Kraus

HOW DOES ONE POSITION THE PROBLEM? CHRIS KRAUS INTERVIEWED BY MARTIN RUMSBY, March 2006 Born in the United States, Chris Kraus spent her formative years in New Zealand after her parents emigrated there during the time of the American war in Vietnam. Kraus returned to the United States in 1978, living in New York and becoming involved with the St Marks Poetry project and various experimental theatre groups. Her first film, IN ORDER TO PASS (1982), a hand-made meditation on memory, reflection and nostalgia, was inspired by a trip back to New Zealand. Following that Kraus made TERROISTS IN LOVE (1983), and then VOYAGE TO RODEZ (1986) and FOOLPROOF ILLUSION (1987) - two films about the life and legacy of Antonin Artaud. Kraus then went on to make HOW TO SHOOT A CRIME (1987) a 26 minute long film combining sadomasochism, urbanization and police videography. In 1988 Kraus made THE GOLDEN BOWL (OR REPRESSION), a conflation of Henry James and George Bataille. TRAVELING BY NIGHT (1990) was a video of speculations about the Underground Railroad (the escape route taken to Canada by fugitive African American slaves). Between 1993 and 1996 Kraus worked on a feature film, GRAVITY AND GRACE that failed to generate critical and public responses. Following the disappointment of that experience Kraus turned to writing. Her first novel, I LOVE DICK (1997) is a series of love letters written to love. Her second novel, ALIENS AND ANOREXIA (2000), confronts the troublesome experience of making GRAVITY AND GRACE. A refreshingly honest and insightful writer brimming with ideas, Kraus has also produced a book of art criticism, VIDEO GREEN: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004). In 2005 Kraus completed her third novel, TORPOR. She is also a co-editor with Sylvere Lotringer and Hedi El Kholti at Semiotext(e), America's premiere independent press, publishing writers such Kathy Acker and Lynne Tillman. The anthology HATRED OF CAPITALISM (2001) brings together 25 years of contributions to Semiotext(e). Martin Rumsby: You were born on the East Coast of the United States? Chris Kraus: Yes, I was born in the Bronx, New York MR: Do you have strong memories of your childhood? Kraus: We moved from the Bronx to Milford, Connecticut, a blue-collar town near Bridgeport. Mostly my memories were of my childhood being a complete prison. Not happy memories. MR: Were your family involved with the arts? Kraus: Yes. My parents were oddly disenfranchised intellectuals. Both of them were children of the Depression, from working class families, and had great ambitions, which were nipped in the bud because they had to leave school and go out to work to support their families. My father finally did a few courses at City College but really did not have an education. But they were huge readers and my father worked for Cambridge University Press, in the warehouse. We had, probably 2000 books at home. My father's favorite writers were William Burroughs and Jean Genet. MR: So he was a bit of a subversive influence? Kraus: A totally subversive influence. MR: Which partly explains your punk outlook when you were growing up in New Zealand? Kraus: Yeah. I got it at home. My father was a colleague of Jane Alpert who became a leader of the Weather Underground. She had worked at Cambridge for a while before quitting then being involved with some bombings. She was another childhood influence. My father was full of news about Jane Alpert and other brilliant and interesting women that he knew. MR: Your family moved to New Zealand during the time of the American war in Vietnam? Kraus: Yes. My parents were not actively political but in their hearts they were very dissatisfied, very burnt out on their lives in America. They had this fantasy of New Zealand as being this clean, green, egalitarian, quasi-socialist place. It was a very courageous and bold move on their part. MR: Was it exciting moving to a new country? Kraus: It saved my life. MR: You write about that in your books. Kraus: Having that immigrant experience in your childhood, where reality as you know it is completely cut in half, shattered, no longer exists because you go to a new place and you realize that there can be an entirely other reality. MR: You tried to fit in, got rid of your American accent, tried to be like a Kiwi? Kraus: After I had Marmite rubbed in my hair, the first week of school, I decided to stop being an American. MR: Did you go to university in Wellington? Kraus: Yes. I went to Victoria (University of Wellington, New Zealand). MR: What did you study? Kraus: Political Theory and English. MR: You got involved in politics? Kraus: I gravitated to all the Lefties and the Anarchists, I really found my people. I was very young. I was kind of the baby in that group. I found the PYM (Progressive Youth Movement). And I went to China, with the New Zealand China delegation, and we all came back Maoists. MR: Then you became a journalist? Kraus: That happened while I was still at university, Wellington Publishing Company Scholarship. I got that, it was fantastic because you didn't just get some money, and they gave you a job. From my second year of university I was working full-time on the newspaper, first as a feature writer for the Sunday Times, then I was the TV critic and page editor for the Evening Post. It's amazing that somebody that young can have that responsibility. It happens in a small country. MR: Then you moved back to New York. How old were you when you then? Kraus: I was twenty-one. I had been doing journalism for five years. I looked at my future and thought it would be more or less the same when I'm 45 if I stay here. I had a good journalism job, a nice flat and a car. What I really wanted was to be an artist. And I didn't see any way that I could do that without leaving. I had such an identity as this young successful journalist girl about town. I couldn't imagine having no money and going to live on Holloway Road. MR: Where Doctor Sutch used to hang out. (Doctor William Sutch, New Zealand diplomat, author.) Kraus: So in order to do that. To have that complete identity change I had to go to New York. I really wanted to do theatre, I was interested in theatre. I had been reading, in the basement of the library about theatre artists there. My goal was to meet these people and end up working in the theatre. MR: You became involved with various experimental theatre groups and the St Marks Poetry project? Kraus: Somehow I was able to do that. New York was a very different place. It was this incredibly open city. The city was almost bankrupt. You could rent spaces very cheap. There were artists moving in from all over the place. It was the pre art school era where artists would apprentice themselves to each other. You were very easily able to do that. You just had to have the desire. I offered to Yvonne Rainer to be her unpaid intern and wash her films. You could do that. You could call people up and say, "I wanna meet you." MR: What did you gain from that experience? Kraus: J ust from hanging around these very considerable artists I learned a lot about being an artist, long before I was one myself. MR: When did you begin making experimental films? Kraus: I had been studying acting for three or four years. I had written and performed in some of my own plays. Finally a very close friend and mentor said, 'Let's face it. You are not really an actress.' I had too many problems. And she said, 'But you could be a filmmaker. You think like a filmmaker.' She suggested that I look at this film called WAVELENGTH by Michael Snow. I went down to Anthology Film Archives and asked Jonas Mekas if I could have a look at WAVELENGTH. And he said, 'Twenty-five bucks and I'll project it for you.' So I dug out the $25.00 and sat there in the big auditorium all by myself and watched WAVELENGTH. MR: You met Michael Snow in Toronto last month. He's in his eighties now: Kraus: I got to meet him finally. He's a terrific guy. Completely true to himself and who he was and what he does ... WAVELENGTH completely blew my mind. I had no idea that it could be that way. And that it could be so funny. I guess that I discovered Phenomenology in that moment. MR: I think that the structural movement in North American avant-garde cinema was very philosophical, as the application of philosophical ideas to the mechanics of cinema. Kraus: Yeah. It was totally profound. But there was a great deal of wit involved as well. It was not completely without tongue in cheek. MR: What did you hope to achieve through filmmaking? Kraus: It occurred to me that a film could be a mini utopia. Every time you make a film you are creating a parallel reality, a template of how you would most like the world to be. I thought that about theatre too, but it seemed even truer about film where you are creating this very intense, temporary little world. And there were so many parts to it. The thinking about it part, the film production part - that involved so many people, interfacing with all these other people and getting them to play different roles, creating a group dynamic. Then there's the other part, afterwards, they all go away and there's the editing. You are left with this artifact of the experience, the footage, to make what sense of it, as you will. A whole other story can emerge in the editing. Through every stager you are learning more. It seemed infinitely fascinating and exciting. MR: Did you shoot your own films? Kraus: Sometimes. That was my weakest link, because I'm such a technophobe. Sometimes my friend, the New Zealand filmmaker Annie Goldson, who was in New York at the time, would do the camera. She was very meticulous. She made very beautiful footage. When I couldn't find anybody to do it for me I would pick up the camera and do it myself. MR: Your footage wasn't quite so meticulous? Kraus: No. Kinda messy and hand-held and jerky, like life. HOW TO SHOOT A CRIME 16mm B&W&Colour 26 minutes 1987/88 Uptown meets downtown when philosopher Sylvere Lotringer's interviews with two dominatrixes are intertwined with police documentary video of crime scenes and depictions of urban gentrification set against homelessness. Blending documentary, theatricality and experimental techniques, Kraus equates sadomasochism with urban displacement and the city as a machine that relies on poverty, homelessness and waste to build itself up. The city, which consumes and is then consumed by itself as a locus of crime. "It is so difficult," one of the dominatrixes tells Lotringer, "to get to anything organic," then describes her desire to enact a ritualized killing. In HOW TO SHOOT A CRIME everything seems contrived to promote the rapid flow of capital and waste as capitalism and the city metamorphose into each other and investment as a disembodied form of violence. How, Kraus asks, is one to represent life, society, injustice and death, what are the limits of sexual violence, and how is violence related to the life of the city? Kraus: It was composed out of archival found footage. Sylvere Lotringer, who I met in 1984/85, a Professor at Columbia University was publishing SEMIOTEXT(E), which was galvanizing high theory and the American art world in a new way. It was the late days of punk and gave an intellectual patina to punk. It was very glamorous and exciting. Anyway, I kind of hooked up with Sylvere one way or another who had these videos that he had made. Sylvere is the consummate interviewer. To that point he was not doing any of his own writing. Although he was trained as a very great French intellectual. He had a block about writing. Instead of writing he would interview people. He made interviews with everyone. He interviewed these dominatrixes, Terrance Sellars and Mademoiselle Victoire. One of them being, basically, a prostitute and the other an amateur. A complete zealot of S&M. He had done this over a long period of time. Sylvere was teaching a class called Sexuality and Death at Columbia. Ostensibly, the tapes were to show to his class, but they were a kind of record. So, that was one body of material that had been sitting around. He was fascinated with death, I guess, because of his background as a child survivor of the Holocaust. He met George Diaz, a police videographer, who had been a video artist but had to get a job. So he got one at the New York Police Department. His job was to go to scenes of violent crimes in New York City. When a crime occurs it has to be documented on video. It is shown in the trial as evidence. It can't be edited, because editing would be considered prejudicial to the jury. So George, being an artist and a smart guy, figured that he was being asked to edit in camera. He would meticulously create the crime scene videos in single tracking shots around the crime scene, without any cuts. Composing them in such a way to titillate the jury and capture their interest. So, there was this fascinating body of material, with George talking about it. I looked at them one day back to back with the other material, of the women talking about S&M, asking what are the limits and how far can you push. It occurred to me that here we are talking about the same thing. The crime scene energy was the same energy that was being imported from the S&M dialogs. The interviews were made in a neighborhood called the South Street Seaport, which was just on the cusp of gentrification, the artists were losing their lofts and moving out. I got very interested looking at the crime scene footage. Not just the bodies, but also the location, the exterior locations were portraits of the city. Gentrification has a disturbing energy, that feeling of the very rapid movement of capital. That, in conjugation with the dead bodies. Meanwhile the dominatrixes were talking about death. 'Oh yeah, S&M it's like 50%. Murder is 100%' It was very scary the way they kept thinking you could up the limit, up the limit, up the limit, to the point of murder. MR: How does Sado Masochism relate to the city? Kraus: Certainly we could talk about it in terms of anonymity. Right? MR: Help me. Kraus: Alright. S&M is a very intense, complicit contract between two people. It is a mobile, portable intimacy against the backdrop of complete indifference and anonymity within a large city. I don't think about it in terms of cruelty, per se. I think of it more in terms of complicity and connection, or not. The other way, in the movie, of creating complicity and intimacy was to be murdered and have your body documented. Because then, at least, you exist. For that brief moment you exist as an archive at the NYPD. There's a trial, there's a process, people get involved. An otherwise completely anonymous and meaningless life suddenly becomes the object of interest and documentation. S&M tries to connect that in some other, kinda parallel, way through all its protocols, rituals and power games it creates an intense interaction with a form. Otherwise you just see this vast formlessness in the city. It seems to be formless yet capital is moving, moving, moving. Things are happening although nothing appears to be happening. That was the bad joke about the art world in the late seventies; all this durational work and nothing seemed to be happening. But everything was happening in New York City. The city was being bought and sold, lock, stock and barrel. MR: What about western perceptions of death? Kraus: The experience of death in a large American city is extremely mechanized, brutalized, commercialized. There are no funerals any more. It is considered a huge embarrassment. There is no wake, there is no mourning. They want to get rid of the body as quickly as possible. Months pass and when everybody can clear their schedules and arrange a nice time, on a long weekend, they have the memorial service. It's called a celebration of a life. The fact of death has been completely euphemized and sanitized. When that happens surely life loses a great deal of meaning in the process too. THE GOLDEN BOWL (OR REPRESSION) (16mm film on video, 7 minutes 29 seconds, B&W, 1988) Shots of loneliness and isolation are underpinned by tentative camerawork and a narration which opens as, "It is usually when I am most depressed that I end up meeting someone who attracts me through an irresistible mixture of danger and absurdity. Then things happen." MR: THE GOLDEN BOWL is the favorite of your films? Kraus: Yes. If I could have kept making films like THE GOLDEN BOWL I might have kept doing it forever. MR: How complicit is cinema with capitalism? Kraus: Can I turn the question around and say, How is narrative cinema complicit with capitalism? I see these two as being very intertwined. Capitalism thrives on narrative. Narrative the great narcotic, Brecht and everyone else talked about that. And we see it being proven true over and over again. The Iraqi war has been made a great deal more palatable because of the war narratives that are coming out, memoirs and diaries of returning service people. It is supposed to be an indicator of Generation Y now. The war is being filtered through these personal stories and the more we focus on the personal stories the less we have to deal with the bigger picture of what is really going on. Capitalism does this over and over again. It forces us to hermeticize the small individual story so that we never have to look at what is informing that story. It wants us to see the individual as a very isolated unit. MR: I am thinking of Private Jessica, shot up and captured after blundering into a firefight. The story came out that Intelligence had found out where she was and an elite team of military specialists went in and rescued her from her captors. She was patched up in a military hospital, probably met the President, and then was paraded down the main street of her hometown live on national television. Was there talk of a book or movie deal? Kraus: In fact the Iraqis treated her quite well. MR: There never was a big shoot up. The Iraqis had told the invaders where she was and invited them to take her back. It was all more likely done over a handshake. The official story was a lie, to serve a purpose. Kraus: It added a feminist element to it. The whole package. MR: You go through all this stuff then decide to make a feature film, almost a narrative film. GRAVITY AND GRACE 16mm Colour Sound 87 minutes 32 seconds 1996 A low budget experimental feature which Kraus described, as an amateur intellectual's home video. GRAVITY AND GRACE tells the story of a despairing middle class Kiwi woman, Ceal Davis, who meets Thomas Armstrong, a charismatic mystic who believes in flying saucers. Ceal joins his group of followers at the Extraterrestrial Institute and is contacted by aliens who tell her that the world is about to end by flood. The group prepares to be rescued by flying saucers. When the flood and flying saucers do not eventuate the group convinces themselves that their actions have prevented the catastrophe. A sub, or alternate, plot to the movie involves Gravity and Grace, two small time hustlers in Auckland who fall out with each other. Following a chance encounter with Ceal, Grace decides to infiltrate the Extraterrestrial Institute as an undercover anthropologist. Disenchanted with New Zealand, Gravity emigrates to New York where she lives as a starving artist. The film follows Gravity's life at the lower levels of the New York art world. She meets a writer who complains about his lot, teaches English to semi-illiterates, meets a black man in a bar, then has her work critiqued and rejected by a museum curator. After leaving the museum, Gravity has a vision of a disc of whiteness in the sky. Could it be the alien spaceship prophesized by the Extraterrestrial Institute in New Zealand all those years ago? Kraus: You get sick of nobody coming to see your films. You don't want to live in complete obscurity forever. Feature film is the ticket out of the experimental film ghetto. MR: But it wasn't so easy, was it? You had to go through a great deal of sacrifice and privation, getting bits of money here and there, cobbling the production together, then going from New York to New Zealand to make your film, in Auckland. Kraus: I was very stupid. I saw one part of the puzzle, which the way out was to make a feature film, but I didn't see the other, which is that the feature film then needs to be about characters. And it needs to be driven by a story. It can't be just like an overblown experimental film. I completely miscalculated. I still stand by GRAVITY AND GRACE, I saw it again recently. There is a kind of cringe factor. It had a lot of good things going for it. MR: Alan Brunton's performance is absolutely incredible. Kraus: It is so beautiful. And Jennifer Ludlam. The whole New Zealand part of the film is so beautiful. MR: You send up New York, where Gravity meets the writer on the street and he complains about his publisher. Kraus: The career monologue. Every conversation being a career monologue. MR: Gravity teaching literacy in the community college. You playing the art gallery curator critiquing Gravity's work. There are all these moments and connections that don’t quite hang together, like a nice suit does on a coat hanger. Kraus: The thing was that if I wanted it to be a successful crossover film it has to be about one person and their story, there has to be a love interest that changes the story. It has to take place in a sort of underground milieu that is a little bit cleaned up but feels dangerous. There are the elements that define a successful crossover independent film. And I don't have any of them. I just that that you can do what you want. You need to think about it. If you want to do what you want then you are going to have to be an experimental filmmaker and resign yourself to the fact that not a whole lot of people are going to see your films. MR: What happens to Grace after Gravity moves to New York? Kraus: She becomes Prime Minister. MR: What was the exhibition history of GRAVITY AND GRACE? Kraus: No one showed it ... It was humiliating. MR: You went through hell with that film. It failed. You had spent years working on it. So here you are, a failed filmmaker. Yet you come back really quickly. Bang! You write a novel, I LOVE DICK. I LOVE DICK Semiotext(e) Native Agents, New York, 1997 A fusion of gossip and theory, Kraus' novelistic love letter to love maps her obsessive pursuit of Dick, an aloof English academic, in a series of transcontinental letters and telephone calls. MR: What was that process? Dealing with failure, overcoming this huge defeat, coming back new as a writer. Kraus: I didn't really see writing I LOVE DICK as a triumphant comeback, or even comeback at all. It was an act of complete desperation on my part. I didn't know I was writing a book. Everything that I say in the book really happened. Sylvere, my husband, and I had dinner with Dick, a colleague of his. Dick flirted with me. I responded, I got all fluttery. I wanted to continue the conversation. I didn't know how so I started writing him letters. All of that was true. I wrote one dumb letter after another dumb letter. This is what is so great about romantic love; it can really draw you out as a person. Because you believe that one other person is the only one who really gets it. Who can see and understand you. And you feel driven to articulate that to the other person. I had that experience. One letter is never enough. There's more to say, there's more to say, there's more to say. I kept writing and writing and writing. As I did that I realized that it wasn't just about Dick that I had things to say. I had a whole lot that I needed to talk about in general. I'd been knocking around the art world at that point for about 15 years and for the last 5 or 7 or 8 years I was the wife of a much older and famous man. Therefore I was invisible. I had observed a lot. I had seen careers rise and fall. I'd lived through the horrible plague of AIDS that devastated a whole part of a generation. I'd seen artists become homeless, scavenging junk in trash bins. I'd really seen a lot of shit and I had a lot to talk about. And I hadn't believed, at that point, that I had anybody who would listen. I posited Dick, in my mind, as the perfect listener. I was in love with him. Truly, in my heart, I believed that he would understand what I was talking about. If I could just articulate clearly enough. Not only would he understand, but he would fall in love with me. MR: Love is the greatest subjectivity. Kraus: Is that subjectivity? I always get so confused when they use that word in art school. There are a few words they love: narrative, "I will create a narrative. I will tell a story.' What isn't subjective? MR: The subjectivity of love wells up inside you and takes you over. You become convinced that if you write the letter then it will be reciprocated. Kraus: You are talking about madness. MR: Obsession, art, experimental film, writing. Kraus: It takes you over. It is an obsession. You don't just want to write a story, you want to act it out. Or you have to act it out in order to write it. Madness. MR: You write about GRAVITY AND GRACE in your second book, ALIENS AND ANOREXIA. ALIENS AND ANOREXIA. Semiotext(e), New York, 2000. MR: A fabulous book, an incredible introduction to contemporary art as you skate across the surface of America and make a film in New Zealand. You pull many different ideas together, telling us about the French patriot, philosopher, and martyr Simone Weil and how she threw herself against the world to see what is left after her self has been shattered, to find the essence of her humanity. Kraus: I loved her work. I still do. There's a question there that maybe goes back to your use of the word subjectivity. How books get written. I am not comfortable with the idea of memoir to describe my writing. Memoir would imply that my story is the thing that occupies me the most. When really it isn't. I have always been a reader. Simone Weil's story is as real to me as my own. Reading philosophy, reading theory, reading literature is such a large part of how I live and breathe and what makes up my daily life and experience. When I write the book it becomes like a channeling of all this shit. It's passing through my body. ALIENS was written in real time. I LOVE DICK was also written in real time, you know, 'Dear Dick, I am sitting now up against my pillow and the moonlight is pouring in the window and I'm thinking of you.' We are in the present moment. And the present moment always radicalizes everything. You can break anything out of a stupor by, BOOM! Here we are, I am sitting, the light is in my eye, you are wearing a funny suit and you are looking at me. BOOM! We are right here. I do that in ALIENS AND ANOREXIA. I stay in the present tense, in real time. I am studying these people, these biographies, these other lives. I am talking about them as they are passing through me, through my body, as I am writing the book. That becomes more like a performance. Memoir is supremely retrospective, looking back at this great distance of, perhaps, false wisdom. I didn't believe in that for the writing of ALIENS. I wanted everything to be current, contemporary, right now. Even when you are looking at history. MR: You are like a reporter. It’s not the world news of today that you are reporting on, but more important things. Paul Thek, a celebrated New York artist, leaves America, is shown throughout Europe. Was catalogued. The work was bulky. It became inconvenient. The institutions that had shown his work later dismantled and destroyed it. Even though they had been trusted to look after it. Thek was subsequently written out of art history. It is a terrible violence. The way that art history is created. Kraus: Absolutely. To me that is the real story. Being that there is no such thing that is objectively great, or objectively monumental, or objectively worthwhile. All of that occurs by consensus, what the culture believes is important at that moment. I studied this more in the book VIDEO GREEN - what happens to careers. How they rise and fall. How the whole reading of a work can change over a decade. Like the artist Ana Mendieta, the woman who was pushed out of the window by Carl Andre. She died an untimely, early death. In her own lifetime she was not a very successful artist. There was not a great deal of interest in her work. It looked kind of pathetic and lame. No one was interested. Fifteen years after her death, and not because of the circumstances of her death, the whole mindset changed. Her work now seems seminal, it seems important. She has all these people who are her followers. MR: You said, in VIDEO GREEN, some of that was due to the agency of a gallery. You also talk about the performance artist Penny Arcade as an archivist. Kraus:The Ashes. Penny having all these dead artists' ashes all over her coffee table in her lower East Side apartment. MR: The great Penny Arcade. Kraus: Yeah. MR: Your literary reportage raises the question, what is the difference between journalism and literature? Kraus: I've never really seen that there was any. The literature that I like best was a kind of reportage. I remember the New Zealand writer John Mulgan. I have been a huge fan of his work. He wrote a book called REPORT ON EXPERIENCE, I thought that was breathtaking. That, to me, is the definition of writing. The great journalists produce extremely literary work. The job of the journalist is to report on events as accurately and faithfully as they are able to. You can flip this over to literature by saying that one's own experience becomes part of the event. That's what I try to do when I talk about writing in real time. The writing of the book becomes a report, not just on these external subjects but also on my own experience of perceiving them. I have never liked overly lyrical writing. I have always liked the matter of fact, humble, unassuming and very accurate. MR: Does this go back to your days in the Progressive Youth Movement as social realism? Kraus: No. I think it goes back to working as a journalist, having to write something very quickly. You can't really afford to be precious about the blank page and the empty space. You just need to do it. MR: What about limits, what are the limits? Kraus: I think limits are what you were talking about earlier you were describing the work of Simone Weil. A person pushing themselves to a point of such extremity, where they get out of themselves, they get over themselves, and reach this point of expanded open empathy with everything else that is happening in the world. It is a state very close to madness. The limit, the marker, would be how far you can go and not cross that line over into madness from which there might be no coming back, It’s about pushing yourself really hard to a point of intensity where things start to make another kind of sense. MR: In VIDEO GREEN: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (Semiotext(e), New York, 2004) you talk about contexts and referents, which without context there can be no meaning. Kraus: I think that the context increasingly defines the meaning of the work. MR: In your talk, INDELIBLE VIDEO, you say that all art today is conceptual. Kraus: All art is conceptual because of our reading of it. There is the modernist myth that the work of art exists in a transcendental vacuum and if the work has sufficient power it will move us on its own terms and transport us into another state. The belief that the object itself has that kind of power. Increasingly now the power is created and put upon the object by the system, by the art world, by the critics, by the curators, by what we decide is important. It becomes extremely referential. Nobody in art school can do anything original anymore. It is absolutely impossible. Whatever they do has to, in some way or another, reference one or another part of the history of art ... Is that good or bad? I don't know. It certainly creates this vacuum that Baudrillard talks about in The Conspiracy of Art, where art becomes sucked into the vortex of its own irony. And can no longer escape it. An important recognition is that art doesn't exist apart from the larger world. It is very much part of the larger world and is interesting in so much as it mirrors the larger world. So the politics and the star system and the valuing of meaning in art is completely congruent with the larger culture. I like to look at it that way. There are so many ways to look at something. But to not look at it that way would be to miss out on a lot of what is going on. MR: You also talk about the failure of the artist-run movement and the idea that the transgressive avant-garde has been eclipsed. Transgression is no longer a viable strategy? Kraus: Well it is true. Lenin had the same idea in 1918. Didn't Lenin talk about how avant gardes are very quickly subsumed within institutions? The period in which that now happens is a microsecond. It used to take two decades, now it takes two months. MR: Duchamp said that a work of art has a life of 50 years. After that it loses its original meaning and context and so becomes something else - art history. It is no longer what it was. It has been collapsed. Kraus: What Paul Thek tried to do in the seventies was very amazing and admirable. And I can't see something like that happening again today. They really didn't care about their careers. For six, seven, eight years they disappeared into these remote European towns. They just wanted to please themselves. For a while that gave him great happiness, then he came back to New York and suffered enormously. Because he saw that these other people had become stars and no one was paying attention to his work. MR: He was working in a supermarket. Kraus: Yeah. He was teaching a class at Cooper Union, you can't live on that in New York, so he was also working in a supermarket. Before going to Europe he had been an art star with a big gallery in Soho. He couldn't pick the pieces up again. And no one, toward the end of his life, was really interested. It was only after his death that people started to gather. Then he became an enormous influence on younger artists. So, of course, it wasn't a waste. It did filter out. Mike Kelly took huge swaths of Paul Thek and incorporated it in himself. Mike Kelly, in turn, engenders all these other people. So the artists have a tremendous influence and they live on in the work of other artists. MR: You became involved with Semiotext(e) as a co-editor. How did that happen? Kraus: When Sylvere and I got together as a couple, in 84/85, he had already started doing the little black books - the Foreign Agents series. He was publishing Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guatarri and Lyotard. He had already done, maybe, two dozen of them. I couldn't believe that they couldn't dig up a single woman. That there were no women writing notable French theory. His excuse was that the women were doing psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis did not interest him. I thought that was unconscionable, really fucked, that there would be all this energy in this press and it was publishing only the work of these white men. So I had this idea that I could start another series, like an analog to Foreign Agents and that we would publish first person American fiction that was being written by women that I knew in New York at that time - Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles etc. So we started the Native Agents books, putting out this rap and discourse about how French theory is the theory of subjectivity but our American female work is its radical practice. It was true. We continued. And we put out the anthology HATRED OF CAPITALISM. That was the turning point for us. We had to either become more institutional and professional or go away and die. We became an imprint of the MIT Press. HATRED OF CAPITALISM A Semiotext(e) Reader Edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvere Lotringer Semiotext(e), New York 2001 Surveys 25 years of Semiotext(e) alternating between the high ground of recent European theory and the close-up, street level view of American first person narratives. Includes contributions from Jean Baudrillard, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, Jack Smith, Kate Millett, William Burroughs, Chris Kraus and others. If you want a quick summary of what people have been thinking and doing over the last quarter century then HATRED OF CAPITALISM is the place to start. MR: How did you come up with the title HATRED OF CAPITALISM? Kraus: From the filmmaker Jack Smith. Sylvere did this wonderful interview with Jack Smith. Sylvere brought along copies of his magazine Semiotext(e) which he was proud of. And Jack was like, 'Semiotext(e)! What is that? That's a terrible title. I'd just throw it in the trash. It's not glamorous. I think that you should call the magazine Hatred of Capitalism.' MR: Which you say is ridiculous because everything today is capitalist. Kraus: Right. To hate capitalism is to hate yourself, the world, and everything. Capitalism is the matrix, is everything. But that doesn't mean that we can't talk about it. MR: The publishers of Semiotext(e) are mostly foreign. Kraus: Completely foreigners. Hedi El Kholti a French Moroccan, Sylvere Lotringer a Parisian and me half a New Zealander. MR: So how American is it? Kraus: Not at all. MR: There are some quite beautiful relationships between the texts, in places they flow together as if they had been made for each other. Baudrillard says, "All real violence is on the side of power" to which Nina Zivancevic adds, "It is so much about torn flesh, ruined lives, government cover-ups, and the process of keeping everyone in their own place and those on top firmly on top. I see no hope." Baudrillard calls for theory to challenge the real. For theory to assume the form of a world from which truth has withdrawn, thus becoming an object in itself. Kraus: The way we put the book together was like film editing. To bring things together that don't normally belong together. High theory, now that it has become part of academe, they really want to keep it away from the low trash. People like Nina Zivancevic, Bob Flanagan, the lesbian stuff, the S&M stuff. We saw each of these pieces as such beautiful crystalline slices of thought and slices of that person. We really wanted to bring those people together and let them co-exist side by side and talk to each other within the covers of the book. I'm really glad that you read it that way, as a flow between things, because I really saw it that way. MR: Are the selections in HATRED OF CAPITALISM excerpts from longer works? Kraus: They are all from longer books. MR: Hatred of Capitalism includes the riveting testimony of Assata Shakur, now living in exile in Cuba, on her shooting and arrest by New Jersey State Troopers, serving as a savage reminder of the beast within us all. Kraus: She finally escaped from prison and took refuge in Cuba. She has been living in Cuba for a long, long time. Recently though, I was in Harlem and there were these posters up saying that the Bush regime has offered a bounty of $1,000,000.00 for anybody who can capture Assata Shakur, 'the terrorist' and bring her to justice in the United States. That was horrifying. The woman has lived in peace there for 25 years. MR: Place is given to artists too. John Cage talks about creating relationships between sounds in which nothing is pre-determined, in which there are neither obligations nor prohibitions, and where nothing is foreseeable. For Cage the world is not an object, it is an on-going process of change. "If I pursue anything," he says, "it is the absence of a goal." Kraus: Yeah. That's so great. It is so much like some of the ideas in some of the theoretical texts. It is just another way to say it. MR: We were talking last night about the power of exercising one's will and how destructive that can be. Kraus: That kind of failure of the will. Where you push, push, push so hard for something against all these obstacles until you realize that maybe you should have listened to the obstacles. Maybe you were pushing for the wrong thing. Like when I decided in a very absolute and radical manner that I was not going to make another film. I made that decision after John Hanhardt, the curator at the Whitney, invited me to a meeting. I thought it was because he wanted to show GRAVITY AND GRACE. In fact he wanted to tell me definitively and absolutely why he would never show my work. Why I was a terrible filmmaker. I listened to that and I was really struck by the things that John thought constituted failure as a filmmaker. He said, 'Your work is very intelligent and courageous.' And I thought, what is it about this world where intelligence and courage are a bad thing? Shouldn't we be looking at what the whole game is of what constitutes success in this world? I decided, until I could figure out why John wouldn't show my films then I wouldn't make another film. MR: It seems as if intelligence and courage have been replaced by smartness. Right through to smart weapons which blast emerging economies back to the Middle Ages. Kraus: Right. Smart art, smart weapons. MR: Smart clothes, which brings us back to Dick. Your husband starts writing to Dick too, as the emissary of your affections, your native agent or foreign agent? Kraus: Right. He falls in love with Dick through me. Vicariously. MR: But Dick is more like an absence. Kraus: I know. Dick was like the perfect listener because I imagined him to be. He was like a blank screen to project everything on to. If Dick had written back there would have been no book. MR: Exactly. Kraus: If he had returned my calls, forget it. It would have been just life. MR: The power of unconsummated love. The ultimate subjectivity. Kraus: Absolutely. That's troubadour poetry. MR: Your novels are drawn more by ideas than by conventions of plot or character. Kraus: There are many precedents for the way that I write. Other writers have written the same way. Jill Johnston in the 1960s. There is a tradition. MR: Books of ideas. Kraus: Yes. Books of ideas. Look at Berlin Alexanderplatz in pre Hitler Germany. It gets kind of murky and complicated because I am a female. It is much harder to use the I when you are a female. People find a female I much harder to accept than a male I. They want to read a lot of shit into it in a way that they don't with a male I. I had to deal with that. MR: Why do you write? Kraus: To give an order to things. MR: To sort it out for yourself? Kraus: Totally. To figure out what I think and to give shape and order to the formlessness of my days. MR: How does that shape you? Kraus: For me it’s about getting myself to a certain pitch where I can write well. Where I can have ideas. Where the ideas feel right. MR: You are incredibly prolific. Yet you are flitting around, always moving, in a state of constant flux. Kraus: It gets harder. The busier you get and the more chances you have to get your work out the more I find that I have to block off little bits of time where I do nothing but write. MR: How do you write? What is the process? Kraus: I have a diary. When I wrote I LOVE DICK it became very easy for me to go from Dear Dick to Dear Diary. I just write really freely in my diary. Whenever, wherever, whatever. It feels really good. I don't smoke. I'm in a dreamy hazy state. But when I'm actually working on something, that's when the phone goes off the hook. I'm at the computer, I'm chain smoking, I'm doing it. It becomes almost like being in production for a movie. The diary part is the preproduction, and the sitting at the computer part is production. And the last draft becomes editing, like post production. It takes the first draft to even figure out what you are trying to say. Then, in the second or third draft, you come back to it in a completely different mindset. You also have to be careful not to edit out your dumbest parts. Some of the dumbest parts are the best parts. MR: I'm too vain to do that. Kraus: That's the part that makes it feel alive. I really do have this sense of writing being a performance. MR: So much American work has a real casual informality about it, carelessness sprinkled with humor and the revelation of human folly and foibles. Kraus: Right. And in so doing they create this incredible intimacy between the writer and the reader. MR: There are recurrent themes running through your work - otherworldliness, the loss of individuality, peripheral culture, the creation of art and cultural history, and the failure of love. Kraus: I would amend that to the failure of romantic love ... Part of the project of writing I LOVE DICK was to figure out this romantic love thing. To see if I could succeed at romantic love. In fact, I couldn't. And I didn't. Gavin in ALIENS AND ANOREXIA was an attempt to find the perfect listener and complicity through romantic love. I just gave that up. I came to realize that the relationship that Sylvere and I have maintained over the years, we continue to be married, we have other people in our lives, and we continue to be intricately enmeshed in each other. That would be a much more important kind of love. Where you have internalized the other person to such a great degree, where their self-interest is just as important as your own. You can't divorce that person because they are a part of you. MR: You recently completed TORPOR, (e), New York, 2006) a novel written in the third person. Unhappily married New Yorkers, Jerome Shafir and Sylvie Green set off on a journey across the former Soviet Bloc with the aim of adopting a Romanian orphan. Sylvie believes that only two things can save their marriage: a child of their own, and the success of her husband's long awaited book on the Holocaust. But as they get closer to Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination at Auschwitz and his own childhood survival impede him. As they zig zag and bicker their way through Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia and Hungary, Jerome subverts and frustrates Sylvie's ambition at every turn. They finally get to Romania, a state as desolate and crumbling as their marriage collapses, unaware that the US State Department has issued an advisory warning US citizens not to travel to Romania, nor that the adoption of Romanian orphans is now illegal. Kraus: It is not written in real time. I play with tenses. It's much more personal than the other books. It tells the story of me and Sylvere, they years of our conventional marriage and what led up to it, for both of us. For him, what led up to it was his experience as a child survivor of the Holocaust. All his life he wanted to write about it but he never could. All the years that we were together he was working on this book about the Holocaust, he would never move forward with it and he would never write anything else. He was completely paralyzed by this experience. And I kinda took that into myself. His book was meant to be called THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF UNHAPPINESS. In writing TORPOR I write The Anthropology of Unhappiness for him. I use this funny tense in the book, in French its called the future anterior, and it goes like this, 'I would have been, it would've been, it would have been.' So, you are in the past and the future at the same time and the future is always getting dragged back into the past. That, I decided, was the tense of trauma. People who have had a traumatic, heavy experience use that tense because their future has been made impossible and inconceivable by the past that they have lived through. And they cannot live the present and they cannot live the future without it being colored by this past. PAGE 26