Little Frank and his carp 2001

Andrea Fraser often examines the hierarchical structures of the art world and the relationships between its constituent parts: museums, curators, collectors, artists and audiences. Little Frank and his carp is a humorous and thoughtful critique of contemporary museum architecture. The video was inspired by the audio guide created for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry and celebrated as one of the most iconic museum buildings of the late twentieth century.

Fraser has described the audio guide as ‘a particularly outrageous example of the way corporatised museums like the Guggenheim are packaging artistic transgression and transcendence, subversion and sensuality’. In this work, the artist is seen listening to the guide, which forms the video’s soundtrack. Responding to its suggestive language, Fraser comically follows its instructions, which seem to call for a passionate and rapturous relationship with the building itself. Satirical and provocative, Little Frank and his carp reflects on the capacity for a museum’s architecture to overpower the objects and ideas that it contains.