, makes them part of the performance by invoking the collective memory of "us‚" and "we." But Fraser's performances alienate an audience without the referential framework to decipher the constructed identity and make the collective associations required to shift the speech from an utterance to a critique. The displacement of language creates an anxiety for the audience, which is part of the purpose of the project. InSITE 97's political speeches alter meaning drastically through the associative voice. No longer is Andrea Fraser performing the role of Governor Pete Wilson, she is the voice of Peter Wilson. The identity of Governor Wilson becomes performatively inscribed onto her body. Her constant shifting creates an anxiety for the audience that functions to both affect change and create resistance.

If I replace the notion of anxiety with alienation, the function of project shifts in focus. Bertold Brecht's concept of Verfremdung,(Fuegi, 5) translated most closely as "alienation‚" accounts for Fraser's simultaneous creation of "attraction/fascination‚" and "repelation‚": "To make, in an appealing way, an object strange, yet at the same time to make it familiar and attractive"(208). For Brecht, alienation is not a negation of audience participation, but a site of hyper-participation, when the listener is forced into an active role. Is then Fraser's performance a reiteration of Brecht's Epic Theatre? I make this point from Walter Benjamin's The Author as Producer, where Brecht's concept of theatre desires not to "reproduce conditions," but instead to disclose and uncover them (Benjamin, 100). By using elements of montage, as Fraser does with her constructed speeches, Brecht sees the form compelling the audience to take up an active position, for, as Benjamin puts it "there is no better starting point then laughter"(100-1). If it is Fraser's purpose to create Brecht's notion of Verfremdung, then her performance, as with InSITE 97, fulfils its intended function.

But is Fraser then simultaneously alienated in her occupation of the space between production and consumption? Fraser's desire to actively construct a sense of alienation is directly related to her notion of the service-product project. And her refusal to assume a form that would allow consumption is related to this. As Benjamin points out, if a form "ceases to be a compelling motive for decision and becomes an object of comfortable contemplation; it ceases to be a means of production and becomes an article of consumption"(97).In October magazine in 1997, Fraser proposed a discussion of the position of "service-project‚" artists, and sought to analyse what occurs when artists work to form critiques in the service of those very institutions they are critiquing. Fred Wilson along with Renée Green and Judith Barry debated the paradox of these projects, but ultimately agreed that the potential for success is greater than any possible contradiction. Fred Wilson writes:

Fraser's strategies rely on her position as an artist: the performance is constructed on the framework of an artistic endeavour. This labour, which is tied to Fraser's concept of the service-product, calls attention to the complexities of ethnicity, class and gender in relation to the compartmentalising of art (the institution) and life (the institutional demands). Fraser's ability to demand an oscillation between alienation and fascination suggests the potential of the work in eliciting an active response from the audience. Instead of concluding that the "...critique fails because of the perception that it has entered into and been legitimised by the very institution it critiques,"(Ward, 78) it is much more constructive to conclude that Fraser's project does in fact achieve success in its creation of alienation. For as Judith Butler points out: "[t]here is a subversive laughter in the pastiche-effect of parodic practices in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects"(Butler, Gender Trouble, 187). In concluding the progression through liminality, Victor Turner marks the final stage as the moment when an individual re-enters the social framework in an altered state. At the conclusion of her performance, the audience's positionality to Fraser has altered, they are forced to constantly negotiate through her contesting identities and she is re-aggregated into the space of the museum as an artist. And, ultimately, the audience is refused assuming a position of passivity.