Chris Kraus

Personal history and education Chris Kraus was born in The Bronx, New York City, in 1955, and moved to Milford, Connecticut, with her family when she was 5 years old. In 1969, she emigrated to New Zealand under the government's Assisted Passage Scheme. She attended Wellington High School and later the Victoria University of Wellington, where she received a Wellington Publishing Scholarship in Journalism at the age of 16. She has credited moving to New Zealand at such a young age with "saving her life."

She worked in journalism for five years, as a feature writer for the New Zealand Sunday Times and as a TV critic and page editor for the Evening Post. Kraus, along with her collaborator Suzan Cooper, worked for artist Louise Bourgeois who became their friend and associate. Kraus cites Bourgeois as an influence on her as a developing artist, describing her as an exemplar and mentor, for whom Kraus worked as a messenger, often transporting artworks by bicycle. Kraus recalled that Bourgeois would always 'tell you the straight shit,’ a lesson that Kraus carried forward in her own teaching, stating: ‘To just put it all on the table, to say everything you see and you know, and let people work with that’. Kraus also worked as a personal assistant to actor Rip Torn. In 1980, she achieved her first success with her play Disparate Action/Desperate Action at ReCherChez, in which she acted alongside critical theory professor Tom Yemm. In 1983, she abandoned her acting career on the advice of Ruth Maleczech, who encouraged her to pursue filmmaking, saying, 'You're a director, you should make films'. oscillating between sex writing, art criticism, philosophy, critical theory, street slang and classical forms. She has been influenced by French theory, French autofiction, and American New Narrative, of which she has been a key proponent. Her debut novel, I Love Dick, is an exemplar of autofiction, blending autobiography, experimentation, and a mix of graphic sex and intellectualism. The novel's combination of art criticism and autobiography, which Kraus coined as ‘Ficto-criticism’, is considered a milestone in the development of the autotheory genre. Kraus’ subsequent novels have continued to develop this style, employing autobiographical loops, as in Aliens and Anorexia, and combining contemporary life writing with classical third-person prose, as in Torpor.

Form is central to the development of each of Kraus’ works, with the author stating ‘The form is everything. The form is really how I arrive at how I'm going to write and what the book is going to be’. Much of her work dealing with female emotion contains writing that alternates between fragmentary bursts of obsession, desire, and vulnerability, often stepping back to analyze itself philosophically. Kraus’ use of autobiography challenges expectations of how a female writer should write. She has drawn parallels between notions of ‘privacy’ in contemporary female art and accusations of ‘obscenity’ directed at certain male artists of the 1960s, embracing the analysis of female vulnerability as an act of assertion.

Kraus has spoken about her strive for accuracy and humor in her writing, stating: ‘maybe I can't be a ‘Great Writer', but I may have the ability to be accurate. And hopefully, at the same time, amusing—that's the NY School thing—to convey complicated ideas with some conversational charm’. Her work addresses themes of loneliness, failure, sexual politics, and the loneliness of globalization, weaving associative threads of history, theory, popular culture, and the diaristic with a punk rock attitude and critical insight.

Native Agents initially published a series of new first-person female fiction, featuring authors who used what Kraus described as 'the same public ‘I’ expressed in French theories... ' Kraus wanted to push back against the expectation that female ‘confession’ should be made within a repentant therapeutic narrative, The imprint also included male writers such as Jarett Kobek's Atta and Lodovico Pignatti Moran's Nicola, Milan, demonstrating a commitment to diversity while resisting the idea of the straight middle-class white male as the ultimate subject.

In 2001, Hedi El Kholti joined Semiotext(e), furthering its mission of translating French authors for American readers and putting them in dialogue with American writers. El Kholti adopted the Native Agent's ethos of refusing to identify with any particular genre, going on to publish writers such as Marie Darrieussecq, Mathieu Lindon, Abdellah Taïa, Michel Leiris, and Hervé Guibert.

In 2009, Semiotext(e) launched a new imprint, the Intervention Series, which publishes ‘polemical texts by intellectual agitators'. The books are printed in a pocket-sized, simple format, featuring manifestos, essays, and critiques from a range of writers specializing in a variety of political and cultural topics, including Maurizio Lazzarato, Jackie Wang, and Paul D. Preciado. Kraus's book Where Art Belongs was the first book published by the imprint written by a female author, breaking its run of male writers or, potentially, unnamed or anonymous female members of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee. It tells the story of Chris, a 39-year-old ‘failed’ video artist, and her husband Sylvère, a cultural critic more than a decade her senior. When the couple visit Sylvère's friend, Dick, Chris conceives an unrequited passion for him, and her husband colludes with her to play it out in love letters- letters Sylvère reads, sometimes co-writes, and which they mostly do not send. These letters proliferate into autobiographical confessions, essays on artists and intellectual fashions, and rants against the position of women in the art world.

Kraus began writing the book as a series of letters detailing her infatuation. She has stated that, in an obsessional four-week burst, she composed 200 pages of letters before realizing her obsession was with writing itself, not the recipient . It interweaves threads about Simone Weil, Ulrike Meinhof, and Paul Thek with S&M phone chats and her own experiences of failing to find a distributor for her feature film, Gravity & Grace. Kraus encompasses a range of subjects, posing her own subjective perspective as a lens through which to make sense of wider female and artistic experiences. Drawing on Deleuze's assertion that ‘life is not personal’,

Torpor (2006) Kraus’ third novel follows Jerome and Sylvie, two former New Yorkers traveling across the former Soviet Bloc with the aim of adopting a Romanian orphan. As they approach impoverished Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination at Auschwitz and his own childhood survival impede them. Kraus has described Torpor as ‘much more personal than the other two books’ and ironically employs a distanced, third-person perspective to explore the nature of trauma tied to her ex-husband's survivor experience of being hidden in France as a child during the Second World War

Near the beginning, the book describes its own formal strategy, employing parataxis through ‘pettiness of their domestic squabbles juxtaposed with historical trauma’. Vanity Fair said, ‘Torpor concerns itself with a feminist filmmaker consumed and confounded by the intellect and desire of a rapacious philosopher-lover. It's personalized and smart with open thought and independent energy’. recording recent events through the prism of a beleaguered romance. The story begins in 2005, with Catt on the run from Nicholas Cohen, a dominant she met on a BDSM website. She travels to Albuquerque to reinvest windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating ‘real life.’ There, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer. With Catt's help, Paul plans to attend UCLA but is arrested en-route on a ten-year-old bench warrant. Kraus cites Patricia Highsmith as an influence, specifically her manipulation of time to create character and tension. While the book uses pacing to build tension and release during action scenes, it does not conform to conventional thriller structures such as a straightforward plot, instead blurring memoir and fiction with theoretical discursions. This approach creates, according to Hestia Peppe, ‘a weirdness and discomfort that is at once so interestingly and realistically rendered that it's as if the novel is willing to have imperfection in order to be uniquely itself’.

After Kathy Acker (2017) This was the first fully authorized biography of Kathy Acker, an avant-garde writer, mythical artist, and self-styled cultural icon. Kraus explores in Acker's work an aesthetics of provocation, discomfiture, risk, and radical empathy. Kraus approached her subject as a writer and member of the artistic communities from which they both emerged, drawing on extensive archival research, personal interviews and ongoing conversations with mutual friends and acquaintances.

Having known Acker personally and been part of the same circles, including relationships with Sylvère Lotringer at different times, Kraus sought to establish a critical distance from her subject she had unconsciously been researching for years. Writing the book as a critical biography allowed Kraus to achieve the necessary distance to bring readers closer to her subject. distinct from Kraus’ fiction, where she often features as a character or avatar with a mercurial presence.

In a review of Jason McBride's 2022 Acker biography Eat Your Mind, Dwight Garner noted that ‘Kraus is a powerfully original writer, and her book is quirkier. She knew Acker, for good and ill, and there is a jousting sense of rivalry’. Olivia Laing noted in her Guardian review that ‘Kraus’ interest in making hidden structures visible made it surprising that in the book itself she didn't acknowledge her relationship to the subject’. The book reflects Kraus's relationship to Acker, both personally and artistically, through the indirect method of using italics to cite Acker's work, creating a co-mingling of the words of both writers. This approach reflects Acker's own appropriative style, in which she adopted the voices of other writers and combined them with original writing—a practice associated with postmodern pastiche and appropriation —to illustrate a fractured and associative sense of identity. Holland Cotter, in his New York Times article ‘The Best Art Books of 2017’, praised Kraus as 'one of our most innovative art critics, who is also one of our best fiction writers, now becomes one of our more adventurous biographers’.

Anna Poletti highlighted the book's avoidance of hagiography, noting that Kraus 'generously reads the strengths and weaknesses of Acker's oeuvre' and offers a compelling portrait of Acker's rigorous writing practice.

Throughout the book, Greene grapples with newfound literary fame that came with the public rediscovery of her early novel I Love Dick, true to Kraus's own experience publishing I Love Dick, which became widely known only after it was republished in 2006. This book also marks the first time Kraus had written about her own complex childhood, even in veiled manner. When Greene, Kraus's narrator, is outed as the owner of several rental properties, as Kraus is, Greene is harangued on Twitter, with a literary figure tweeting "Catt Greene is a landlord." This mirrors Kraus's own experience of being attacked on Twitter for renting properties, notably from the Red Scare podcast host Dasha Nekrasova.

In an interview with Jennifer Wilson in The New Yorker, in 2025, Kraus called Greene "my avatar." Of her own experience maintaining a relationship with a relapsed addict, which she worked to convey in the book, Kraus claims, "It really is like a boiling frog. When you’re living through that experience you start to differentiate between the person and the addict. Things that are completely inexcusable, you write off to the addiction—but that means negating your own experience." After her own tumultuous relationship with the addict represented by the character Paul, Kraus has said, "One of my goals in this book was to be as candid and vulnerable as I could be about that experience, because I think people who are living with it really need to have it affirmed." The book examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art, driven by high-profile graduate programs, and probes the surface of art-critical buzzwords of the time. Kraus chronicles how Los Angeles suddenly became an epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of larger cultural dynamics.

Publishers Weekly praised the collection as ‘Idiosyncratic, scattered and compelling,” calling Kraus' perspective on Los Angeles and its art 'decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard’. Comprising four interlinked essays, the book expands the argument from Video Green that ‘the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it.’

Moving from New York to Berlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus addresses subjects such as the ubiquity of video, the legacy of Amsterdam's 1960s underground newspaper Suck, and the activities of New York art collective Bernadette Corporation.

The book is characteristic of Kraus’ style, with writing flows fluently between subjects, incorporating interjections, opinions, and asides. It lacks an intended plot, chronological connection, or apparent hierarchical distinction between autobiography and theory.

The book is written in Kraus’ distinctive style of art writing, which is conversational and critical, engaged yet incisive, with elements of chance, memory, and travel animating each entry. Kraus states that the title Social Practices is both a joke and a statement, acknowledging that art always involves some kind of social practice, while also attempting to redeem the phrase from the ‘prissy genre it's come to connote’. Apparently not content with merely addressing such issues from a purely objective stance, Kraus seeks to involve herself in the continuing dialogue between art and culture, making her contribution through the course of these conversations. As Kraus states in the introduction, ‘The only difference between these pieces and traditional art criticism was that they were written more to the work than about it’.

Jennifer Kabat, for Frieze, wrote, ‘Kraus has led the way creating new paths for arts writing and critical thinking, not from wielding a cudgel but exposing our bruises, from being bruised herself and willing to show it’. In one intertitle, which interrupts footage of a group of artists in the woods, Kraus writes: ‘The fantasizer locates the ideal state but then uses the imagination to create a progression into the present and future', presenting reality as a constant state of transition. The title itself has been interpreted as a guide to understanding Kraus’ artistic drive, characterized as a passing through, with the artist's subjectivity serving as the conductor for all that runs through it, eventually spilling into the work.

Voyage to Rodez (1985) Voyage to Rodez was co-written and directed with Lotringer. It takes the form of a documentary, recounting an episode in Antonin Artaud's life. As Kraus recalls in an interview, ‘She wears bondage regalia and ‘lectures’ to his Columbia students about Antonin Artaud, telling stories about her ‘relationship’ with him and reaching an essence of madness that eludes most Artaud scholars. Louise Bourgeois had that same madness, an ability to access the heart of something’. and ‘luridly intellectual’.

The interviews were largely unstructured, allowing the participants to speak freely and producing some unexpected results. At one point, Terence, a seasoned dominatrix with control and intimacy issues, Performed by Kraus and Tom Yemm, directed by Nancy Reilly with assistance from Gale Pike, the play was a reflection on ‘political imagery and personal experience’. A didactic political commentary introduced the show as a meeting-hall lecture, with other parts of the presentation focusing on the interactions between the characters Joe and Susie. The repetitiveness and banality of Susie and Joe's concerns with money and their boredom underscored Kraus's commentary on the commodity of sex in society as their interactions were laden with imagery of sexual control. Performance Space 122, in the East Village of Manhattan.

Kraus, assuming the identity of Gabi Teisch from the Alexander Kluge movie The Patriot, played the role of hostess, delivering exposition while the characters in the play spoke their parts. Referencing Teisch, a German history teacher unhappy with the present who turns to history to find out where it went wrong,

Kraus played the role of an affable, informative host, pointing out Ball's travels on a Fauvist map of Europe. Flanking her were two tables with four 'panellists' who took turns reading selections from the diary: Daryl Chin on politics, Phil Auslander on theater, Danny Krakauer on being German and shy, and Susie Timmons. Michael Kirby wore a replica of a costume Ball had performed in, created by Kay Spurlock. Linda Hartinian stood on a chair, blindfolded, wearing a white blouse and black skirt, as she 'read' Hennings' foreword to the diaries while turning the pages. The music, composed by Chris Abajian, was a lyrical spoof of cabaret music in twelve-tone style.

Events

Chance: Three Days in the Desert In November 1996, a year after leaving New York for Los Angeles, Kraus produced and curated Chance: Three Days in the Desert, a three-day ‘philosophy rave’ at Whiskey Pete's Casino on the border of Nevada and California. It was billed as ‘a philosophical rave and summit meeting between artists and philosophers, chaosophists and croupiers, mathematicians and musicians’. The event brought together Jean Baudrillard, Rosanne Alluquere Stone, DJ Spooky, Diane di Prima, the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, visual artists, garage noise bands, and 600 participants to investigate the mystery of chance. The event, funded by the French Cultural Service and Art Center College of Design, was considered instrumental in establishing Los Angeles as a new artistic center in the mid-1990s.