🏴Untitled 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission included a sexual encounter between Fraser & a collector, which would be recorded on videotape to be produced as a DVD in an edition of five, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera & existing lighting.

Fraser thought about becoming a psychoanalyst after she was commissioned to stage and perform Untitled in 2002, but she got a teaching job which saved her from buying a couch for other people to lie on. Untitled is a strange work, one that claims but sits outside of Institutional Critique (IC), which was always a meta critique of the art institutions that housed it anyway, an injoke for the gatekeepers. Untitled is not so much an injoke, but something niche & risky, which is very unlike the admin aesthetic of IC. I’m a big admirer of how Fraser articulates the artworld - she made me become aware of institutions, the institutionalised artworld, artist, & the contradictions therein. I discovered Untitled much later, which floored me at first, then filled me with questions. Fraser’s Untitled made the New York Times based on the popular & unpopular reception to the 60-minute artwork, a misogynist article that ramped up the spectacle of sex, lies & video tape. Fraser had to warn her parents before the NYT article came out in print, an article her mother hated so much that I wonder if her anger was misdirected. I think when artists talk about risk, Untitled makes them look like formalist snowflakes. Untitled is not IC a la Fraser, because all meta & irony is lost to something much more real. Unless, as Isabelle Graw writes in response to Untitled, we “rethink the idea of critique as a form of abandon”. It appears on the front cover of a monograph of the artist’s work as recent as 2015, an outlier work that wraps Fraser’s work before & after like a skin, like a pregnancy, naked, alone🏴