In Conversation: Forrest Muelrath Interviews Chris Kraus

Chris Kraus, Photo Credit: Christie Frields

In Conversation: Forrest Muelrath Interviews Chris Kraus

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the relationship of money to art. This talk is usually negative, apprehensive, or critical. When Dave Hickey, the “doyen of American art criticism,” announced his retirement last October, he said in an interview: “Art editors and critics — people like me — have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It’s not worth my time.”

Hickey’s perspective has long focused on the economics of art: he’s championed the free-market belief that beauty arises from the liberated perspective of the individual art buyer. Given his prominence among critics, Hickey’s retirement perhaps signaled a demarcation of some changing paradigm. Upon receiving this signal I turned to Chris Kraus. Kraus has been building momentum as a voice to those dissatisfied with the art markets since her early writings in Art Forum and her cult novel I Love Dick (1997). Kraus’ writing often focuses on the relationship art has to a specific culture, class. Her books Video Green, and Where Art Belongs trace youthful art movements that exist outside of established institutions, as they rise and fall or become assimilated into the art word. Her most recent published essay, Kelly Lake Store, is about time she spent visiting Mexicali and experiencing its art community, as well as a letter she wrote for a Guggenheim Fellowship Proposal to reopen a general store in the rural Minnesota town of Kelly Lake—a proposal that she admits was a joke. I exchanged a few emails with Chris in hopes to gain some perspective about a potential shift in the realm of art markets.

Forrest Muelrath: In your essay Kelly Lake Store you describe the Mexicali artists’ desire to stay in their hometown, despite many financial drawbacks, as: “radical localism, privileging authentic relationships and shared experiences over the dislocation and competition of the international art world.” Would you mind expanding on that description?

Chris Kraus: I never set out to counterpose the Mexicali experience against the experience of people living and working in international art centers. They’re two entirely different situations. But, what drew me to Mexicali was the thrill of finding the “community” that many artists and activists long for in such, intact and uncontrived. The downsides to the Mexicali situation are obvious: it’s isolate, there are no commercial galleries, it’s dangerous, and much poorer than a U.S. city. But perhaps because of the above conditions, there is a culture intact that’s more sustaining. My only other experience of this was living in the Adirondacks in upstate NY for several years in the 1980s, among people who’d never been to Albany, just 90 miles away! Before cable and internet, the culture maintained an oral tradition. A friend, Christine Macdonald, who moved there from NY to become head librarian in Glens Falls, said she wanted to be there because she felt like she was witnessing the end of something, that in a decade wouldn’t exist any more. And she was right.

FM: How do you imagine radical localism functioning in present day New York?

CK: I don’t know. I haven’t lived in NY since ’95. Manhattan is now the meet-point for people spread out across the boroughs, and I don’t really know what it’s like to live in these other neighborhoods.

FM: Can you relate radical localism to the Occupy Wall St. protests as they transpired via social media and physically in the Finical District?

CK: Occupy was important because it wasn’t just one demonstration, but a commitment of time among people who camped out, or showed up in the park day after day. It could only succeed through its resonance, as a poetic gesture, and I think the fact that all of those people were prepared to put Occupy events before their work and careers and other concerns for those weeks was incredibly powerful.

FM: Do you think you could have developed a sincere community around the Kelly Lake Store between MFA interns and long-time residents of Kelly Lake? If so, do you have any ideas about how to create community in this instance?

CK: Yeah. Like beauty, community is based upon exclusion. Not of people, but of possibilities. Mexicali is many things, but it is also NOT mobility, contacts, opportunity outside itself. I’ve lived in a rural backwater before in upstate NY and it was one of the most memorable times of my life. Just because your focus is so necessarily constricted. Of course it wouldn’t be the same, but if people make a commitment to be anywhere and limit their activities during that period, it will be something.

FM: This concept of forming community intentionally around a creative collective resonates with collectives I know in the outer boroughs. Much like the Tiny Creatures in L.A., there are many groups in Brooklyn and Queens functioning collectively outside of the art world with DIY values. Do you think sincere community can grow out of DIY idealism? How do you imagine contributions from non-profit institution like the Guggenheim would affect a collectivist projects like these art collectives or Kelly Lake Store?

CK: Oh, well, the Guggenheim was a joke. That’s the kind of grant I’d never get, let alone as a visual artist, which I’m not. That said, if it took 60K to launch a project like this, who cares where the money comes from? Does it make a difference? I’m sure ANY 60K, once traced, would have some compromising roots. I think communities come and go—Tiny Creatures was a group of friends who were together for a couple of years. Brooklyn, Echo Park, are first-world settings, the people we’re talking about are mostly in their 20s. It’s funny to me that people talk about the end of Tiny Creatures as a “failure—I think the real “failure” would be if they’d stayed together for the rest of their lives! These are different kinds of community than Pueblo Nuevo in Mexicali, where generations and extended families are connected through relationships and marriages and remaining in that neighborhood over time.

FM: Do you think the Punk culture you were a part of in New York had a community “intact and uncontrived?” What about the celebrity-like intellectual and academic communities you’ve been a part of?

CK: Umm, I wasn’t really part of punk culture. I arrived in NY just in time to go to CBGBs, but I didn’t know any of the people involved. The people I knew were mostly dabblers, poets, actors, academics, and I guess there was a community of a kind that involved being broke, depressed and getting by. No one was pretending to be building a “community”! It was all pretty solipsistic, MY work, MY life … happily there were no illusions about that.  Real communities arise from actual shared work and time. In that sense, my work with Semiotexte has been an ongoing ‘community.’

FM: What about the community that developed within your construction team described in Summer of Hate considering all of the trouble concerned with personal finances? Is labor (restoring apartments, running a store) art? And does art signify community? Does labor signify community?

CK: I don’t know if it’s art, but I personally enjoyed running these construction jobs. It was a bit like making films—you bring all these people together for a purpose, there is a direct time/money equation, though with construction the money part is not so high. Work is so under-rated in our culture! It’s always amazed me how little attention is paid to work, when for most people, work is the great continuity, it’s how you spend most hours of your life. So why can’t something more creative be done with that?

FM: In an interview with Gallerist NY about his retirement from art criticism, Dave Hickey was critical of the Guggenheim. However, he is critical of the bureaucratic institution’s blockage of freedom, which deludes a subjective experience of beauty. Whereas your proposal wishfully asked for them to participate in a project that was all about community, and had little to nothing to do with subjective taste. Do these divergent thoughts simply represent two opposite sides of a spectrum too far removed from the Guggenheim center or is there a correlation?

CK: I thought Dave Hickey’s thing was pretty funny. How can you “retire” from something like art criticism, a totally self-appointed job? Really though we’re talking about the same thing. When he says “beauty,” he means taste, he’s talking about a particular, personal aesthetic. Perhaps Hickey and I have different tastes, but my aesthetic—which involves an ethics—is every bit as particular and subjective as his.

FM: What is the place of the subjective experience of beauty within a community? And what is art’s responsibility to community? Perhaps you can relate these questions to the “Radical Localism” show.

CK: I feel that nobody is responsible to anything or anyone, particularly in art. I agree with Hickey in his distaste for a certain PC piousness. What impressed me most about the scene in Mexicali was that their experience of “community” had none of that.