Cult Writers by Ian Haydn Smith

Author:Ian Haydn Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Lion Publishing
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHRIS KRAUS (1955)

THE AUTO-FICTIONALIST

Admiration for the work of Kathy Acker and a willingness to mine her own experiences and desires have made Chris Kraus a singular and remarkable figure on the map of contemporary literature.

Novelist, film-maker, biographer, critic and publisher, Kraus emerged from the New York art scene in the 1980s. She turned to fiction, or her unique version of it, in the late 1990s with the critically acclaimed and divisive epistolary novel I Love Dick (1997), and has subsequently produced a body of work that blurs the lines of the personal, political and cultural.

Born in New York City, Kraus’s youth was divided between Connecticut and New Zealand. She graduated from Victoria University of Wellington and worked as a journalist before moving back to New York to study acting and produce films as part of a collective of cross-discipline artists. Her focus was gender stereotypes, which she parodied. Although she continued to make films into the 1990s, including her only feature Gravity & Grace (1996) – which, like much of her work, is a study in failure, of people and institutions – Kraus established herself as a respected critic, particularly of the art world, which she often savaged for its patriarchy. Many of her essays for the art magazine Artext, which appeared in her column ‘Torpor’, were collected in Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004). Where Art Belongs, a book-length essay examining sexuality in modern art, was published in 2011, and like all her work, by her own imprint Semiotext(e) / Native Agents.

If I Love Dick caused little stir upon publication, its reputation has grown with time, due in no small part to a TV adaptation. Kraus based the story on her own experiences – she even uses her own name for the main character, as she did for her subsequent novel Aliens and Anorexia (2000). I Love Dick details the stalled potential relationship between Kraus and an academic at a local college, a situation that Kraus’s partner also had a hand in engineering. Less a confessional memoir than an auto-fiction, taking actual incidents and presenting them in fiction form, the novel bemused some critics but has since gained stature as a key feminist text of the era. Her subsequent novels also draw on aspects of her personal life. Even her acclaimed biography, After Kathy Acker (2017), is complicated by the fact that her former husband was an ex of Acker’s. But as the critic Leslie Jamison noted about Kraus, ‘Her work isn’t an expression of narcissism so much as a preemptive challenge to anyone who might read it that way.’

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