Click below for my Rachel Rosenthal PowerPoint Presentation.

Rachel Rosenthal

Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights. She took an unexpecting tour group around the gallery, giving artistic explanations to the non artistic sections of the gallery.

The Municipal Art Gallery “that really serves its purpose gives an opportunity for enjoying the highest privileges of wealth and leisure to all those people who have cultivated taste but not the means of gratifying them.” And for those who have not yet cultivated taste, the museum will provide “A training in taste.” (Fraser, 1991, 109)

She is quoting from A Living Museum: Philadelphia’s opportunity for leadership in the field of art. (1928)

She parodies the arty, bourgeois language that is associated with museum tours.

This is the Grand Salon from the Chateau de Draveil. It’s French, uh, eighteenth century… Few eras in history were more preoccupied with “living in style” than eighteenth century France. (Fraser, 1991, 111, original ellipses)

She also quotes several materials that are condescending and classist.

“The public, who buy clothes and table china and wallpaper and inexpensive jewelry, must be forced to raise their standards of taste by seeing the masterpieces of other civilizations and other centuries.” (Fraser, 1991, 112)

This is entirely quoting The New Museum and its service to Philadelphia. (1982)

She intentionally over-analyses parts of the museum that aren’t supposed to be art.

Addressing a guard’s stool in the corner of the gallery.
In scale and complexity…the most ambitious undertaking…in the great European tradition…abundance and grace…free from time and change… (Fraser, 1991, 114, original ellipses and emphasis)

Overall, one of the clear points of her performance is that the art world looks down on the lower-classes. Yet she performs it in a way that doesn’t come across as preachy. She also uses audience deception well within her performance.

For my performance, I would like to try and experiment with audience deception as well.

Fraser, A. (1991) ‘Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk’.  October, 55, 104-122.

A more recent idea, which I am more likely to develop.

All marketing for the show is for ‘Retreating from Reality by Amanda Gray.’ The posters and Facebook event show a woman in a black dress, whom most people would imagine was Amanda Gray. Everything prior to the show would suggest that the audience were going to see Amanda Gray who would be performing a show about existentialism and perceptions of morality.

When the audience enter they see a chair in a warm wash and an image of the woman in the black dress projected on a screen. A technician (myself) is setting up a microphone and looking busy as the audience enter and settle down. When everything is ready, I will check my phone as though I have received a message. I then speak to the audience:

“Everyone. Hi everyone, I’m afraid the performance is going to be delayed…indefinitely. Our performer, Amanda, she…she doesn’t exist…She’s made up…I made her up…It’s not nice being lied to, is it?”

A partial idea for a show, written in a seminar.

The audience are all given high chairs. Pink wash is spread around the performance area. They enter to a song by the Wiggles. Light fades. Pin spot comes up on a rattle on the floor. A woman walks into the spot:

“I’m going to spoon feed you the story of this production. You aren’t clever enough to understand without my explanation. You are all … babies. You are all in your high chairs being spoon fed Shakespeare or Stoppard. You look to us to come up with your interpretation for you. Then we say ‘well done, who’s a clever baby’. You’re all used to being spoon fed your plots and structures and don’t worry, tonight will be no different. First, we have a character called John. Now, this man is really, really clever. He works as an engineer at a big, big car company. Brum brum. John has a wife, and she’s called Sally. Sally is very nice. Except when she’s having an affair with Peter, the next door neighbour.”

She gets out a picture book with cartoon pictures of the characters.

“Do you remember their names? John. The car man. Brum brum. Yes. Sally, the silly wife. And Peter, the naughty neighbour. Now remember, at the start, John, brum brum, doesn’t know about Sally and Peter. And you’re not meant to either, but if I hadn’t told you now, you would have been completely clueless. Lets sing a song:

John works in a car factory,
Sally’s at home where she makes tea,
Then she sits down to watch TV,
Then she commits adultery,”

The words appear on a screen behind her and she encourages the audience to sing the song.

“Well done everyone. That concludes the first scene of the play and we’ve managed to get all the exposition out of the way. Can you say that? Ex-pos-never mind. Now we’re going to move onto scene two. Now this is a very important scene, because John finds out about Sally’s affair. And this is where our first ‘theme’ comes in. Betrayal. So when you go and crawl over to babble to your friends and play dates about the show, you can tell them all about the show’s ‘theme’ of ‘betrayal’. It will make you sound really clever. You could then compare the show’s theme to – biblical themes/ Say that Sally is representative of Judas and John is like Jesus because both their names start with a ‘J’. They will think you’re a genius. Now when John finds out about the affair, he cuts one of his wrists with a rusty nail, more Jesus imagery, but then, without saying anything, bandages up the cut. You must all be really confused by this, so let me explain. It’s meant to look like John is trying to kill himself, but the audience is meant to figure out that he’s only hurt himself to try and make Sally feel guilty for having an affair. That’s the subtext. But the fact that he bandages himself is a ‘betrayal’ of his true intentions. See? Doesn’t being in the presence of such dramatic complexity make you feel special?”