uni/[/ A fUr ::1ndte Kunst Wien I . ) - ( I 10~/:;J -~ /~ SEMIOTEXT(E) ACTIVE AGENTS SERIES Video Green Copyrighr © 2004 C hris Kra us All rights reserved. No parr of this book may be reproduced, srorcd in a retrieval system, or transmirred by any means, electronic, mechanica l, photo­ copying, recording, or otherwise, withom prior permiss ion of the publisher. Chris Kraus Published by Semiotext(e) 501 Philosophy H all , Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 L 2571 W Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90057 wv{w.semiorexre.com Cover art by Jonathan Williams Phorography by Daniel Marlos Detail s from "Spatial Relationships" (1997-1998) UNIVERSITATSBIB.UOTHEK UNIVERSITAT All images courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe. FOR ANGEWANDTE KUNST WIEN Design by Hedi EI Kholti ISBN: 1-584-35022-9 Disrribmed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Primed in the United States of America Los iltage'es ilrt and The Triumph of Nothingness 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Table of Can ten ts 9 Preface 13 Art Collection 51 Let's Call'fhe Whole Thing Off (1998) 57 Pay Attention (1999) 65 Posthumous Lives (1999) 71 Pussy Orphanage (J 999) 79 Deep Chaos (1999) 85 Emotional Technologies (2000) 105 Surface Streets (2000) III Bad Nostalgia (2000) 115 The Blessed (2000) 131 Military Culture (2000) 139 Shit On My Sleepmask (2001) 145 Cast Away (2001) 151 Dropoff (2001) 159 Panda Porn (2001) 165 Picturing the Period (2001) 173 Calle Arr (2001) 179 Featured (2001) 187 Torpor Los Angeles: Daniel Marlos (2002) 193 Sentimental Birch (2002) 199 Whole: Julie Becker (2002) 207 How To Shoot A Crime (2003) 213 Falling Into The Whole: Julie Becker (2002) 216 Acknowledgements 7 Preface These essays were written over several years after moving to LA from New York City. Teaching at Art Center College of Design, I was fortunate to be at the center of an expanding local art scene that, during the mid 1990s, was fast becoming international. Finding it impossible to separate the careers and works of individual anisrs from the politics and values of rhe art world at large, I was trying, in these pieces, to understand it. I'm deeply grateful to Susan Kandel. under whose editorship of Artext magazine I wrote early versions of most of these pieces in a column called "Torpor," and (0 Paul Foss, Artext's publisher. Thanks also to Ei leen Sommerman and Rosemary Heather, editors of C Magazine International, where "Torpor" continued. I am forever indebted to Richard Hertz, who, as MFA Chair, created the eclectic, visionary program that prevailed at Art Center for many years, and to the artist Sabina Ott, who made my life in LA possible. I learned a great deal from many Art Center students, including Daniel Marlos, Pam Srrugar, Zhenya Gershman. Shirley Tse, Ivan Morley, Mariah Corrigan, Jonathan Herder, April Durham. Sarah Matsuda. Shannon Durbin, David Hullfish Bailey and Christie Frields. Thanks to editors Anthony Kiendl (Banff Centre), Greg Burke (Govett-Brewster) and Ariana Speyer (Index) for their astute comments and questions and to Mathias Viegner for making Kathy Acker's notebooks ava ilable. I'm grateful to Mark Von Schlegell, Charlie Finch, Julie Becker, the late Giovanni Intra, Tessa Laird, Hedi EI Kholti and Jonathan Williams for our con­ versarions about an and everything. Thanks to Jonathan Williams and Daniel Marias for fabulous images, to Jenifer Borum for her insightful editing and finally (0 David Farrar and Sylvere Lotringer for their constant support, love and friendship. 9 Video Green Art Collection Part 1: Thursday, April 9,2003, Palm Springs, California My father shows me the six or seven rare books in his collection. Produced in the late 16th and 17th centuries in London and pub­ lished by th e Cambridge University Press, the books are various editions of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. My father celebrares the dawn of secularism during the Elizabethan age. No mo re Latin, no more mindless following of the pope, whose authority surpassed the monarchy. In order to become a world power, England needed its own state rel igion, buttressed by a media-wing the monarchy could contro l. Founded by a charter issued by King Henry VIII in J 534, Cambridge University Press published the Church of England's liturgy. Its Chancell or also acted as a censor for all publications in the realm. Not unlike the Moscow Press established by Vladimir Lenin, it functioned as an institutional propaganda wing that brought new ideologies to the masses. Bound in calf and vellum, with spines strengthened by a set of horizontal sums fashioned from meshed rwine and embedded undernea th the leather, the books, of co urse, are very old. The pages have that pungent, mildewy smell of things left too long in a damp basement. They are whisper-thin and graying at the edges. Every thing foils apart... Over four centuries of use and curiosity, the 12 13 pages have come loose and have been collected, reassembled and Similarly, in William Gibson's book Count Zero (1986), the then sewn back rogether. T he ea rliest of these books are se t in a missing unnamed Joseph Cornell box functions as the ultimate heavy Saxon gothic typeface. Crude and deliberate. A rype that collector's fetish. The box is totally erotic: the innocent embodiment wasn't going anywhere. A type tbat sUlllmons up a world of fear of a world that lives outside itself. The collector Josef Virek and faith and ignorance, of plagues and herbal cures, seaso ns, deploys all his resources to locate it. And finally, he does. But the weather, straw marrresses and ox cans. A cosmogo ny in whi ch one box is unrecoverably adrift in hyperspace and cannot be possessed. might actually seek out a book of common prayer, wh ere "com­ In this most modernist of sci-fi novels, the work of art is utterly mon" means not ordinary but "collective." T his commonality held implacable. It can only be perceived within its own universe, on its rhe promise of lifting the individual from the squalor of the village own terms. To view the box, Virek must launch himself into into a larger and more radiant consciousness : a natio n. World hyperspace: a destination from which, like death, there is no without end, Amen. return. And Virek does. There is a feti shism attached to objects in this kind of amateur In 1992, William Gibson's collaborative performance with artist collecting. A naive experience of substance and the material world. Dennis Ashbaugh at The Kitchen in New York explored this The object fOIms a link between the collector and its ori gins. The confluence of objecthood and vanishment in slightly different prairie child holds a conch shell to her ear to hea r the ocean roar. terms. Simulcast to several cities, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) There is a tactile thrill, embroidered by imaginati on. This im agi­ (1992) was the public reading of a Gibson text inscribed by Ash­ nation requires a certain literacy- history is like the ocean-an baugh onto a vacuum-sealed magnetic disk. This text was accumulation of references, dreams and srories unleashed by contact programmed to erase itself within minutes of exposure to the air. with the object. In this sense, the object simply functions as trigger Words disappeared no sooner than they were spoken. to the real collection, which is totally internal. Agrippa's disappearing text may well have been inspired by the Researching millennial flying saucer cults, I vi sited the rare cmarorial strategy for exhibiting the cave paintings at Lascaux in book room of the New York Public Library and reques ted a central France. Discovered in 1940 in Dordogne, these Paleolithic broadside pamphlet about the sighting of the Divine Virgin Mary drawings were open to the public until archeologists noted their by two children in an English Midlands village circa 1425. Folded deterioration through exposure to the air, in 1955. In 1963, the like an accordion, the pamphlet was retrieved from the basement caves were closed. Visitors are led, instead, through Lascaux II, a of the library and presented on a tray covered in burgundy­ perfect simulation of the original artwork and environment, in a crushed velvet. Outside it was 1999, but here insid e the nearby town. Were the real caves to remain unsealed, the paintings high-ceilinged windowless paneled room was proof that a band of that had survived for 17,000 years due to the hermetic seal created lunarics once roamed the English countryside prophesizing salva­ by a geologic accident would disappear within a a single human tion through the world's first flying saucer, the Divine Virgin lifetime. Mary. It is written that she will first show herself to children, the Collecting, in its most primitive form, implies a deep belief pamphlet claims. in the primacy and mystery of the object, as if the object was a 14 / Video Grall Art ColI",joll I 15 1 I wild thing. As ifit had a meaning and a weight rh at was inherent, produced by graduates of art schools. The life of the artist matters primary, that overrode anempts to classify it. As if the object didn't very little. What life? The lives of sllccessful younger artists are function best as a blank slate waiting to be written on by curarorial practically identical. There's very little margin in the contemporary practice and art criticism. art world for fucking up with accidents or unforeseen surprises. In Clearly, this kind of primitive collecting is totally irreleva nt to the business world, lapses in employment history automatically the object's pre-emptive emptiness and the infinite exchangeability of eliminate middle managers, IT specialists and lawyers from the fast meaning in the contemporary art world.