| Chris Kraus
Video Green
Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness
| Video Green: Los Angeles
Art and the Triumph of Nothingness examines the explosion
of late 1990s art by high-profile graduate programs that
catapulted Los Angeles into the epicenter of the international
art world. |
Leaving
New York for LA in the mid-90s to teach at Art Center College
of Design, Chris Kraus found that the sleek, deliberate products
delivered by this high-profile program contradicted the experiential
values of New York art. Notions like ‘authenticity’ seemed
ridiculous in a context where it was possible to have an
excellent career providing the artist/student abided by unspoken
rules: keep it empty and cool. Art had become as teachable
as engineering or law.
The art world is interesting, argues Kraus, as a reflection
of the larger culture. How, then, did Los Angeles art come
to be so divorced from the city’s other realities? With
its huge immigrant population, LA is, in most respects, the
most fluid, open, and democratic of American cities. How then
did Los Angeles art become so institutionally defined? Probing
LA art’s new rhetoric of “beauty” and the “technological
sublime,” Kraus shows how social and political content
became exiled to be replaced by bland ambiguity.
Shrewd, analytical and witty, Video Green does for
contemporary art what Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces:
A Secret History of the 20th Century did for punk rock.
Both map the persistence of a peripheral culture. Author of I
Love Dick (1997) and Aliens & Anorexia (2000),
Kraus was described by Index as “one of the
most subversive voices in contemporary fiction.” Unlike
humanist critics who attack contemporary art from the outside
to uphold the high ideals of modernism, she writes about art
as an insider. In Video Green, her first non-fiction
book, she performs a live autopsy of a ghost city. |
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“Like all the great chroniclers
of Los Angeles, Chris Kraus observes the city’s emptiness,
possibility and hallucination of meaning. But Kraus is Joan
Didion cubed, writing herself into the narrative of the city.
Kraus desperately searches for meaning in Spearmint Rhino
billboards, 99 cent stores, phone sex and Central American
money-wiring storefronts only to find that the void she tries
to escape is being commodified by a new breed of MFA superstars
producing the iconography of vacancy we all know today.”
—Tamar Brott, Los Angeles magazine |
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