![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/Chris-Kraus-photo-credit-Reynaldo-Rivera.jpg\")
Chris Kraus. Photo by Reynaldo Rivera<\/p>\n Chris Kraus. Photo by Reynaldo Rivera<\/p>\n
Chris Kraus is an indefinable amalgam of novelist, critic, artist, editor and mentor who, in the Nineties (\u201cpost MTV, pre-AOL\u201d), pioneered a new sort of subjectivised criticism that blended personal experience\u00a0with theory.<\/p>\n
She founded and co-edits the Native Agents series for the \u00a0independent press Semiotext(e) which publishes work by non-mainstream, mostly female American writers working in the first person. Meanwhile, she herself has produced several novels (\u201cI Love Dick\u201d, \u201cTorpor\u201d, \u201cAliens and Anorexia\u201d and the recent \u201cSummer of Hate\u201d) that meditate on the role of women in the sphere of cultural production while simultaneously dishing on art world gossip.<\/p>\n
Kraus has helped to shepherd the radical female \u201cI\u201d to the place it is today. But where is that exactly?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mara Goldwyn: Somehow, somewhere, women\u2019s reports from the sidelines of the art world \u2013 or from the beds of the men at the centre of it \u2013 became the artworks themselves. How did that happen? McCarthy wrote in the clean modernist style of her time. Calloway is channeling the rambling blah-blah-blah Tao Lin style of our time. Either way, the fear and loathing of what women can say about men\u00a0in that most \u201cintimate\u201d state is still there. We\u2019re supposed to be silent witnesses. Though whether sex is really the most intimate thing about anyone is something we could debate.<\/p>\n Which female artists do you think have successfully \u2013 or unsuccessfully \u2013 used confession and self-exposure in their practice? What\u2019s art and what\u2019s just cheap titillation? Can we even make that distinction? When you published your novel \u201cI Love Dick\u201d in 1997 it was a pioneering mix of confession and criticism, and the first person in that case was definitely you. In your fictional works your main characters (Sylvie in \u201cTorpor\u201d (2006) and Catt in \u201cSummer of Hate\u201d (2012)) have since migrated to the third person, though \u201cshe\u201d still resembles you. Can we call this an evolution? Can \u201cI\u201d still be radical? What happened to it? What passes for feminist art nowadays? How did we get from Kathy Acker and Carolee Schneemann to Miranda July and Lena Dunham? So what\u2019s the alternative? I mean, what can work? Does the current epidemic of female over-sharing, not only in the artworld but across Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on, ever feel like the Monster created by these mid-century feminist Doctor Frankensteins? <\/strong><\/p>\n Interview by Mara Goldwyn\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cSummer Of Hate\u201d by Chris Kraus is published by Semiotext(e)\/Native Agents<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Chris Kraus. Photo by Reynaldo Rivera Chris Kraus is an indefinable amalgam of novelist, critic, artist, editor and mentor who, in the Nineties (\u201cpost MTV, pre-AOL\u201d), pioneered a new sort of subjectivised criticism that blended personal experience\u00a0with theory. She founded and co-edits the Native Agents series for the \u00a0independent press Semiotext(e) which publishes work by…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6567,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[525,526,527,528,454,529,530],"class_list":["post-6566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-chris-kraus","tag-confession","tag-feminism","tag-lena-dunham","tag-mara-goldwyn","tag-miranda-july","tag-sheila-heti"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
<\/strong>Chris Kraus: Female writers have always been criticised for any account of their sex and romantic lives. Mary McCarthy published a story in 1941 called \u201cThe Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit\u201d about a young woman \u2013 clearly her \u2013 who slept with a middle-aged businessman on a train and woke up realizing he looked \u201clike a young pig\u201d. The men were all scandalised! Saul Bellow called the piece \u201cbullshit\u201d, and Alfred Kazin condemned her \u201ccontempt for men.\u201d Just last year, a 21-year-old writer named Marie Calloway blogged about a sexual encounter engineered with an older \u201cn+1\u201d type guy \u2013 in graphic detail. She wrote, in a very deliberate, moment-by-moment way, about how it felt, using the phone on her camera to record his cum on her face.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Sophie Calle gained notoriety for her \u201cstalking\u201d of B., with her famous\u00a0 \u201cAddress Book\u201d piece. Frances Stark made a video based on her online sex\/dating chats. Neither of these works disturbed anyone much, perhaps because of the cool and aesthetic way these \u201cexperiments\u201d were staged. So these works were \u201cart\u201d. Other experiments have been more problematic. There\u2019s a huge trend among female writers to use real-life sex-and-relationship experience as material. Ariana Reines, in her magnificent book-length poem \u201cCoeur de Lion\u201d, \u201cconfesses\u201d to hacking into her boyfriend\u2019s email. Arianna has the guy\u2019s number all round; and that was disturbing to some. But, younger women \u2013 especially American women \u2013 are placed in the bind of having to be transgressive AND lovable at the same time. Blame the culture for that! An American \u00a0interviewer asked Canadian writer Sheila Heti how being Canadian and Jewish \u201ccontributed to her identity,\u201d and Heti replied: \u201cWell I AM Canadian, I AM Jewish.\u201d In the US, especially for girls, \u201cidentity\u201d is\u00a0something we have to make up, and have approved, all of the time.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>I abandoned the first-person in \u201cTorpor\u201d because it was a much more personal book. In order to tell the truth about the two characters, I had to treat them as clowns, a very high kind of Punch and Judy show.\u00a0You can\u2019t turn your \u201cI\u201d into a clown, especially if you\u2019re a girl, without people becoming distracted, actually pathologising, your \u201csad lack of self-worth.\u201d I found in both books I could treat my female characters\u2019\u00a0situation more comically by giving them character names. I still use \u201cI\u201d in my critical work; it\u2019s a more mature and intellectual \u201cI\u201d in this case. But I began using character names to convey fiction\u2019s mess of real-life, contradictory experience.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>[Writer] Masha Tupitsyn posted a brilliant critique last week on her Love Dog blog, quoting Miranda July: \u201c\u2018Girls\u2019 is a great show. Sheila [Heti] and I were talking about Lena Dunham\u2019s generation, whom we\u00a0admire. These women are able to make art at a much younger age, without having to go through, like, a punky rebellion like us older feminists have. They already just love themselves. And that\u2019s great.\u201d And\u00a0Masha, I think, nails it when she adds: \u201cMiranda July acts as though feminism is some kind of default or preventative measure \u2013 you\u2019re a feminist because you have no other choice. You don\u2019t have power yet.\u00a0You don\u2019t have access. It\u2019s not a life-long struggle or commitment to social justice. It\u2019s something you have to be until you no longer have to be it. For the record, feminism is not just about \u2018loving yourself\u2019; loving\u00a0ourselves in the way that loving ourselves has come to be defined (\u2018Sex And The City\u2019, HBO\u2019s \u2018Girls\u2019, etc) and accepted is overrated, privileged, and self-indulgent. A lot of assholes love themselves, don\u2019t they?\u201d\u00a0Put another way, Germaine Greer lamented that when the media finally dropped the derogatory word \u201clibbers\u201d to describe the Women\u2019s Liberation Movement, she and her friends were overjoyed\u2026 They didn\u2019t\u00a0realise yet that the very idea of \u201cliberation\u201d was being excised. To cultivate \u201cself-worth\u201d is a far cry from wanting to change the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/strong>The work I love most is the work that doesn\u2019t try to make itself loveable.<\/p>\n
<\/strong>Yeah, and it\u2019s sad when women lose sight of the world in a myopic obsession to self-analyse. But that doesn\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t kiss and tell.\u00a0<\/p>\n