Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness

Afterimage, March-April, 2005 by Emily Kuenstler

VIDEO GREEN: LOS ANGELES ART AND THE TRIUMPH OF NOTHINGNESS

BY CHRIS KRAUS NEW YORK: SEMIOTEXT(E), 2004. 160 PP./$14.95 (SB)

S/m radically preempts romantic love because it is a practice of it. To
see this fact as cold or cynical is as naive as thinking writing ought
to be 'original' or that speaking in the first person necessarily
connotes any kind of truth, sincerity.
From "Emotional Technologies," in Video Green by Chris Kraus

Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness is comprised of 23 ficto-critical essays--a form for which author Chris Kraus has become well known--dedicated to ideas and art. While the art world is the topic of many of the essays, it is depicted as an institution where ideas and art may or may not actually thrive. While much of the book is a morphology of cultural organisms, she allows her subjects to inspire personal reveries which are offered up with tight detail, with specific names and places. Nostalgia vies with a taste for an even colder mediated present. Kraus' use of metaphor is startling and satisfying: it folds in, it takes flight. While the book respects the human need for truth, her honest descriptions (erudite and radically subjective) provoke howls of laughter and, occasionally, true sadness.

Kraus tests her perceptions of institutions, people, art and cities against the larger matrix of income, politics, race and history. The outcome is an encyclopedically random fable, set in foreign train stations, marshlands, museums and cluttered apartments, with a dozen or so main characters supported by their many acquaintances.

The first piece, "Art Collection," begins with a story about her father's rare book collecting. Her discussion of old type-faces expands to include the germ of meaning that they carry, and what this implies about books as artifacts. She writes:

Collecting, in its most primitive form, implies a deep belief in the
primacy of the object, as if the object itself was a wild thing....
Clearly this kind of primitive collecting is totally irrelevant to the
object's pre-emptive emptiness and the infinite exchangeability of
meaning in the contemporary art world.

Furthermore, she responds to the art world of Dave Hickey, Jeremy
Gilbert-Rolfe, and David Pagel and their (circa mid-1990s) backlash
against critical studies' influence on the visual arts: "Together, the
three function as a Homeland Security force to keep aestheticism, as
they have come to define it, safe and clean." One of Kraus' favorite
topics is American MFA programs, without which: "... who would know
which cibachrome photos of urban signage, which videotapes of socks
tossing around in a dryer, which neominimalist monochrome paintings are
negligible and which are destined to be art?"

Like Hickey, Gilbert-Rolfe and Pagel, Kraus is also employed by MFA programs, thus her critique from within the university shows some measure of bravery, and allows us to make what we will of her "complicity." Perhaps it is self-criticality itself that keeps real creativity fertile. One of her keenest observations appears in "Art Collection" and concerns the sociological shift wherein an artist's emergence was professionalized "congruent with specialization in other post-capitalist industries":

There's very little margin in the contemporary art world for fucking up with accidents or unforeseen surprises.... It is best, of course, for the artist to be heterosexual and better to be monogamously settled in a couple. This guards against messy leaks of subjectivity which might compromise the work and throw it back into the realm of the "abject," which, we all supposedly agree, was a 1980s excess that has long since been discredited.

"Pay Attention" describes vigilance and truth in another way, set as it is alternately in the stillness of a Zen-style meditation retreat in a beautiful marshland that Kraus experienced in Sagaponack, New York in 1999, and at UCLA's MFA program. As is Kraus' wont, the retreat story folds into that of an art school student's (Jennifer Schlosberg) trials at a well-known art school. It is a fantastic drama in which name-brand, once-radical artists sound like royal asses, as they chastise the next generation for their lack of art school etiquette like playground bullies. Schlosberg's journal, like Zen mindfulness practice, maintains Truth in this unapologetically dishonest environment. The reign of "cool" gets thawed and the tale of creepy "faux paternalistic concern" reads like a suspense story.

"Posthumous Lives" interweaves the legacies of several performance artists who made New York's Lower East Side their home, particularly in its 1980s heyday--with special attention paid to performance artist Penny Arcade, and her practice of maintaining the elaborate archive of "camp artiste and theorist" Jack Smith. Written in a particularly "short story" voice, in which Penny's personality is kept mysterious, Kraus narrates afternoons with Penny, as she is led to other artist archives Penny maintains, each oeuvre safely stored behind improbable doorways; and finally, Kraus supplies the reader with an art historical context in which to fully appreciate the work. "Pussy Orphanage" (so titled because the sexually explicit works are "abandoned") provides examples of work by Hannah Wilke, Ana Medieta, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lisette Model that were rediscovered a generation or longer after each artist died.