Institutional gender: from Hans Haacke’s Systems Theory to Andrea Fraser’s feminist economies

This chapter looks at a development within institutional critique as bracketed by the work of Haacke and Andrea Fraser, highlighting their interest in art as a site of social interaction, and focusing on the connection made by Fraser between the personal and the financial transaction. This trajectory nests within two typologies of criticism levelled against institutional critique: one claiming that all criticism is eventually subsumed into the system, and the other arguing that the gesture of exposing contradictions relies on a vulgar notion of political reality. This second position defined aesthetics as the form that makes ineligible what is intelligible on the stage of politics, calling for the analysis of forms of visibility that define the appearance of politics. It is in some ways a formalist argument. In contrast, Fraser’s proposition brought a feminist perspective to institutional critique to show how politics appear in and through the human body. In her synthesis of an identity-based/feminist entry point to the work of institutional critique, Fraser offered a perspective on the making of a political stage and its subjects. Her work compared how gender, the (working) human body, or the artwork appear, exist or mediate transactions, and what form value takes in the process.