Chris Kraus: ‘I’m reaching out to people’
The novelist and art critic talks about her travelling role as a pollinator of ideas
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Correspondence is central to Kraus’s work. In I Love Dick (1997), the first of her four novels, Kraus used the epistolary form to blend fiction, autobiography and feminist polemic. Social Practices, her new collection of 26 essays, features transcripts of conversations with artists, as well as a surreal account of a seven-year email exchange with a Romanian woman who wanted Kraus to write about her.
When the students have gone, I sit down with Kraus over coffee and ask if it’s important to her to be available to her readers. “Definitely,” she says. “In my writing, I’m reaching out to people. I never want to work on a scale where I can’t be available to things that interest me. I don’t need a filter.”
At 63, Kraus has more readers than ever. I Love Dick was reissued in 2016, at the same time as Sheila Heti, Leslie Jamison and other members of a new generation of women writers cited its influence.
The following year, it was adapted for an Amazon TV series starring Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Hahn (Kraus is apparently tired of talking about it, so I don’t go there). Its narrator is a writer who is obsessed with a professor of art, while the protagonist in Kraus’s most recent novel, Summer of Hate (2012), is also an art critic. Her fiction can be essayistic, while her essays often read like fiction. Does Kraus see her novels and her art criticism as part of a single project?
“Yes,” she says, speaking softly but fixing me with a firm gaze. “I don’t understand why people are so insistent on genre divisions. When I write, I start with an idea, rather than considering what form it’s going to take. All parts of my life are tied up with the art world.”
The essays in Kraus’s new book were written over the past decade and a half for exhibition catalogues or Artforum and other magazines. They reflect her interest in conceptual art with a social agenda — a subject explored in her 2004 book Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. She is a warm, witty critic, so it’s easy to enjoy her essays regardless of whether you are familiar with the artists she writes about. As Kraus says: “My essays aren’t analytical or discursive. I try to reflect the spirit of the artworks I’m writing about.”
In the final piece, “Resistance”, Kraus combines meditations on seemingly disparate subjects — a plastic coffee scoop, a found letter, the story of Walter Benjamin’s 1926 visit to Moscow — in a beautiful collage essay about loss.
In between these autobiographical pieces, Kraus travels the world, meeting artists. “I’m like a pollinating bee,” she says, “bringing news of one group to another.” With notable exceptions — such as the photographers Ryan McGinley and Kate Newby, from the US and New Zealand respectively — the artists in Social Practices eschew traditional mediums. Why? “The humanities have become degraded and are migrating into the art world,” says Kraus. “Ten years ago, independent film moved into the gallery and now we’re seeing something similar with literature and theatre. People are doing things like teaching, translation and activism under the rubric of art. It gives them more cachet and a wider reach.
In northern Mexico, in Mexicali, Kraus visits Marco Vera, who has set up a cultural centre that is bringing together everyone in the local community, from scholars to gangs. In Dunedin, New Zealand, she meets Tao Wells, who sparked outrage with a grant-funded project that proposed unemployment as a route to sustainability. Back in the US, she talks to Thomas Gokey, cofounder of the Rolling Jubilee project, which, Kraus explains, “raised money to buy up millions of dollars of bundled debt and then wrote it off to start a conversation about the nature of debt”.
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Many of the artists Kraus writes about live, she says, “off the metropolitan grid” (Vera in Mexico, Newby in Germany, Wells in New Zealand). Is this the inevitable consequence of the rocketing cost of living in major cities?
“People are moving to more affordable places,” says Kraus, “so smaller cities have become important in the international art cosmos. In the UK, Glasgow is the obvious example. Yesterday, I gave a reading at TOMA, a free art school in Southend-on-Sea. Recently, I was in touch with artists in Lyon. London and New York are where commercially viable work is exhibited. But they’re not where art is being made.”
Where would Kraus go if, like the students she met at the Royal Academy, she were starting out on a creative life today? “Oh my god,” she says and, for the first time, sounds stumped. After a moment, she says: “I’d live in a cheap suburb within a reasonable commute of a large city. Or I’d find a free study programme. Wherever you are, you have to meet your peers.”
Social Practices, by Chris Kraus, The MIT Press, RRP£13.99/Semiotext(e), RRP$17.95, 296 pages
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