Creative Freedom with Chris Kraus

Joana P. R. Neves: The artist Hannah Wilke was born Arlene Butter 1940 and grew up in Manhattan and Long Island. She died of cancer at the age of 52. output was prolific and consistent. Through constant effort, maintained a visible career. At a certain point, perhaps the early 70s, her work began addressing the following question. If women have failed to make universal art because we're trapped within the personal, why not universalize the personal and make it the subject of our art? To ask this question, to be willing to live it through, is still so bold. In 1974, after producing drawings, ceramics and sculptural wall pieces, many of which involved a tough, ambiguous depiction of traditionally female imagery, Douglas Crimp 1972, for 11 years, Hannah started to insert her own image into her art. I don't know what experiences or conditions in her life precipitated this. Well, she pushed towards it by critics Daphner, who wrote responding to her show of cunts fashioned out of washing machine lint at Feldman in 1972. Quote. There is some wit in this, but it is swamped by aggressive ideology. The ideology is that of women's liberation, female bodies have been shown, but only in an oppressive, sexist manner. Wilke's forthright, repetitious presentation of the most intimate image of female sexuality is intended to be a cure for all this. I don't see how it is supposed to work. It is boring and superficial." Unlike Judy Chicago and her bloated vaginal renditions of Great Cunts in History, a show that every mother in the world could take her daughters to, Hannah never was afraid to be undignified, to trash herself, to call a cunt a cunt. Quote, I want to throw back to the audience everything the world throws at me, Penny Arcade, 1982. Hannah later told the Soho Weekly News how she'd collected material for this work over several years by doing laundry Claes Oldenburg, her companion at the time. Even then, Hannah was a neo-dadaist. Claes Oldenburg, great male universal artist, Shanghai'd. In 1974, made her first videotape. Gestures created one day after the death of her sister's husband. Gestures was, among other things, an expression of grief and dismay, a reaching for the body after death. The critic James Collins gave it two thumbs up in Art Forum. Quote, every time I see her work, I think of pussy, unquote, he declared. An early champion of Wilke's work, Collins described Gestures thusly quote, erotically, Wilke's video was more successful, hornier the sculpture. Why? Well, she's actually in it for a start. The video is probably the best thing in the show because by being in the pieces, ⁓ using just her head and hands, she the folding gestures particularly more meaning, ⁓ stroking, kneading, Preening and slapping her face were interesting, but the folding mouth gestures were the naughtiest Because she's sensuously breaking a cultural rule and that's one definition of erotic Pushing at her lips and then folding them back Using her mouth as a surrogate vagina and her tongue as a surrogate clitoris in the context of her face with its whole Psychological history was strong stuff Wilke's position in the art world is a strange paradox between her own physical beauty and her very serious art. She longs to fulfill her sexuality, but her attempt to deal with this dilemma within the women's movement has a touching air of pathos about it." But don't you see the paradoxes in Hannah Wilke's work are not pathetic, they're polemic. It's like that night Dick when you called me passive aggressive on the phone. Wrong. Gestures throws the weirdness of male response to female sexuality wide open. Meanwhile, Hanna in the work was exploring much more personal and human ground. Quote, Re-Morton told me that when she saw the video, she almost cried. Unquote. Wilke recalled several years later, quote, I exposed myself beyond posing and she saw past it. She saw the pathos beyond posing. Unquote. From this point on, willingly became a self-created work of art. In SOS Starification Object Series, from 1974 to 1979, she turns to face the camera in three-quarter profile, bare tits and jeans unzipped with one hand on her crotch. Her eyes are bare and heavy, her long hair set in housewife rollers, obviously a home job, eight bits of chewed-up gum shaped to simulate vaginas, stuck across her face like scars or pimples." Quote, gum has a shape before you chew it, but when it comes out, it comes out as real garbage. Unquote. She later said, quote, in this society, we use people up The way we use up chewing gum. unquote. In her presence, Hannah always was extremely beautiful. In 1977, she made another videotape called intercourse with in which the answering machine messages left by her boyfriends, friends and family play as she removes the names of the most troubling spelled out in press type from her naked body. Quote, become your own myth, unquote, she started saying. Like every other work of art, Hannah became a piece of roadkill for the art press jackals, torn literally apart. Her naked body straddling interpretations of the hippie man Lucy Lippard who saw any female self-display as patriarchal putty. Hannah started using the impossibility of her life, her artwork and career as material. If art's a seismographic project, when that project's met with miscomprehension, failure must become its subject too. In 1976, she produced a poster modelled after the famous call for visual art subway ads that read, having a talent isn't worth much unless you know what to do with it, unquote. Hannah reproduced it with a photo of her fucked up self. Portrait of the artist as an object. She's wearing a crocheted apron that doesn't hide her naked tits at all and clutching a Mickey Mouse doll. The now famous chewing gum vaginas are arranged like tiny scabs across her body. In a later poster called Marxism and Art, Hannah's wearing a man's shirt flung wide open to reveal bare breasts, chewed up cunts and the wide man's tie. Well, hello and welcome to Exhibitionistas - Notes on Art. I am your host, Joana P. R. Neves, and this is your Art wonderment podcast. Why wonderment? maybe to free yourself from the shackles of likes and dislikes, liberate yourself. ⁓ And today I have a very specific question regards to liberation, actually, ⁓ which is quote, beware of fascist feminism, unquote, the poster reads. From the very start, art critics saw Hannah's willingness to use her body in her work as an act of narcissism. Quote, a harmless air of narcissism pervades this show, unquote, New York Times, 9, 20, 75. This strange descriptor still follows her beyond the grave despite the passionate efforts of writers like Amanda Jones, whether obscurity leads to freedom or not ⁓ and in ⁓ if visibility somehow hinder creative freedom or at least ⁓ affect it not. The reason why I thought of this idea of obscurity is very simple. and Laura Cottingham to refute it. In his review of Intra Venus, Hannah's posthumous show, Ralph Rugoff describes the artist's startling photos of her naked cancer-ridden body as a, quote, deeply thrilling venture into narcissism, unquote. As if the only possible reason for a woman to publicly reveal herself could be self-therapeutic. As if the point was not to reveal the circumstances of one's own objectification. It came from one single sentence of a book that hit me like a ton of bricks a decade ago. And I'm going to read you that sentence without telling you right away what the book is, but I'm going to reveal it very, very soon. So I have it here and I'm going to read the sentence that inspired this episode from page 72. as if Hannah Wilke was not brilliantly feeding back her audience's prejudice and fear, inviting them to join her for a naked lunch. A few smart men like Peter Frank and Gerrit Lansing recognized the strategy and wit of Hannah's work, though not perhaps the boldness and the cost. The fact she was a genius. At any rate, the controversy around her work never agglomerated into major stardom. By 1980, there's a reference to Gravity & Grace and All you need to know here is that it is a film that the artist was trying to produce and grants for. Guy Trebaie was sniffing in the village voice that Hannah's vagina, quote, is now as familiar to us as an old shoe, unquote. Has anybody ever said this about Chris Burden penis? No one apart from Hannah's closest friends and family recognized the sweetness and idealism at the bottom of her work, her warmth, the humanness of her female person. In an amazing text written in 1976, Hannah proved to be her own best critic, quote. So here we go. This is the sentence. In the car, I started thinking once I accept the failure of & Grace, it won't matter anymore what I do. ⁓ Once you've accepted total obscurity, you may as well do what you want. And that's it. This is a sentence. the question of obscurity here is framed through the idea of acceptance ⁓ rearranging the touch of sensuality with a residual magic made from laundry lint or latex loosely laid out like love, vulnerably exposed, continually exposing myself to whatever situation occurs, gambling as well as gamboling, to exist instead of being an existentialist, to make objects instead of being one, But what leads to it? In our heteronormative societies, maybe the elder son is fated to visibility and all the others to obscurity. A beautiful woman, way my smile just gleams, the way I sip my tea. to be a sugar giver instead of a salt seller to not sell out. Hannah Wilke Wittgenstein was pure female intellect. Her entire gorgeous being stretched out in paradoxical proposition. In 1979, Claes Oldenburg, Hannah's partner since the late sixties, changed their door locks while she was out one day and married someone else. She recreated the collection of 50 ray guns ⁓ fated to visibility, whereas women who are not beautiful, are fated to some sort of So here for an artist, ⁓ a white woman who access to grants, ⁓ so ways to finance her projects, not really ⁓ wealth She'd collected for his work and posed naked with them in a series of performerlist self-portraits called So Help Me Hannah, in which she demonstrates and overturns her favorite classic citations of male philosophy and art. Hannah Wilke on Ard Reinhardt, sitting naked in a corner, feeling hopeless, head in hands, high heeled legs apart. She's surrounded by toy pistols and bazookas. What does this represent? What do you represent? The title reads. that she may into to produce it on her own. She finds herself artistic darkness, ⁓ in obscurity. And so here obscurity. feels, at least in the way she describes it, like going back to a sort of original state, a place where nothing was expected of her. But why? Hannah Wilke on Karl Marx posts shakily on the pistons a combustion engine in her strappy high heeled sandals naked body part of the machine. Hannah lunges forward in profile, toy guns in hand, exchange values. Exchange values? Whose? The insertion of Hannah Wilke's complex human presence throws all slogans into question. Her beauty is compelling, but as in gestures, her presence circumvents the pose. This page 72 sentence came from a book called "I Love Dick" by Quote, I have long since resolved to be a Jew. I regard that as more important than my art. RB Kitai and Arnold Schomburg declared. Hannah Wilke said, feminism in the largest sense is intrinsically more important to me than art. Unquote. No one ever called these men bad Jews. The bitterest irony of Hannah Wilke's career is that her imitators who risked much less became art stars of the early eighties. the American author Chris Kraus, a female white author. It was published in 1997 and it sold not more than a few hundred copies. But then when it was republished in 2006, it was received with great acclaim. quote, Wilke's projection of herself contrasts markedly with the more impersonal impersonations of the recent work of Cindy Sherman, whose dress up masquerades are, au fond, no less narcissistic, but somehow easier to accept or digest as art because they disguise the self and parody the suffering, pain and pleasure we sense in real in Wilke's art, Lower East Sims argued in a new museum catalog in 1984. But by then, hailed ⁓ as even the most important feminist book ⁓ of the decades. It was published, this book, by an author. became very quickly an obscure book and suddenly everything shifted completely. Art history had already labelled Wilke dumb, her imitators smart. it is now the book for which author, Chris Kraus, ⁓ is most famous for and which of granted her I would say, sort avant-garde or obscure national treasure in the US and a place in the feminist And a bit on, quote, because we rejected a certain kind of theoretical language, I picked it up from a table at Waterstones. So just to tell you how much sometimes these moments strong. ⁓ ⁓ read a single sentence from it. people just assumed we were dumb, unquote. The poet, Alice Notley said to me in Paris last Hannah Wilke spent a great deal of energy throughout her life trying to prove that she was right. If art's a seismographic project, then that project meets with failure. Failure must become a subject too. Dear Dick, that's what I realized when I fell in love with you. read the title, this kind of ⁓ mesmerizing, strange sort of infantile provocation almost of naming book ⁓ I Quote, of course Hannah did become a monster, unquote. I said to Warren, Neil Luszowski. Warren's a friend and our world personality and critic, a smart and cultivated guy. We were sitting on Mike Kelly's patio at a barbecue catching up on news. Warren knows everyone in the art world. He'd known Hannah since they met in 1975 at the Soho restaurant food. Warren chuckled, quote, yes, she did. dick, but then the cover made the book seem sort of sober. And so in some sort of way, it's a very minimal title and sort of self possessed. I was immediately tempted to pick it up and take it home. And I wasn't disappointed. but of the wrong kind, not a monster on the order of Picasso or, and here he named several other famous males. The problem was she started taking everything so personally. She refused to take a leap of faith. Her work was no longer art." In 1985, Claes Oldenburg made by Hedi L. Kholti. And so this is the Serpent's Tail ⁓ cover that I have. So I'm showing it to the camera for those who are watching. it is really minimal. It is attractive. an injunction against University of Missouri Press. They were preparing a book of Hannah Wilke's work. There's these moments in culture where suddenly there is something in us that makes us or that drives us. and writings to accompany her first major retrospective. In order to protect his privacy, Claes Oldenburg demanded that the following items be removed. a photograph from advertisements for living that depicted Clae's together with Hannah's eight-year-old niece. Two, any mention of his name in Hannah's writings. Three, reproduction of a collaborative poster, artists make toys. Four, quotations from a correspondence between him and Hannah that was part of Hannah Wilke's text, I object. to a particular cultural piece. So, Chris Kraus is a female author ⁓ in New York in but then she and her family moved to New Zealand and that's where she grew up. ⁓ Then spent some time in London, went back to New York where she developed a sort of avant-garde work. She was for a time the assistant of Bourgeois, the French artist who lived most of her life. Clae's fame and the university's unwillingness to defend her made it possible for Oldenburg to erase a huge portion of Hannah Wilke's life. Eraser, erase her, the title of one of Wilke's later works. I explained to Warren about the difference between male and female monsters. Quote, female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party. New York in the US. She developed, works on film, experimental mostly until "Gravity and Grace", which is referred to in the passage that I read to you ⁓ and which comes up often in the book. It is really a sort of ⁓ biographical line that is for Chris Kraus And this book, "I Love Dick", also marks a moment, a shifting moment in her career. They have to understand the reason why." Monstrosity, the self as a machine, the blob, mindlessly swallowing and engorging, rolling down the supermarket aisle, absorbing pancake mix and jello and everyone in town. Unwise and unstoppable. The horror of the blob is a horror of the fearless. To become the blob requires a certain force of will. Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm. So in the 80s, she meets an intellectual called Sylvère Lotringer, or Sylvère Lotringer, as he is called in New York, where he is living contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren, I aim to be a female monster too. Love, Chris. And so he was a prominent intellectual with a publishing house called Semiotext(e). And she starts working with him as an editor. They work together, they live together, they become a couple. all couples can work together ⁓ and not all of can share an intellectual life, ⁓ career, ⁓ life, ⁓ sexual life, ⁓ and the book. else is there to say? The only thing I can tell you is that after reading I Love Dick, the only thing left to do ⁓ to start a "I Love Dick" is going to be very much about it. So the reason why I'm talking about Sylvère Lotringer is not because once we are doing a biographic moment or description of an author, we must immediately revert to their ⁓ It's more because Sylvère is going to be ⁓ a very person in this book, as you will find out. ⁓ Elkins book, Art Monsters. You will not be disappointed. ⁓ females, ⁓ males, intersex people, everyone should read it. Trans people, everyone. It's a really interesting book about visibility as well. and visibility, particularly of ⁓ female identifying people, also, I think, extended to anyone who doesn't have the expectations of society to be something that is perceived as something. He was a character. He was born in 38, so he was older than her. And he wrote his dissertation on Virginia Woolf. He was still in France. That dissertation was supervised by Roland Barthes and Lucien Goldman. And speaking of thing, ⁓ in the case Chris Kraus, but also in the case of Sophie Calle for example, ⁓ obscurity led to exposure, female making art. exposing themselves doesn't really matter. No one is shocked, especially when the female in question is not beautiful like Hannah Wilke. And that's why Chris Kraus' analysis is so interesting and so powerful of Hannah Wilke's work. So writing I Love Dick was a risk because Sylvère Lotringer was famous. So this could have been damaging. It could have been a scandal because there's a suggestion of an autobiographical basis. there's also Sylvère's behavior in the book because if it was indeed true and if these letters were indeed signed by Sylvère it means that this game truly happened and it was ridiculous, exposing, unserious, ⁓ everything that Sylvère wasn't. So Sylvère is really an accomplice here. Can we call him an ally? Maybe. ⁓ So he ends up pals with Leonard Woolf who was the husband of Virginia Woolf. He interviews Vita Sackville-West. He interviews T.S. Eliot. I mean, he is in a very specific moment of culture, of Western culture, European culture. And then he moves to New York and he is also embedded and contributing also through his publishing house, a little bit like Virginia Woolf and Leonard. Also, similarly, Sophie Calle overturned the power structure between the muse and the writer by being unattractive but intelligent, and by not caring to expose herself as ⁓ So obscurity through exposure might be true freedom, because for those who are watching, what do you really ⁓ of the person exposed? What do ⁓ to the culture about me seeing my office, seeing my clothes, seeing my plants, my face. Nothing really except projections and those by definition live on surfaces. worked as a professor as well, ⁓ and he influenced the of students of his, such as Kathryn Bigelow, Marshall Blonsky, art critics Tim Griffin and John Kelsey, and the poet Ariana Reines, for example. So another trait of Silvère Lotringer is that he appears as a quasi-fictional character in quite a few books. So Kathy Acker's "Great Expectations". and "My Mother, Demonology", in "I Love Dick", as you will see, in "Aliens and Anorexia", another of Chris Kraus's books, and in "Torpor", the final of this trilogy, Chris Kraus's trilogy, and in Eileen Myles's "Inferno". So Lotringer is a figure, let's put it that way, whereas Chris Kraus, in this moment of her life, in the so this book was published in 1997, So Chris Kraus a with this book that shifted her career because indeed she stopped being a filmmaker and she became an author and dedicated her life to writing. is not. She is ⁓ wife of Sylvère Lotringer and that is going to be an important aspect of "I Love Dick". So once you have achieved this platform of visibility, Is it a hurdle for creativity? I think this book also talks about this in what it became and how Chris Kraus then handled her career and the fact that she's not keen on being in a platform that embraces things through a superficial based on taglines and onliners says a lot about how she manages exposure. So if you are between peers, which is what Sylvère Lotringer was as well, something that maybe people who are outside of the game played by the white males or the males in general, ⁓ maybe. ⁓ That's also something to aspire having your own group, your own community. And Chris Kraus' posterior work very much focused on female artists, on really So the narrator of "I Love Dick" is Chris herself, but between the first and the third person, because speaks in own voice, but she also speaks of ⁓ herself. husband of the story is her maintaining those friendships and talking about imperfect women such as Kathy Acker whose biography she recently wrote. So is something to be managed. Creative freedom is something that is never an absolute. It is also and always negotiable. ⁓ although Chris Kraus claims not to be of philosophy, she certainly is a critical thinker. ex-husband, Sylvère Lortringer. They separated in 2005. ⁓ And Dick, the Dick of the title, ⁓ is a real... academic, so a real person that really existed and exists still. And I will only leave you one little ⁓ nugget from Chris Kraus. an interview, that ⁓ she has nothing against philosophy. She worked for So Chris, person, the real person, ⁓ Chris, the narrator, both themselves Dick's home with Sylvère. That's the beginning of the book. publishing house that published philosophical books, simutex. What he really is against is this obligation of bringing philosophy into art and bringing philosophical terms into art and not, for some mysterious reason, being allowed to tackle art and to embrace art through writing, through experience. she becomes ⁓ with ⁓ Dick and any normal person would she her husband, obviously, and it becomes the topic of conversation. and not tackle art in other ways, specifically through experience a big, big part of their lives. and personal subjective relationship with it. Why is it frowned ⁓ And I not only agree with her, I also think that everything has its place. It mean that we are against philosophy. She does talk about philosophy in the book and very well and maybe better than those gatekeepers. The thing really is to not forbid any kind of relationship with art and to place in a hierarchical ⁓ order philosophy at the top and experience and subjectivity at the bottom. Neutrality does not exist and it is usually the tone that is given by the gatekeepers because we are all subjective, we're all people with a history. I'll leave you with that. I'm going to read the very first pages of the book. December 3, 1994. Chris Kraus, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker, and Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old college professor from New York, have dinner with Dick, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère's, at a sushi bar in Pasadena. Dick is an English cultural critic who's recently relocated from Melbourne to Los Angeles. Chris and Sylvère have spent Sylvère's sabbatical at a cabin in Crestline, a small town in the San Bernardino Mountains, some 90 minutes from Los Angeles. Since Sylvère begins teaching again in January, they will soon be returning to New York. Over dinner, the two men discuss recent trends in postmodern critical theory, and Chris, who is no intellectual, notices Dick making continual eye contact with her. Dick's attention. you have other suggestions of books that I could read, they're very welcome. Other than that, go to the show's notes. There's links in there and there's also links for you to donate to subscribe to the newsletter. Keep informed ⁓ and you also receive texts if you like reading because that newsletter is makes her feel powerful. And when the check comes, takes out her Diner's Club card. Please, she says, let me pay. The radio predicts snow on the San Bernardino Highway. Dick generously invites them both to spend the night at his home in the Antelope Valley Desert, some 30 miles away. Chris wants to separate herself from her coupleness. my online publication where you get All the other things, all the good stuff that I do. All right. Take care. See you in two weeks. Bye bye. So she sells Sylvère on the thrill of riding on Dick's magnificent vintage Thunderbird convertible. Sylvère, who doesn't know a T-bird from a hummingbird and doesn't care, agrees, bemused. Done. Dick gives her copious, concerned directions. Don't worry, she interrupts, flashing hair and smiles. I'll tail you. And she does, slightly buzzed and keeping the accelerator of her pickup truck steady. She's reminded of a performance she did called "Car Chase" at the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York when she was 23. She and her friend, Liza Martin, had tailed the steelyly good-looking driver of a Porsche all the way through Connecticut on Highway 95. Finally, he'd pulled over to a rest stop, but when Liza and Chris got out, he drove off. The performance ended with Liza accidentally, but really stabbing Chris's hand on stage with a kitchen knife. Blood flowed and everyone found Liza dazzlingly sexy and dangerous and beautiful. Liza, belly popping out of a fuzzy midriff top, fishnet legs tearing up against her green vinyl miniskirt as she rocked back to show her crotch, looked like the cheapest kind of whore. A star is born. No one at the show that night had found Chris's pale anemic looks and piercing gaze remotely endearing. Could anyone? It was a question that had temporarily been shelved. But now it was a whole new world. The request line on 92.3, The Beat was thumping. Post-Riot Los Angeles, a city strung on fibre optic nerves. Dick's Thunderbird was always somewhere in her line of sight. The two vehicles strung invisibly together across the concrete riverbed of highway like John Donne's eyeballs. And this time, Chris was alone. Back at Dick's... The night unfolds like the boozy Christmas Eve in Eric Romer's film, My Night at Maud's. Chris notices that Dick is flirting with her, his vast intelligence straining beyond the pomo rhetoric and words to evince some essential loneliness that only he and she can share. Chris giddily responds, at a.m., Dick plays a video of himself dressed as Johnny Cash, commissioned by English public television. He's talking about earthquakes and upheaval and his restless longing for a place called home. Dick's video, though she not articulate it at the time, is complex. As an artist, she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive. Yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. Years later, Chris would realize that her fondness for bad art Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie. bad characters invite invention. But Chris keeps these thoughts to herself. Because she does not express herself in theoretical language. No one expects too much from her, and she is used to tripping out on layers of complexity in total silence. Chris's unarticulated double flip on Dick's video draws her even closer to him. She dreams about him all night long. But when Chris and Sylvère wake up on the sofa bed the next morning, Dick is gone. obscurity here appears first ⁓ the physique of the author. She describes herself very often in ⁓ terms, so negatively, ⁓ expressions such as pale, anemic looks, never the type for cowboy guys, unseductive. ⁓ She to a character that is not able to seduce the visible men, the cowboy guys, those who have, through their looks, through their power, or through just the fact that society expects it from them, visibility. So in I Love Dick, there is a triangle. We have just heard it form in the beginning of the book. That's how it starts with a sort of love slash sex slash lust slash desire triangle. There are money issues. There is sex or lack thereof. And finally, there are deep musings about art, namely about the American artist, Hannah Wilke. But the structure of the book is very interesting. It's epistolary. It is also diaristic, but it also contains transcriptions of phone calls or of recordings, of voice messages. The plot of the book is obviously a plot that attracts attention. It is adulterous desire, routine and married life. this is not only couple that existed real life fictionalized, but ⁓ the couple ⁓ is an couple. And so they are too to embark on deceit They talk openly about a desire for someone outside of the couple. So this man named Dick, this sort of cowboy figure who was also a professor. and they start strategizing together. about how to handle that infatuation. And before you say anything and before you think anything, there is absolutely nothing that you can refer to that they haven't already, either specifically ⁓ or subrectitiously the narrative Jane Madame Lafayette, of course, the roman à clef. Why am I saying this? Not to frustrate you, but to describe the way ⁓ these people think, but also the context that serves ⁓ as ⁓ the ⁓ the of this novel, of this book, So as their biographies described very well, there is a real interaction. with the works that make up the culture of the 90s. the ⁓ cultural filters that are ⁓ used to evaluate situation, also they're used to create the situation. It is a really playful book where the rules are set out, from other rules that were set out in literature as opposed to real life. And so the friction between real life, ⁓ literature, fiction, documentation, recording and assessment and memory is fascinating in this book, So on page 27, Sylvère Lotringer ends up by describing pretty much ⁓ what this in a PS to Dick, because they start writing to Dick, not really sending the But they start an of epistolary relationship with him, unbeknownst to him and also really acted upon. So Silvère writes a piece at the end of letter. P.S. Thinking about it further, these letters seem to open up a genre, something between criticism and fiction. You told us how you hope to revamp the writing program at your institution along these lines. Would you like me to read from it in my critical study seminar when I visit next March? It seems to be a step towards the kind of confrontational performing art that you're encouraging regards Sylvère." So this is what happens. They start talking about the situation, this infatuation, and they start frantically writing to Dick. But they don't send the letters, at least in the beginning. the tone. It is to me wide eyed sadness, which is another way to describe pure unadultered comedy. This book is see for yourselves and hear yourselves how funny and how immensely explorative these letters are, but also ⁓ what kind of triangle is created here and how ⁓ they relate to Dick. Crestline, California, December 10th, 1994. Dear Dick, on December 15th, I'll be leaving Crestline to drive our pickup truck and personal belongings on our miniature wirehead dash hand Mimi back to New York. Six or seven days, 3000 miles, I will drive across America thinking of you. The Idaho Potato Museum, every landmark that I pass will draw me closer to the next and they'll all be meaningful and alive. because they'll trigger different thoughts of you. We will do this trip together. I will never be alone. Love, Chris." Crestline, California, December 10th, ⁓ 1994. Dear Dick, I bet if you could done this with Jane, you never would have broken up with her, right? Do you envy our perversity? You're so priggish and judgmental, but deep down, I bet you'd like to like Don't you wish you had someone else to do it with? Your friend. Silvère. Dear Dick, come to think of it, why did you even call a Sunday night? The night after our date with you in Antelope Valley? You were supposed to be this cool guy smoking a cigarette behind his bedroom door on Sunday morning, just waiting for us to clear out. you would have been totally in character not to call. So why did you call? Because you really wanted it to continue, right? You came up with this lame excuse about going to get breakfast. At 7.30 in the morning in this tiny town where the grocery store is three minutes away? It took you three hours, Dick, to get that fucking breakfast. So where'd you go? Did you sneak out to meet the bimbo girl who left her abject message on your answering machine? Can't you spend a single night alone? Or were you already fighting the invasion of your mental universe by this couple of cynical, rapacious libertines? Were you trying to defend yourself? Or was it a trap, you set, it the following night with your apparently innocent Actually, that night I picked up the receiver for a moment and heard your voice. Such a small voice, too, for such enormous stakes. You've been holding our destiny in your hands for the last few days. No wonder Chris didn't know what to say. So what's your game, Dick? You've gone too far into it to keep hiding in the distance, biting your nails and listening to some girls or some other girls. You have to deal with what you've created. Dick, you have to respond to the following facts. Dear Dick, I think you won. I'm totally obsessed with you. Chris will be driving across America. We have to talk this over. Sylvère. So this goes on and on and on and on. They write letters. And as you can see, there's a sort of a crescendo. They start fabulating, they start projecting. And at a certain point, they think we should send these letters. They almost do, but they don't. They wrote about 80 pages altogether, the both of them. So they decide that maybe instead of a book, they could produce a sort of avant-garde experimental video where they bring these texts and they pin them on the car, on the cactuses, in the excerpts that ⁓ read, know, you learn Dick called the day after. And Sylvère has also in a few conversations with over the phone with the pretext of doing something together academically. then decide ⁓ that have do something about this. ⁓ And they out that maybe the thing to do to call Dick, tell him about the infatuation the writing propose an of an experimental video. Dick says he needs to think about it. And so they decide to a to his But what happens is that Chris, and up to this point, all of it had been organic together. It had been a of a collaborative effort to explore this triangle and all its possibilities except the physical encounter. And it's interesting to see that in this writing, for Sylvère, it's always more important that the physical encounter hasn't taken place and that they went beyond it in some ways and that it has become something that sort of, think he calls it a meta fuck at some point. And to Chris, there is a sort of ⁓ in regards to the physical encounter until the moment the fax is sent. And so this has become a reality. she starts to feel ⁓ some sort of trepidation, but also desire. And she decides send a secret fax. She writes it, ⁓ but at the of it, she changes her mind and doesn't it. But she does tell Sylvère about And therefore, on page 50, we are already ⁓ the situation of the betrayal without ⁓ physical encounter. betrayal arrives fictional form. But this fictional form comes with real feelings But ⁓ the triangle here may very well be between Sylvère, Chris and us, They specifically mention at a certain point Sophie Calle, who is a French artist whose career was dedicated to fictionalize her own life and her own identity. In one of her first works, Sophie Calle asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her. So she didn't know whether she was being at a certain moment in the day. She had no idea, but she knew that someone would be following her at some point. And therefore this artifice, because of course it was created by her, no one was really interested in knowing about her life, not even herself. was intersecting with life, but it was a fictional device. And therefore fiction creates a sort of framework that renders fictional, at least that intersects with it. there is a ⁓ in the book where Sophie Calle is referred particularly regards to fiction and in regards to another writer. And artifice of intersecting with life here is gendered. And Chris Kraus very adamant in showing the difference between her own device and Sophie Calle device and the device ⁓ used by ⁓ authors. So I'm going to read you the where she mentions Paul Auster Sophie Calle Because most serious fiction still involves the fullest possible expression of a single person subjectivity, it's considered crass and amateurish not to fictionalise the supporting cast of characters, changing names and insignificant features of their identities. The serious contemporary hetero male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero slash anti-hero explicitly is the author, everybody else is reduced to characters. Example, the artist Sophie Calle appears in Paul Auster's book "Leviathan" in the role of the writer's girlfriend. Quote, Maria was far from beautiful, but there was an intensity in her gray eyes that attracted me, unquote. Maria's work. is identical to Calle's most famous pieces, the address book, hotel photos, et cetera. But in Leviathan, she's a waif-like creature, of complications like ambition or career. When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our eyes are changing as we meet other eyes, We're called bitches, libellers, pornographers and amateurs. Why are you so angry? He said to me. There are no messages from Dick that evening on the answering machine. The house is empty, clean. After dinner, Sylvère and Chris sit together on the floor and turn the laptop on. in male fiction, the author the the author slash main is usually either a hero or an anti-hero who basically is also a hero because there is something desirable. There is a process of identification that occurs. Whereas here, there's something about this character that is more than unlikable. She actually is described at a certain point or they describe themselves as unlikable characters, but it's more than that. ⁓ ⁓ not a dignified person. and unlikable characters seem to have been a sort of feminist revolution. One of the people who when this book was published, re-edited, who loved it was ⁓ Dunham, who is famous for having created the show Girls, for acting in it, for being naked in it without the perfect body, and ⁓ claim ⁓ of unlikable character for themselves, the ⁓ female writers filmmakers, is something that is considered to be part of current or at least very recent feminism. But here, what is really interesting is the complexity of this unlikeability. It goes very far. There is real humiliation that is not presented in an S framing. There is no desire from the author. creating relationship with the reader that would be of identification. And that's the real difference. And I think the real transgression of this ⁓ story also that the fiction presenting a sexual fantasy. discussed, collaboratively strategized as being true love, although ⁓ they don't have sex. sex has somewhat ⁓ of a device. ⁓ Desire and lust have become triggers and the real is preserved behind the fiction and that's the real transgression. We ⁓ don't know who this couple is, everything is revealed. And yet the performative, consciously performative act of editing and publishing this book is a curtain that is absolutely So I'm going to illustrate this ⁓ life affected by fiction by reading exhibit D, where Sylvère and Chris converse through simultaneous transcription. So here goes. Sunday, December 11, 1994. 12.05 pm C. Sylvère, what are going to do if he doesn't call? Are we going call him? S. No, can continue this without him anyway. C. But you're forgetting that I really want for him to call. I'm tingling all over, waiting for the phone to ring. I'll be really disappointed if he doesn't call. S: Well, this time you should talk to him. Why let us two white guys decide the course? I got him in. It's your turn now. C: But I'm afraid he's gonna not call at all. What then? Do I call him? It's already feeling like the Frank Zappa song, You Didn't Try and Call Me. S: He'll call, but not today. He'll call when it's too late. C: Sylvère, I hate that. ⁓ But Chris, that's why he'll do it that way. C: If he doesn't call today, I think I'll have to disengage Because you know I'll lose respect. done so much. All he has to do is call. S: But maybe he'll realise we've already done everything in his place. Why disturb it? C: I disagree. He should be curious. If someone called me and said that they'd written 50, 60, 70 pages about me overnight, I'd definitely be curious. You know, Sylvère, I think if this whole Dick thing falls through, I'll go to Guatemala City. I have to do something with my life. S: But Chris, the Antelope Valley is Guatemala. C: I'll just be so disappointed if he doesn't call. How can you continue loving someone who doesn't pass this first and really basic test? S: What test? The adultery test. C: No. The first test is to call. Since their telephone has call waiting, her unshockable friend, Rawer in New York. 10 minutes later. S: So what did Anne think? C: Anne thought it was a great project, more perverse than just having an affair. She thinks it'd make a good book. When Dick calls, shall we tell him we're considering publication? S: No. The murder hasn't happened yet. Desire's still unconsumated. Let the media wait. C: Whining. Why? Seven hours later. C: Look, Sylvère, this is hopeless. We're leaving in two days and I can't think past this phone call. I got a fax this afternoon from a producer who wants to see my film. I didn't even read it. Maybe it's already thrown away. Pause. It's an impossible situation. I don't even know what I want from Dick anymore. Nothing good can come of this. The only thing I'm thankful for is that it's not the 70s and I didn't already fuck him. You know that anguish? Waiting by the phone until the burn and torment finally goes away. Our only hope if for some resumption of our normal lives. What seemed so daring just looks juvenile and pathetic. S: Chris, I already told you he wouldn't call. He has a tendency to pull away. We've taken the decision for him, deciding on his thoughts. Remember the introduction that we wrote for him. In a sense, Dick isn't necessary. He has more to say by not saying anything, and maybe he's aware of it. We've been treating Dick like a dumb cunt. Why should he be like it? By not calling, he's playing right into his role. C: you're wrong. Dick's response has nothing to do with character. It's the situation. This reminds me of something that happened when I was 11 years old. There was this man at the local station who'd been very nice to me. He let me talk over the air. Then one day a cloud came over me. I started throwing rocks into the windshield of his car. It made sense while I was doing it, but later. I felt crazy and ashamed. S: Do you want to throw a rock through Dick's Thunderbird? C. I already have, though mostly I've debased myself. S. No. C. Of course. I've projected a total fantasy onto an unsuspecting person and then actually asked him to respond. S. But Chris, I think his embarrassment isn't in relation to you or me but to himself. What can he do? C. I hate being thrown into such a physical state. When the phone rang during dinner, my face flushed, my heart was pounding. Laura and Elizabeth drove all this way to visit us and I like them, but I couldn't wait for them to leave. S. Isn't that experiencing life to the hilt? C. No, it's just a dumb infatuation. I'm so ashamed. S. But even if his silence hurts you, isn't that what attracted you to him? The fact that he was inaccessible. So I think there is a contradiction there. At least nothing to feel ashamed of. C. I took terrible liberties with another person. He has every right to laugh at me. S. I doubt he's laughing, perhaps biting his fingers. C. I feel so teenage. When you're living so intensely in your head, you actually believe when something happens you've imagined that you caused it. When Leonora OD'd on bad acid from my boyfriend Donald, he and Paul and I sat up all night in the park and made a pact that if Leonora wasn't out of ward 16 tomorrow, we'd kill ourselves. When you're living so intensely in your head, there isn't any difference between what you imagine and what actually takes place. Therefore, you're both omnipotent and powerless. S. You're saying teenagers aren't in their so far in that there's no difference between the inside of their heads and the world. S. So what's happening in Dick's head now? C. Sylvère he's not a teenager. He's not experiencing any feeling of infatuation for me. He's in a normal state, well, whatever's normal for him, wondering how to deal with this terrible, mawkish situation. ⁓ If he's thinking about it, he'll call tonight. If not, he'll call on Tuesday morning. But he will definitely call. C. Sylvère, this is like the Institute of Emotional Research. S. It's funny how what we're after is so fleeting and so easily lost. The only way we can recapture any feeling is by evoking Dick. C. He's our imaginary friend. S. Do we need that? It's so mixed up. At times we reach these peaks of real possession at his expense. But through it, able to see him more clearly than he would ever himself. C. Don't be so presumptuous. You keep talking about Dick, Evissy, as if he was your little brother. You think you have his number? S. Well, I don't have the same take on him as you do. C. I don't have a take. I'm in love with him. S. It's so unfair. What has he done to deserve this? C. Don't you think we're doing this because we're anxious and confused about leaving California? S. No, leaving's our routine. But what would have happened if he'd been involved and willing? C. I would have fucked him once and then he'd never call. S. But what makes all of this legitimate is that you didn't. brought up is the essential thing. You know, I was picturing Dick before as a wicked, manipulative creature, but perhaps he's keeping silence just to give us time. C. To get over him. He wants us to get over him. S. Chris, what sort of strange zone are we entering? To write to him is one thing, but now we're writing to each other. has Dick been a means of getting to talk, not to each other, but to some thing? C. You mean that Dick is God. ⁓ S. No. Maybe Dick never existed. C. Sylvère. I think we're entering the post-mortem elegiac form right now. S. No. We're just waiting for his call. 8.45pm. S. It's so unfair. I guess these silent types make your work twice as hard and then you can't escape because you yourself create the cage. Maybe that's why you feel so bad. It's like he's watching. Watching you do this to yourself. Okay. So I told you in the beginning, there are other issues and there are other references that come up. one of, guess, the ghosts that haunt this book ⁓ is Austen because Chris Kraus talks about obscurity in economic terms. So as I said before, after the triangle come the money issues. That's something that's introduced right at beginning. reason why I talked about the triangle is that because in the book, Chris, as an author, makes it about two men. So she is under the weight ⁓ her husband, who is an incredibly famous scholar, and another who is kind of his doppelganger in a sort of ⁓ masculine uber masculine version. And she's crushing under the weight of the ghost. ⁓ of all those men in the past, who would not be seduced by her and he would not consider her attractive. But the economic angle is really important as well for obscurity. So the money issues. And here I will just say, I don't know why Jane Austen her books are about the obscurity of women and how ⁓ money, the trigger or the device, the literary device, but really the life device that brings women to ⁓ visibility for a at least in fiction, but certainly not in real life. And therefore, what is in Jane novels ⁓ is for the invisible character to be visible through wit or beauty, and then to rise in and and then serve her husband's visibility her obscurity. In ⁓ case of Kraus, she is in a world women can aspire to be visible, or at least can aspire to be authors and to have their work ⁓ come into the platform of visibility that is Contemporary Art and its system. ⁓ page 16, there is the first reference to money. Sylvère never dreamed and rarely knew what he was feeling. So they played a game sometimes that they devised to tease his feelings out. Objective correlative. Who was Sylvère's metonymic mirror? A student at the art school, their dog, the dark canyon storage man. Fully awake around 11, the conversation usually peaked with a passionate discussion of checks and bills. So long as Chris continued making independent films, they'd always be juggling money, thousands here and thousands there. Chris spent time buying or acquiring long-term leases to three apartments and two houses, which they kept rented at a profit while holing up in rural slums. She kept Sylvère apprised of the status of their mortgages, taxes, rental income and repair bills. And luckily, beyond this primitive foray into acquisition, With Chris's help, Sylvère's career was becoming lucrative enough to offer the losses incurred by hers. Chris, a diehard feminist who often saw herself as spinning on a great Elizabethan wheel of fortune, smiled to think that in order to continue making work, she would have to be supported by her husband. Who's independent? Isabelle Hubert's pimp demanded, spanking her in the backseat of a car in Sauve qui peut. The maid? The bureaucrat? The banker? No. Yeah. In late capitalism, was anyone truly free? Sylvère's fans were mostly young white men drawn to the more transgressive elements of modernism, heroic sciences of human sacrifice and torture, as legitimized by Georges Bataille. They scotch taped Xeroxes of the famous torture of a hundred pieces photo from Bataille's tears of Eros to their notebooks, a regicide captured on gelatin plate film by French anthropologists in China in 1902. The Bataille boys saw beatitute in the victim's agonized expression as the executioner sawed off his last remaining limb. But even more inexcusably, they were often rude to Chris. Going out to exchange ideas with Sylvère Lotringer in bars after his lectures in Paris, Berlin, and Montreal, the boys resented any barrier, ⁓ an unseductive one at that, between themselves and the great man. Chris responded by milking money from Sylvère's growing reputation, Setting ever higher fees. Would the German money and the $2,000 from Vienna be enough to pay her lab bill in Toronto? No. per diem, etc. Around noon, after coffee number three, two buzzed to think about anything but money, they hit the phone. Dick's presence in their lives was a vacation from this kind of scheming. It was a foray into scheming of another kind. what is really enchanting in the book is not so much that she's unlikable and that unlikability is allowed for women, although that's an important point, certainly, but so superficial. What is really, really deeply, deeply, deeply important in this book is that she's not a static character. Lots of people describe this book as being about a triangle, but really, this is a book about female obscurity, white female obscurity, certainly privileged and with access kind of obscurity, it is a moment not only ⁓ of acceptance of obscurity, but also of discovery of creative fiction. she complains about this book being the book that she's known for, She the and ⁓ the stability in some ways as an author that this book has brought her. but she also resistant to a specific role this book may have in feminism. She embraces complexity in this attitude for me, there's a real depth of consciousness, And Chris Kraus herself, while she can, while she's with us, she's in her seventies now, does everything for this book not to become reduced a tagline And so here we're going to go into another moment where she talks about money. And she talks about money in regards to this man she has just met, who is an incredibly savvy and knowledgeable intellectual, that she admires greatly. And so they end up talking about her own situation. Back in Columbus, Bill Horrigan, media curator at the Wexner, asked me how I really managed to support myself. I was picking up the restaurant check and driving a new car, and obviously this cover story about an art school teaching job fooled no one. It's simple, I told him. I take money from Sylvère. Was Bill bothered that such a marginal sexless hag as me wasn't living in the street? Unlike his favorites, Leslie Thornton and Beth B. I was difficult and unadorable and a bad feminist to boot. Bill, you should have seen me in New York in 1983, vomiting in the street. I was bruised with malnutrition on the Bellevue Welfare Ward and hooked up to IV, not knowing what was wrong because the city's mandatory catastrophic care plan doesn't cover diagnostic tests. Sylvère and I are Marxists, I told Bill Horrigan. He takes money from the people who won't give me money and gives it to me. ⁓ culture's distribution of it is based on values I reject. And it occurred to me that I was suffering from the dizziness of contradictions, the only pleasure that remains once you've decided you know better than the world. Accepting contradictions means not believing anymore in the primacy of true feeling. Everything is true and simultaneously. It's why I hate Sam Shepard and all your true West stuff. It's like analysis, as if the riddle could be solved by digging up the buried child. Dear Dick Today I drove across the panhandle of North Texas. I was incredibly excited when I hit the flat land west of Amarillo, knowing that the buried Cadillac piece would come up soon. 10 of them, a pop-up monument to your car, fins flapping, heads buried in the dust. I passed it on the highway, turned back, and took two photos of it for you. Dick, you may be wondering, if I'm so wary of the mythology you embrace, why'd my blood start pumping 15 miles west of Amarillo? Why'd I used to get dressed up to go meet JD Austin in the night birds bar so he could fuck me up the ass then say he didn't love me. Tight jeans, red lips and nails this morning. Feeling really femme and like time for this isn't on my side. It's a cultural study to be part of something else. Sylvère and I are twinned in our analytic bent, content with scrambling the codes. Oh Dick you were eroticize what you're not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too love Chris. aspect of book sex or lack thereof. So the couple, and Chris, said have sex three years. And Chris Kraus, and this is another thing that makes her highly unlikable in or undesirable and with in this age that we live that is over sexualized is that she talks a lot about her lack of libido. And the previous passage, there is this sort of correlation between this consciousness and this intellectualization of life. ⁓ and of everything around them, that might be one of the reasons why they have such a sexless life. ⁓ explains how ⁓ regardless of cowboy nature, or maybe because of it, eroticizes everything. And there's sort of suggestion ⁓ of the that these men are. And Sylvère, at a certain point, talks about how ⁓ it's sort of paints him to imagine that he is the reflection of all the men that rejected her and the unrequited loves had in the past before him. And so they are in this connection. They are so bound together. Their work intertwines. She accompanies him to the detriment of herself also the sort of company that Sylvère has, which is mostly male. And so therefore, ⁓ that she refers to is a complex situation because one of obscurity is that sex wants ⁓ You want be, ⁓ and when say visibility, I don't mean it literally, optically, in the retinian I mean in the sense of being perceived. the introduction of a third element what prompts Chris and Sylvère to have sex again. Is it because there's someone else? Is it a sort of ⁓ suddenly because Dick was flirting with her? Why a man who doesn't desire you or perhaps eventually sex with you, but doesn't call you back, flirts with you? And another aspect of sex in this book is that the situation is reversed and it is the woman who talks about being attracted by someone who is also repulsive. So as you read the letters about Dick, some of the letters become quite they become ⁓ sarcastic, they are very grating, they're gritty. ⁓ And so here, there's a sort of a reversal, right? Because in instances of sexual assault, to bring something a bit darker and not comical at all into the matter of sex, the reality is that sex is used as an aggression. in that sense, isn't a sexless marriage a proof of love? The explorations of all sides the question are very interesting here. not for Chris, her own life, but for us, the readers, because it also allows us not to do the same exercise, not to go about meandering and speculatively live our lives, but maybe to recognize something in there, some form of unavoidable truth. The notion of being a bad feminist was not invented by Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag, the series that you may have heard of. But really, is something that haunts a of feminists, this notion we are not pure. We're pure. Our values are not us. And the way we live things and the way our feelings and our emotions lead us into explorative encounters with ourselves and with others is painful. So I will leave you with that. I decided not to reveal the whole book because it is too recent prefer to leave you with this other aspect of the book, which is the fact that, and in the last passage I read, there is a reference to an art piece, which is the Cadillacs in the desert. it's the work of a ⁓ San Francisco-based art collective of the 70s. It's a 1974 piece. and the collective is called Ant Farm. And so ⁓ book is also a subjective exploration of lots artworks that are part ⁓ the 90s, inherited scene from the 60s, the the ⁓ 80s. it goes deep into a artists, mostly Hannah Wilke. And Hannah Wilke was an artist, an American artist who was exploring the feminine identity and who was very criticized at the time. Hannah Wilke was ⁓ very beautiful and have been considered, still considered conventionally beautiful. And she based or built her work that so the last passage that I want to read is about Hannah Wilke.