CRITICAL METHOD

Chris Kraus, interview, Sleek 53 (Spring 2017): 57.

“I was writing a column for an art magazine, Artfest, in the late ’90s and early 2000s. I had just moved to L.A. and I really didn’t know that much about art. I still don’t—actually I have a very limited knowledge of great art—but I had to come up with a column every three months! So what I did was I ended up writing about all the conditions around me, combining a description of the arts with everything else that I was doing and seeing and thinking and feeling. It was about discovering L.A. and a lot of it was about living alone for the first time. But I copied that from Gary Indiana, he did something similar in the Village Voice in the 1980s—he copied it from Jill Johnston, who did that in the late ’50s and the early ’70s. And I think if we go back into history and art criticism, we can talk about Proust doing that and the damn radical depiction of visual art that’s contained within some of the books in In Search of Lost Time. I mean there’s a great tradition of writers embracing and describing and understanding and interpreting visual art, and it doesn’t have to come from a purely technocratic and theoretical place….

“It’s not that I can only think about my own little life, but when I think about larger things, I like to think about larger things in simpler and more human ways….”

sleek-mag.com/2017/05/05/chris-kraus-interview-i-love-dick/

Chris Kraus.

chriskraus

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.