Description
Kraus, Chris:. Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness . New York & Los Angeles: Published by Semiotext(e) / Active Agents Series, 2004. 8vo paperback as issued. 220 pages, with b/w illustrations. Fine clean copy.
“Slow-witted, fat, 14, and dreaming constantly of being fucked by other boys, Bo found a kitten near a neighbors trash one day.” One does not expect such a sentence in a collection of art criticism essays, but for Kraus, her life and relationships, including the one with her friend Bo, form an inseparable part of her take on art, and to leave them out would be untrue, she believes, to her perceptions of the works under consideration, and thus to her own writing. These 24 pieces reflecting on Los Angeles art, most previously published in Artext, therefore include Krauss sado-masochistic practice, her semi-estranged husband Sylvère Lotringer, the late Kathy Ackers notebooks, her various living spaces, her visceral reactions as a New Yorker who relocates to L.A., and the San Diego Zoo. Along the way, Kraus offers some trenchant observations about young L.A. artists and works, and builds a scathing critique of the Masters of Fine Arts programs around which the L.A. scene revolves. Idiosyncractic, scattered and compelling, Krauss take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard.”
