| Institutional Critique, Andrea Fraser noted recently, is no longer possible. Her work since then, most notably her deeply affective tears, plumbs a gesture towards a new form of art, one that reengages with social totality. If discourse was the mode of rationality appropriate to postmodernism, then her tears, which come at a time when language fails, reveal discourse's limit. Institutional Critique is no longer possible, she claims, but what is? Does she mourn its loss? Does she mourn its confident anti-totalizing gesture? I argue her tears are an attempt to grasp the totality, the sociality, of an emerging world no longer effectively structured along lines of alienating individualism, a world in crisis. |
