Chris Kraus (American writer)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Chris Kraus is a writer and filmmaker. Her books include I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia and Torpor. Video Green, Kraus' first non-fiction book examines the explosion of late 1990s art by high-profile graduate programs that catapulted Los Angeles into the epicenter of the international art world. Her films include "Gravity & Grace", "How To Shoot A Crime", and "The Golden Bowl, or, Repression".
Contents |
Biography
Chris Kraus spent her childhood in Connecticut and New Zealand. After obtaining a BA at a young age from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Kraus worked as a journalist for five years, and then moved to New York. Part of the city's then-burgeoning art scene, Kraus made films and video art and staged performances and plays at many venues. Her work as a performance and video artist satirized the Downtown scene's gender politics and favored literary tropes, blending theatrical techniques with Dada, literary criticism, social activism, and performance art. Kraus continued to make films through the mid 1990s. She now lives in Los Angeles.
Bibliography
- I Love Dick, 1997 (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents).
- Aliens & Anorexia, 2000 (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents).
- Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader by Chris Kraus & Sylvere Lotringer, 2001.
- Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, 2004 (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents).
- LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles by Chris Kraus, Jan Tumlir, and Jane McFadden, 2005 (Black Dog Publishing Ltd).
- Torpor, March 2006 (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents).
- I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, Eileen Myles, Joan Hawkins; Sep 2006 (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents).
Works
I Love Dick
I Love Dick is an epistolary novel. The text, a series of love letters to an elusive addressee, is anchored firmly in a tradition that can be traced back through Derrida's La Carte Postale, the letters of Madame de Sévigné (and their immense influence on Marcel Proust), Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the letters of Héloise and Abelard, as well as art concret and the confrontational performance art of the 1970s. Its implicit conceit is the connection between the novel (in French, le roman and romance: I Love Dick manages to be both a sincere lover's cry and a feminist manifesto, while at the same time destroying the bourgeois novel once and for all. I Love Dick's narrator invents a genre she names, variously, "The Dumb Cunt's Tale", "lonely girl phenomenology", and "performative philosophy", treating, among many other subjects, the paintings of R.B. Kitaj, the correspondence of Flaubert and Louise Colet, the activism of Jennifer Harbury, and Felix Guattari's Chaosophy while deconstructing the institution of marriage and the life of the mind.
"Because most 'serious' fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expression of a single person's subjectivity, it's considered crass and amateurish not to 'fictionalize' the supporting cast of characters, changing names and inisignificant features of their identites. The 'serious' contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the authpr. everybody else is reduced to "characters." Example: the artist Sophie Calle appears in Paul Auster's book Leviathan in the role of writer's girlfriend. 'Maria was far from beautiful but there was an intensity in her gray eyes that attracted me.' Maria's work is identical to Calle's most famous pieces-- the address book, hotel photos, etc.--but in Leviathan she's a waif-like creature relieved of complications like ambition or career.
When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our 'Is are changing as we meet other 'Is, we're called bitches, libellers, pornographers, and amateurs."
Eileen Myles writes, "Chris' ultimate achievement is philosophical. She's turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man. As if her decades of experience were both a painting and a weapon. As if she, a hag, a kike, a poet, a failed filmmaker, a former go-go dancer--an intellectual, a wife, as if she had the right to go right up to the end of the book and live having felt all that. I Love Dick boldly suggests that Chris Kraus' unswervingly attempted and felt female life is a total work and it didn't kill her."
Some say that I Love Dick is not fiction piggy-backed on non-fiction or vice versa, but a sustained critique of the laziness of its readers.
Aliens and Anorexia
Perhaps Kraus's wildest novel, Aliens and Anorexia zooms back and forth in time and location, tracing the life and activism of Ulrike Meinhof, the downtown theatre scene in late seventies New York, the drug experiments of Aldous Huxley, the paintings and writings of Paul Thek, through the narrator Chris's fruitless attempts to make and sell a feature film, "Gravity and Grace", (which takes its title from the Simone Weil volume of the same name). Turning the "I" of I Love Dick even further outward, Kraus writes, "Sartre thinks that those who experience an intolerable situation through their bodies are manipulative cowards. It's inconceivable to him that female pain can be impersonal." Aliens and Anorexia is a kind of archaeology of embodied suffering, following the narrator's Crohn's disease back to Simone Weil's activist mortifications and eventual death by starvation. "All her life," Kraus writes, "Simone Weil suffered viscerally from the collapse of beauty. Without justice and the harmony of social life that it implies, there can be no beauty." And, "Food's a product of the culture and the cynicism of it makes me sick." Further on, "Weil as the anorexic philosopher... Though Friedrich Nietzsche suffered blinding headaches, The Gay Science is not interpreted as a Philosophy of Headaches." A hunger for <i>understanding afflicts the novel's many characters, from a struggling artist in downtown New York who can't bear to eat to New Zealanders who congregate to contact aliens. The real aliens are Simone Weil and a choir of woman radical heroes, none of them saints because none of them, to paraphrase Kraus, loses her intelligence.
Video Green
A series of 23 essays written between 1998 and 2003, mostly in her column "Torpor" in the magazine Artext, Video Green is dense with the literary, the personal, and the culturally marginal, like all of Kraus's writing. A few of the collection's notable essays not about L.A. include the elegaic "Posthumous Lives", about the performance artist Penny Arcade's loving curation of the estate of the filmmaker Jack Smith, and "How to Shoot a Crime," about Kraus's 1987 film of the same name. The volume's first essay and its lengthiest, "Art Collection" echoes both Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" and Wallace Stevens's "Prelude to Objects". The essay finds that "Collecting, in its most primitive form, implies a deep belief in the primacy and mystery of the object, as if the object was a wild thing. As if it had a meaning and a weight that was inherent, primary, that overrode attempts to classify it. As if the object didn't function best as a blank slate waiting to be written on by curatorial practice and art criticism." Reading texts on collecting and abjection, Kraus states, "We are witnessing a daily life that's so contemptible and trite that pornography becomes its only appropriate rejoinder." She follows the idea of collecting through L.A.'s M.F.A. art scene and real estate market, ending up in rural upstate New York with the extraordinary poetry-- and art collection-- of the all-but forgotten William Bronk.
Torpor
Torpor follows Jerome Shafir, a literature professor at Columbia, his wife, Sylvie Green, a writer and filmmaker with an inconclusive career, and their dog Lily through rustbelt New York, Paris, Berlin, and the Eastern Bloc at the dawn of the New World Order. As much a shattering portrait of Holocaust survivor as portrait of a marriage, Torpor is also the portrait of a lady rarely found in literature: a down-and-out intellectual bearing witness to a culture in collapse.
In Torpor, Kraus shifts out of the first-person narration of I Love Dick, employing a kind of free-indirect discourse that has led many reviewers to compare her style and devastating irony to that of Flaubert. In naming her central characters Sylvie and Jerome, Kraus alludes to the hapless, interchangeable protagonists of George Perec's first novel, Les Choses. Perec, a childhood friend of both Torpor's Jerome and Kraus's real-life husband, Sylvère Lotringer, is quoted several times in the novel. Felix Guattari and Nan Goldin also make appearances, among other cultural figures, though Kraus's use of "reality" comes to more subversive effect than a simple roman à clef.
Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series
Kraus founded the Native Agents imprint to publish fiction, mostly by women, as an analogue to French theories of subjectivity. In addition to groundbreaking works of fiction by writers like Michelle Tea and Ann Rower, Native Agents has published notable volumes of poetry by Eileen Myles, Barbara Barg, and Fanny Howe, as well as memoirs and interviews by Kathy Acker, Bob Flanagan, David Rattray, and William Burroughs.
The Chance Event
The Chance Event: Three Days in the Desert: Primm, Nevada, November, 1996. Variously described as "a philosophy rave" and "one of the landmark LA events of the 90s," Chance brought together Jean Baudrillard, Rosanne Alluquere Stone, DJ Spooky, Diane di Prima, the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, visual artists, garage noise bands and 600 participants to investigate the mystery of chance at Whiskey Pete's Casino. The audience lay on the floor while Jean Baudrillard, dressed up as Elvis, lectured on chance, backed up by a band ... The Chance Event was reviewed on the front page of the LA Times and throughout the art press. Highlights were broadcast on European television. This self-supporting event was funded by the French Cultural Service and Art Center College of Design.
