An old review

This is a review I wrote in the last year of my undergraduate degree, for the impossibly fleeting Glasgow Review of Books, which is due an exciting resurgence I'm told. I cringe a little reading some of it, but it was written with a genuine sense of excitement, fuelled by a mixture of ridiculously unstructured theory-intake and the heady air of the 11th floor of Glasgow University's library near exam time, which I've come to miss against all expectations. It also reminds me of meeting some lovely people and friends - which rather saddens me, as I've been terrible at keeping in touch.

I've only edited one part, where I accidentally referred to Sylvère Lotringer as an 'artist'. I never saved it, but a commenter retorted from LA correcting me and, in that strange genre of personalized spam, criticising the whole review's naivety (which was partly intended I'm sure), and Kraus herself. Around the same time, coincidentally (or perhaps not!), I received an email from the author, who somehow stumbled upon the review and offered some extremely kind words. There are quite a few things I'd do differently were I to review (or indeed read) this book today, but I suppose that's always the way.

Chris Kraus, Where Art Belongs

Semiotext(e), 2011

Glancing over the titles and subtitles of the four essays which comprise Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs, one could not be blamed for hastily situating the text within a discourse of epistemic lassitude: ‘You are invited to be the Last Tiny Creature’, ‘No More Utopias’, ‘May ‘69’, ‘The Failed Collective’. A professor at the European Graduate School, Kraus is also a film-maker and author, whose publications range from the epistolary novel I Love Dick to the reader Hatred of Capitalism, which she co-edited with Sylvère Lotringer (a protagonist of this text also). Where Art Belongs is the eighth in a series of semiotext(e) ‘interventions’, the first of which,  The Invisible Committee’s Coming Insurrection, carried a revolutionary, declarative impetus that seems a far cry from the not entirely dissimulating sense of ennui readers initially encounter here. Yet Kraus’s writing ruptures the linear temporality of artistic and theoretical historiography. Whilst manifestos play a central role in connecting the seemingly disparate projects that the book attempts to coalesce, their role is not necessarily that ineluctably performative and creative one that engendered so much activity in the wake of The Coming Insurrection.

In the opening essay on Tiny Creatures, an influential Los Angeles gallery that enjoyed a brief and prolific existence between 2006 and 2009, an artist, analyzing the project’s denouement, explains to Kraus:

You know the book Auto-Dissolution of the Avant-Gardes by René Lourau? Instead of publishing the manifestos written when they start, he compiled the manifestos of why they need to end their projects. I don’t know. I remember feeling sad about it that night – like, that’s the last time I’ll be young, and I mean by that a more ambiguous relationship with time and productivity.

‘Time and productivity’ are indeed central themes throughout Where Art Belongs. A defamiliarizing temporality is part of its strange economy of intratextual and extratextual dynamics, which see the book commence: ‘In the winter or spring or maybe the summer – depending on who and when you ask – of 2006, Janet Kim moved into the storefront at 628 N. Alvarado that would become Tiny Creatures.’ One might justifiably contest that such ambiguity already appears nostalgic, if not affected, in an era in which social media relentlessly records every semblance of an ‘event’. If art should exist or ‘belong’ to the world, however, the role that Kraus assigns it here is one that accords a singular degree of autonomy, from the constraints of everyday time as well as from our long-standing preconceptions about the roles or responsibilities of art’s makers. An essay on the collaboration between fashion photographer David Vasiljevic and artists involved in the Bernadette Corporation - a protean collective working collaboratively behind this fictional, corporate façade - discusses a project where ‘cut adrift from their commercial function, the images matter-of-factly expose fashion photography’s potent but limited bag of tricks for conflating youth and “lifestyle.”’ It’s a conflation that Kraus’s prose delights in, albeit one that can appear slightly dislodging when, after reading the book’s blurb – an excerpt from Kraus’s description of a Vasiljevic fashion shoot (‘the white girl’s clothes are arranged to display soft bulges of fat’) displayed, like a context-less art object on the book’s neon cover – one encounters in the opening pages the idiosyncrasies and hedonism of LA’s art and music scene in the late 2000s. Nonetheless, Kraus’s prose itself - sometimes detachedly laconic, occasionally joyously visceral - is always alluringly anecdotal and self-reflexive, harbouring quotations from Wikipedia and details of the author’s Googling habits alongside elongated treatises on film, illness, homosexuality, and globalization. Although, as Anne K. Yoder noted over at The Millions, less personal than her previous collections of criticism, the style of Where Art Belongs, with its sudden changes in tone, perspective and tense, embodies that ‘ambiguous relation’ mentioned initially, that acts as a harbinger for Kraus’s analyses of a dozen or so projects from the last decade. The fourth, last, and shortest essay, appropriately entitled ‘Drift’, ends the book - save for an extremely short but important addendum on the impossibility of ‘a failed utopian community’ – in diary form, mimicking the textual dynamics of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When we remember that the initial version of Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel took the name Stephen Hero, this structural allusion highlights the theme of heroism, pertinent throughout Where Art Belongs, a topos that is, in the realm of aesthetics at least, inextricably bound up with a distinctly non-standard time.

The Bernadette Corporation’s collaborative ‘epic’ poem, A Billion and Change, provides a model that delineates the book’s most pertinent themes. Investing in a definition that she takes from poet Eilleen Myles – ‘the world is an epic poem’ – Kraus suggests that ‘the job of the poem […] is to describe the present’, aligning her project alongside a continuum of modernist writers, from Baudelaire to Bergson to Badiou, who have conflated ideas of the epic and the subjective immediacy of the present moment. For the author, a transposed fashion shoot, or ‘art direction’ in general, can similarly accede to heroic novelty through the instantaneous coherency of the camera’s ‘freeze’. Although Kraus’s title is never explicitly alluded to, those approaching Where Art Belongs from a literary background will perhaps deduce that it is literature, and more specifically poetry, that finds itself torn asunder from its comfortable habitat, and transposed into the distinct otherness of the gallery space. Kraus relates how the Bernadette Corporation alienated friends and supporters with their intransigent refusal to capitulate to poetry’s mapped boundaries in the twenty-first century, boundaries which reside not in physical books, of course, but in the deterritorialized space of instantly available, repeatable, and distributable texts: ‘No press copies, no posting online, no Xeroxed handouts.’ The format, which the artists hoped would prevent, ‘that effortless transmission’ belies a strategy that is more adherent to the necessary and arguably ‘emancipatory’ distance between artwork and audience outlined by Jacques Rancière’s recent writing, than the vigilance against ‘consumption’ preached by his Situationist predecessors, Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, that has dominated efforts to break down barriers between artists and audiences in recent decades. Contributor Antek Walczak reminisces that ‘a lot of people weren’t sure if it was an art object, and that was good’. Although deliberately designed to evade genres, however, the poem does not seem to strive towards the elevated status of Gesamtkuntswerk either; poetry’s engagement with art has less lofty implications. Ever weary of the quotidian reality behind epic heroism, Kraus contests that art criticism – more precisely, ‘churning out art reviews and catalogue essays’ – is a primary source of income for contemporary poets and writers of fiction, a pragmatic reality that she herself evidently faces.

The ‘where’ of A Billion and Change is located precisely in its conceptual existence within ‘The Complete Poem’, the exhibition presented at New York’s Greene Naftali gallery in 2009, or – even more closely – in the tables on which the 130-page manuscript was displayed. Extending the locus of art and literature into the sphere of commodity marketing represents a break from a merely critical or ironic syncretism of these domains. Kraus traces the pivotal influence of Mallarmé in the work of the Bernadette Corporation: ‘In its 2001 videotape Hell Frozen Over, critic and theorist Sylvère Lotringer stands on a frozen mid-winter lake describing the white space of Mallarmé’s poems while the image-track cuts to a fashion shoot in a loft and this is never ironic because all forms of blankness contain some kind of beauty.’ This axiom of ‘never ironic’ permeates the projects appraised (or at least informs Kraus’s readings); indeed it often appears, less as a manifesto for engaged or committed art, than a precondition arising from the always-already secondary nature of these artists’ sources. Marginal texts of the nineteenth and twentieth century avant-garde are more often than not the explicit influence for the installations scrutinized. The indebtedness of the Bernadette Corporation to La Dernière Mode – Mallarmé’s enigmatic fashion magazine - is highlighted, as is the influence of Walter Benjamin’s correspondence with Gershom Scholem on contemporary photographer Moyra Davey. This definition of ‘texts’ appropriable for modern art stretches beyond written material, incorporating (highly aestheticized) lives themselves; and again it is the marginal that attracts both Kraus and the artists subject to her exegesis. Inspiration is found not least in failed, quasi-imperialist misadventures. The work of Austrian self-portraitist Elke Krystufek is read in light of a structural myth of modernity, the ‘romance of disappearance’: she draws on Bas Jan Ader’s vanishment at sea in 1975, the German Expressionist Max Hermann Pechstein’s exile to Palau following his banishment from the Berlin Brucke group, and Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘literary suicide’, his personal embodiment of his own poetic maxim, ‘I is an other’, during his years spent as a ‘trader, explorer and Arabist’ in North Africa.

Kraus’s hostility to the ironic distancing that marks melancholic and disengaged late-capitalist critique extends to a passionate defence of sixties counterculture, in which the author once again centralizes the prominence of time. After May ’68:

Structural change of course proved impossible. What remained was a widespread desire to reclaim the personal freedom inhaled – first-hand or vicariously – during those days, over time, outside the tempestuous bubble of revolutionary action/reaction. New modes of living were needed, new definitions of “normal”. [Emphasis in the original]

This historiography finds reflection in Kraus’s somewhat irresolute antipathy towards psychoanalysis, that couches a concern for the virtual vanishing act performed by anti-psychiatry and its protagonists (R.D. Laing, David Cooper, Félix Guattari) from the theoretical scene. ‘What would happen if people took sex less seriously?’ is a question whose evaporation Kraus laments, at the same time as she rues the closure of the universe of discourse surrounding the issue of liberation: ‘Why is it that to this day every sexual libertarian movement in history is viewed with a wink, if not a chastising sneer?’ In line with her insistence upon returning to the aporias and vacillations present in marginal texts, Kraus finds in the short-lived magazines of the late sixties effective models of resistance, whose strategies are again laid out in resolutely idiosyncratic manifestos. Of a special issue of Recherches, entitled ‘Three Billion Perverts’, Kraus tells us that ‘no one will ever be sure if the drawing of a penis wrapped in a turban was made by Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Fanny Deleuze, Jean Genet, Guy Hocquenghem, or one of the less well-known contributors whose names appeared on the masthead.’ Kraus pays fidelity to these sexual revolutions with her own performances during the Sex Workers Art Show, to which she dedicates a chapter of the book. Here, poetry, art, performance, and sex work infiltrate each other in a mutually destabilizing way: Kraus describes one act as ‘a very pure form of the V-effect’, and asks of her own literary piece (she was herself a topless dancer), ‘Where else except, perhaps, pre-glasnost Russia or Poland could a writer of literary fiction read to standing-room only crowds of 600 people?’, a pressing question in the age of e-readers and online reading groups. Kraus regards the perennial question of ‘Are you for or against sex work?’ as absurd (‘It’s like asking if someone is “for” or “against” global capitalism’): we can deduce that, in the cultural conditions of neoliberalism, art can belong in unfamiliar and unwanted places, the residue of a heroism of liberation never fulfilled.

Although privy to the almost ubiquitous whitewash of the radical and theoretical projects of the sixties, Kraus is willing to qualitatively differentiate. She is critical of the Situationist dérive (‘rather programmatic and dry’), and stresses the limitations of the methods of institutional critique pursued by the New Left. One is reminded that Rancière, whose recent publications have focused heavily on contemporary art, turned away from the scientific Marxism of Althusser, largely because of his former master’s reluctance to support the spontaneous eruptions of May ’68, and from the pedagogically restrictive conditions that arose in the aftermath of les événements. Perhaps the most vital essay from Where Art Belongs is Kraus’s engagement with Moyra Davey’s photography and writing. Kraus witnesses in Davey an active alternative to what she perceives as stale Situationism: her works ‘insert the psycho in psycho-geography.’ Describing Davey’s work as ‘a kind of gestural poetry – an ability to respond to the present – that can be expressed in various media’, Kraus traces what is also, demonstrably, a novel ability to respond to written texts. Davey describes her Cage-inspired reading practice as ‘flânerie’, and the results garnered appear as a truly exciting antidote to the stagnation that can occur, particularly perhaps in the locus of literature departments, when texts are sanitized, if not canonized, within a coherent and teleological history of ‘theory’. Kraus maps the contours of the photographer’s obsession with one particular letter of Walter Benjamin’s in which he admits ‘I now write only while lying down’, and appears fascinated by a clock. Recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the image instigated Davey’s ‘work about writing, illness, sleep, and the view from the window’. Whilst most will be familiar with the Benjaminian impetus to turn the past into ruins, to make it other in order to recognize it as the past and engage with it as such, Kraus suggests the need to recognize – in, for example, ‘the promise of a permanence that never arrived’ that she witnesses is Benjamin’s ‘Unpacking My Library’ - these lost visions of the future in a way that is subjective, active, and engaged. In other words, she emphasizes ‘correspondence’ as ‘the aspect of Benjamin’s work I see transmitted most clearly in [Davey’s] epic, heroic writing.

Kraus assigns contemporary art with a central role, rather than a marginal or secondary one. Describing Krystufek’s ‘commitment to forging continuity between disparate, disjointed systems’, Kraus deduces that, ‘in this sense, she’s a philosopher, pushing the situations that she creates towards a zany syncretism.’ To read Where Art Belongs is to witness this procedure in action. Unlike The Coming Insurrection, we will probably never see the book being waved deliriously by Glenn Beck, as footage from rioting banlieues competes for screen space with flashing headlines about imminent urban collapse. Kraus’s text is not a collective call to arms, but an incitement to find art, to read in a heroic way, to create a moment – as an individual or within a group – where one’s relationship to the past is dictated only by the chance nature of what the present has thrown at you.