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Chris Kraus photographed by Christian Werner, courtesy of the photographer<\/p>\n Chris Kraus photographed by Christian Werner, courtesy of the photographer<\/p>\n
Hello Chris, how are you doing?<\/strong> \nGood morning. It\u2019s the Trump Inauguration, and appropriately it\u2019s dark, gloomy and raining. It\u2019s rare that something from the area of\u00a0experimental fiction goes on to take over the mainstream.\u00a0It\u2019s a deeply unheroic book, in many ways.<\/strong> \nIt wouldn’t be a mainstream book if it wasn’t being read in other ways than I originally intended it. The political aspects of the book are overlooked in favour of its lifestyle aspects. There is nothing better than a coming of age story, right? And so it\u2019s being read as a coming-of-age story of\u00a0a middle-aged woman finding her own joy, overcoming the patriarchy, etc. That’s fine, I can’t deny that it’s not there. To be more positive about this aspect of the book, definitely things have changed for women. There is more modern feminism among younger women, and\u00a0things that the book is talking about such as the whole question of male privacy being so sacrosanct. Women are rejecting the unspoken code of omert\u00e0 about their experiences and partners. I came to your work through “<\/strong>Where Art Belongs”<\/strong>\u00a0and your critique of the anti-individualism of art criticism, of art and the MFA system. Are you still convinced that art criticism can be a personal narrative?\u00a0<\/strong> \nThat’s easy – I didn’t invent this. It\u2019s just that things got so skewed in the other direction of people thinking in this completely different bodied, socialist and abstract way of\u00a0art in the last ten or fifteen years that it seemed\u00a0radical and new.
\nThe German translation of “I Love Dick” has just come out, and there’s been momentum building around the book 20 years after it was released. Why this resurgence?<\/strong> \nSomething changed radically two to three years ago, when the book started to be picked up in more mainstream circles, and the book was republished commercially in the UK. We had somebody at Frankfurt Book Fair selling the rights. So it\u2019s come out in 12 or maybe 14 different countries \u2013 it’s come out in China, it’s come out all over the place. And there was a TV show that came out\u00a0almost simultaneously, so it became more of a cultural phenomenon than a literary work.
\nYes, all of a sudden women were instagramming themselves on the metro\u00a0with it, Lena Dunham and various other it girls were heralding it as their bible\u2026<\/strong> \nYeah. I had no control over that, there were all kinds of circumstances that made that happen. It has nothing to do with the literary merit of the book, it just fit into a\u00a0niche of the moment and I embrace that.<\/p>\n\n
“I am such a fabulator. I’m trying to get over projecting onto people what I want them to be” \u2013 Chris Kraus<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nPeople have blasted that to shit in the last five years, and long overdue! I couldn’t believe when “I Love Dick” came out Dick Hebdige actually threatened to sue because of the whole issue about it invading his privacy. That was the whole aegis of the book; the way these second wave feminists were tortured and berated, driven mad.
\nBelittled.\u00a0<\/strong> \nYeah, these crazy cultural double standards. The whole book was exemplary of the issue of women having the entitlement to describe the conditions of their own lives.
\nBut I think that\u2019s become important both in contemporary literature and in contemporary art-making. If you look at artists like\u00a0Molly Soda or the Alt Lit movement, the confessional is at the heart of their practice, which I think helped this resurgence.\u00a0<\/strong> \nI totally agree. While I was researching my latest book, a biography of the late writer Kathy Acker, I came across the artist Anna Maria Pinaka. She invented an interesting concept called ‘Pornographic’ to describe the work that is being made now. The idea pornographic is not, at it’s heart, anything to do with sex. What she describes as pornographic is art work that tries to talk about the emotional relations between the people in the sexual encounter. That’s still very taboo. You have the great clusters. The poet Ariana Reines is one of my\u00a0favourite writers. In her second book “Coeur De Lion”, an epic poem, she describes the social relations between her and\u00a0her\u00a0boyfriend\/lover that she has over the summer while she was\u00a0at the European Graduate School, in great detail. So of course what’s more titillating to us at this point are not the graphic descriptions of sex \u2013 they’re everywhere \u2013 but in the account of what actually happens between two people.
\nI think what’s also very interesting is how The New Yorker credited you with inventing Karl Ove Knausgaard, which was a great turnaround. Normally\u00a0men were\u00a0credited with inventing women. So this is really ironic.<\/strong> \nYeah that’s pretty exciting isn’t it? I never thought of that until people pointed it out. The whole muse thing, I’m such a fabulator. I’ve always had this bad habit – I’m trying to get over it now – of projecting onto people what I want them to be. You idealise the image of that person. If you want to like that person, male or female, sexual or not-sexual, if you have an attraction or an excitement about a person, you kind of exaggerate it so that they\u2019re larger than life so it ends up being nothing about the person at all. And everything to do with your own desires and sadness. Do you have that problem?
\nYes I \u00a0do. Particularly when I was younger. Later, I became more aware of the danger of it and consciously\u00a0tried to stop it.<\/strong> \nWe’ve just created the whole kind of male muse phenomenon, maybe just from doing that too.<\/p>\n\n
“The political aspects of “I Love Dick” are overlooked in favour of tis lifestyle aspects” \u2013 Chris Kraus<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nI was writing a column for an art magazine, “Artfest”, in the late 90s\u00a0and early 2000s. I had just moved to LA and I really didn’t know that much about art. I still don’t, actually I have a very limited knowledge of great art, but I had to come up with a column every three months! So what I did was I ended up writing about all the conditions around me, combining a description of the arts with everything else that I was doing and seeing and thinking and feeling. It was about discovering LA and a lot of it was about living alone for the first time. But I copied that from Gary Indiana, he did something similar in the “Village Voice” in the 1980s –\u00a0he copied it from Jill Johnston,\u00a0who\u00a0did that in the late 50s\u00a0and the early 70s. And I think if we go back into history and art criticism, we can talk about Proust doing\u00a0that and the damn radical depiction of visual art that’s contained within some of the books in “In Search of Lost Time”. I mean there’s a great tradition of writers embracing and describing and understanding and interpreting visual art, and it doesn’t have to come from a purely technocratic and theoretical\u00a0place.
\nBut I feel that’s very rare now, I feel like the\u00a0<\/strong>Bataille<\/strong>\u00a0boys, as you described\u00a0them, won.\u00a0Every single\u00a0young writer that approaches me wants to write \u2018theory\u2019.<\/strong> \nThere have been efforts to bring it back, though. Maria Fusco, an Irish writer,\u00a0started a magazine a few years ago called the “Happy Hypocrite”. This is exactly the kind of writing you’re talking about.
\nIt\u2019s just Germany is the capital of theory, really.<\/strong> \nYes, absolutely. Germany has “Texte zur Kunst”, right?
\nYes (laughs). <\/strong> \nSLEEK would be the opposite pole of Texte zur Kunst?
\nYeah.<\/strong> \nI did a thing with Ariana Reines for Texte zur Kunst\u00a0this year. The questions were just so obtuse and theoretically\u00a0unjust and soft for me. I can’t think that way. It\u2019s not that I can only think about my own little life, but\u00a0when I think about larger things, I like to think about larger things in simpler and more human ways.<\/p>\n\n
“You can’t have philosophy and not speak the language of philosophy. The problem is when people import the language of philosophy into talking about culture” \u2013\u00a0Chris Kraus<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n