Mobilization:CHRIS KRAUS

Interview: Katie Geha

The author, artist, filmmaker, and cultural critic Chris Kraus visited the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art and Creative Writing Program in 2015. One night during her visit, she read from her recent Lost Properties, a slim publication that provides an account of the work of Rolling Jubilee, a project by an activist group called Strike Debt that purchases debt for pennies on the dollar, then abolishes it instead of collecting it. On another night, she read from her in-progress biography of the late writer Kathy Acker.

In 1990 Kraus made a proposal to Semiotext(e)—an independent publisher of theory, criticism, fiction, and philosophy, founded a decade earlier by her then husband, Sylvere Lotringer, and known for its Foreign Agents series, which presented works by French theorists in English, often for the first time. Kraus’ series, Native Agents, added to this repertoire significant works by radical, often female American writers; Acker, as well as Eileen Myles and Lynne Tillman, were among its published authors. Kraus meanwhile published her own work, including / Love Dick (1997), Aliens & Anorexia (2000), and Torpor (2006), all of which experiment w ith—and, variously, fuse— forms of memoir, fiction, reportage, and portraiture.

As Kraus’ host, I had the pleasure of ferrying her around Athens, GA, for two days, during which we continually discussed writing and art. Inevitably, conversation also touched upon our respective lives. As we sat down in the lobby of her hotel to finally record ourselves, Kraus turned to art criticism as a form of reportage. She cited her writing on Tiny Creatures, the now defunct Los Angeles DIY space featured in her book of essays, Where Art Belongs (2011), as well as Semiotext(e)’s participation in the last Whitney Biennial, and the money and politics behind making, teaching, exhibiting, and writing about— and within—contemporary art.

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Katie Geha: A lot of what we’ve discussed over your visit is a kind of writing that could be described as "chronicling”— in which, rather than interpreting an event or action, you present your research in a straightfor­ward manner.

Chris Kraus: I prefer straight reportage to lyrical fiction— I’m not big on lyricism in fiction writing. The interest in reportage led me to read­ing some of the early English histories of the high Middle Ages, which were mostly called chronicles. They're both subjective and factual; I'm fascinated by that.

This kind of chronicling or straight reportage is evident in your early writ­ing and even in the art sections of I Love Dick. I’m thinking in particular of the passage about the painter R.B. Kitaj, whose work generally seems rife with metaphor.

Well, I just happened upon that show, and didn’t know anything yet about his work. In that case, it was just a matter of faithfully tran­scribing what I saw in the paintings. And, learning more about the discourse around Kitaj’s work later on, those impressions turned out to be not too far o ff the mark.

The projects that you choose are also projects that maybe aren’t encapsu­lated in an object— or projects that are ephemeral, [and] so might need that chronicling for them to continue to exist.

That's very true. It’s more a matter of becoming interested in some­one, or a group of people, and their ongoing work. Most of the work I discussed in Where Art Belongs— both the obscure and the cel­ebrated—took place within groups, overtime. Consciously or not, time became a material. I was happy to get a Warhol grant to write the long piece about Tiny Creatures, a gallery that had already disbanded— what magazine would want an 8,ooo-word story about that? But I thought it was fascinating to use this group as a case study, and trace their very particular, and consequently paradigmatic, history. Like in life, there was definitely a narrative arc.

This idea of the “case study” is interesting— as if the work you do is a type or form of presenting evidence.

It’s all evidence! Case studies are used in anthropology and sociol­ogy works as a means of illustrating how larger theories play out in particular circumstances—they’re part of a double helix between the macro and the micro. Actually, I think of Semiotext(e)'s fiction list as a series of "case studies” that illustrate and humanize the premises set out in more general ways through the theory we publish. Fiction itself is a case study; it allows you to see how circumstances play out in individual lives.

It also seems to me that the case study doesn’t try to extrapolate meta­phor from the evidence in order to create another case; it just is what it is.

Yes, that's the trick. The implications are all there within the work, but they're implicit. It's up to the reader to see it within a larger matrix. What you said in the car about interning at the Chinati Foundation— about how you were told not to explain anything when giving the gallery tours, but to simply describe the work— it's a bit hard-core, but it sounds right: if people aren’t told how to interpret a work, they may actually encounter it fresh, for themselves.

Yet with your project on the Rolling Jubilee there [seem] to be some implicit messages going on— one of which might be a critique of MFA programs. I know that you start off by stating that there are too many art students, and discussing the relationship between debt and the MFA degree. Though I don’t think it is necessarily the main objective of Rolling Jubilee—they aren’t necessarily calling out MFA programs.

In Lost Properties, the monograph where I discuss the Rolling Jubilee, I write a little bit about how strange it seems that all kinds of humani­ties disciplines have migrated into MFA studio art programs. I visit these schools, and people are writing novels, translating books, DJing, archiving, and running after-school literacy programs. It's a sad fact that there's little place for these things anymore but in the gallery sys­tem. It would be hypocritical to criticize MFA programs— because here we are now, in this nice hotel, discussing contemporary art, courtesy of your institution. But I do think the model will change in the next half-decade or so. Andrew Berardini recently wrote a very convincing piece on [Momus.ca] about the need for a switch away from the MFA towards a more specialized, and less expensive, institute model, like the Whitney Independent Study Program has been running foryears. Credibility doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to grad school accredita­tion— it’s something people invent as we go along.

Money, its exchange, and the transparency of that exchange are at the heart of a lot of your projects, and certainly too with the Rolling Jubilee.

Money is the juice that underlies everything. It’s how things work.

And in terms of political activism, was [it] also something that drew you to write on Rolling Jubilee?

Yes. For a while [my Semiotext(e) co-editors] Sylvere Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti and I were concerned that, despite the important books on economic and critical theory we’ve published, most of these books were European. We were doing very little to cover domestic, topical, activist work. We started the Interventions series to remedy this, and the almost 30 monographs that Hedi commissioned for his Whitney

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Pamphlets [Whitney Biennial, 2014] included some very strong, activist-oriented texts on US issues by people like Jennifer Doyle and Jackie Wang. I was thrilled to discover Rolling Jubilee's work, because they were deploying the strategies of conceptual art to do activist work. The idea was not just to shine a light on the enslavement cre­ated by debt, but to create ways to overcome it. They've since moved on to organizing unions of people in debt to the same large corporate lender, in order to negotiate better rates. This, like the Fight for $15 workers’ movement, seems critically important, and also achievable.

In terms of mobilization— which includes art as a political act, and the crossover of activism and art and everyday life— you have also discussed the crossover of literature into art.

I’ve found that my fiction has been much more widely read in the art world than in the literary world, and I’m not alone in this. The mainstream literary world is still about 100 aesthetic years behind the visual art world ... techniques and worldviews that have been received ideas in the art world for the last century are still marginalized as "experimental” in the literary world.

And now you’re writing on Kathy Acker, a writer who also was very much embraced by the art world.

Kathy began in the poetry world on the West Coast, and around St. Mark’s in New York in the 1970s, but her work took on this glamorous edge when she entered the art world. Her first books were published by [Frederick Castle and] Leandro Katz's press TVRT and financed by William Wegman, and then by Printed Matter, an art press in New York. She had the good luck to be picked up by commercial publishing as a punk icon in the mid-1980s, and promoted as that. But the first people who really "got” Kathy’s work were in the art world.

Most of the women’s lit you’ve published in Native Agents— there is a group of women who find these texts, these women’s voices, incredibly vital.

' Yes, it ’s true! And I think there’s also a parallel "girl culture" now that sometimes does, and other times does not, cross over into the main­stream literary world. Definitely a great deal of female presence in mainstream literary culture came out of an informal, Internet, books- being-passed-around female community. Still, not much of this has reached, say, The New York Times.

But Semiotext(e) did exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in 2014, which is pretty big in art world and in New York cultural terms. Can you tell me a little about the choices you made in that installation?

Hedi conceived our installation, and I think his most important choice was to focus on the creation of new work, rather than just dragging archives into vitrines. We were initially ambivalent about participating, but Hedi saw it as a chance to just continue doing more of what we already do. Jerry Saltz wrote a sneer-fest review about Semiotext(e) and French theory... obviously, he hasn’t looked at our list for the last 20 years! Everyone bashes the Whitney Biennial; i t ’s part of the show. But the pamphlets have proved enduring. Henri Lefebvre’s book-length poem The Missing Pieces keeps appearing in lists of favorite books; Jennifer Doyle’s monograph is expanding into a book. The strategy worked: our installation has a whole other life, outside the institution.

Why pamphlets?Because they are cheap and easy to produce? Realistically, you can commission a w riterto produce something of that length in a short time, more easily than a whole book. We were thrilled that all of these people created original works for the show, despite the Whitney’s extremely small budget.

How do you discover the art you become interested in?I’m not all that aware of everything in the art world. Usually, people approach me, and if it seems interesting, I’ll write about it. Writing about someone’s work entails a huge amount of study— I want to understand it from the inside out, so that means having to take in all o f that person's work. Consequently, once I’ve written about some­body's work, I tend to refer to it for a long time. But, you know, when I travel—going to the art museum in a new city is not something I normally do.

Really? That is always my first question when I travel: where are the museums?

I'm always amazed when I meet people in the art world like you, who really love visual art.

Yes, I’m interested in the art, but as a curator I find myself more and more looking at the structures— what font are they using for the vinyl? What kind of projector is that? How did they make that vitrine?

That’s funny. I’d rather ride the subway to the end of the line or take a walk in the park. Clearly, I wasn’t cut out to be a curator.

Dr. Katie Ceha is a writer, curator, and an art historian. She is the director o f the Catteries at the Lamar Dodd School o f Art at the University o f Georgia, and regularly teaches modern and contemporary art history seminars on artists' writings.

OPPOSITE: R.B. Kitaj, Dismantling The Red Tent, 1964, oil on canvas with collage, 48 x 48 inches[photo: Marlborough Fine Art; courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of A rt collection, © R.B. Kitaj Estate]

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