Guest Lecture by Chris Kraus

BIO

Chris Kraus is a critic, filmmaker and author. She wrote I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia and various books on art criticism.

Experimental approach to writing, auto-fiction. Using her own life as a case study, a site of theoretical speculation. In doing so, she manages to complicate the dichotomy between theory and practice. Who are perceived as those in the position to "generate knowledge"?

Both I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia show this experimental approach to writing - the revolutionary, disrupting potential of the first person narrator. What does it mean to claim the I?

"Chris Kraus’ texts show a great fascination with the figure of the artist as loser, which is most famously the case with her 1997 cult novel I Love Dick ... By valorizing losing as a mode of authenticity, Chris Kraus brings to the fore a tradition of subversion within a world of various coded rivalries (between men and women, between overt and shameful desire, between artists in the art market, etc.) and in doing so establishes the art of losing as a radical ethical position." 1

Her writing is associated to the literary movement New Narrative .

Authenticity is paramount in New Narrative, and is possible with a variety of devices, including fragmentation, meta-text, identity politics, explicit descriptions of sex and undisguised identification with the author's physicality, intentionality, interior emotional life and external life circumstances. The New Narrative movement includes many gay and lesbian authors, and the works were greatly influenced by the AIDS epidemic in the '80s 2

"gossip as legitimate art"

New Narrative borrows from highbrow and lowbrow cultures — from canonical literature and from television, popular music, and pornography. 3

Kraus is the co-editor of independent press Semiotext(e) (specified in critical theory, activist texts, art and philosophy). Common denominator of many the publications is that they don't easily fit into one genre, but remain rather genre defiant.

Aliens & Anorexia

is a book that runs parallel the attempted distribution of Kraus' film Gravity and Grace The book is a recounting of the movie production, its afterlife. The book in this way is a documentation of a documentation. The last chapter of the book concerns the script of the movie. This approach of re-mediating I thought interesting for us!

The battlefield, for Kraus, is the body. A prison, as in Plato? Perhaps. But as Weil wrote, the walls that separate two prisoners is also, when they tap on it, their means of communication. Perhaps the body is, after all, our spaceship, the only vehicle we have for transcendence (Introduction Aliens & Anorexia p. 14).

The "idea of movie" is that emotion is a place. It's site-specific. Just as the optic nerve makes cubist cut-ups out of objects for the brain to reassemble, emotion happens in and out. It is a symbolic loop, a country that we enter through our bodies. (Aliens & Anorexia p. 131)

I Love Dick

is an epistolary novel (diary form), reappropriating a form of writing stereotypically conceived of as low art and feminine.

Dear Dick", she wrote, "I guess in a sense I've killed you. You've become Dear Diary" (I Love Dick p. 74)

LECTURE

Have a peak at some of Chris' work beforehand! An overview of work and links to writing as well as film work can be accessed through the following link: https://monoskop.org/Chris_Kraus

For this short lecture I have proposed to Chris that she reads selected a piece of writing for us to read collectively and use as a starting point of our conversation. This can be followed by a short writing exercise.

QUESTIONS / SUGGESTIONS

(please feel free to paste some thoughts and ideas here that I can forward before the meeting)