Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness

173 Pages·2004·17.78 MB·English

by  Chris Kraus

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Video Green
SEMIOTEXT(E) ACTIVE AGENTS SERIES
Copyrighr © 2004 Chris Kraus
All rights reserved. No parr of this book may be reproduced, srorcd in a
retrieval system, or transmirred by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo
copying, recording, or otherwise, withom prior permission of the publisher.
Chris Kraus
Published by Semiotext(e)
L
501 Philosophy Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027
2571 W Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90057
wv{w.semiorexre.com
Cover art by Jonathan Williams
Phorography by Daniel Marlos
UNIVERSITATSBIB.UOTHEK
Details from "Spatial Relationships" (1997-1998)
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
Los iltage'es ilrt
Primed in the United States of America
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 Paul Foss, Artext's publisher.
(0
Thanks also to Eileen 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 available. 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 David Farrar and Sylvere Lotringer
(0
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 the 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
more 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 religion, buttressed by a
media-wing the monarchy could control. Founded by a charter
issued by King Henry VIII in J 534, Cambridge University Press
published the Church of England's liturgy. Its Chancellor 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
underneath the leather, the books, of course, 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
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