Chris Kraus is a nearly prolific writer who keeps fashionable intellectual company. She’s on the faculty of the European Graduate School with Slavoj Zizek and Manuel DeLanda; she has won numerous prestigious awards and founded a division of the semiotext(e) series dedicated primarily to women’s voices in fiction. Her books of fiction and criticism, with glib, wry, attention-grabbing titles like Aliens and Anorexia and I Love Dick, have garnered praise. Her latest, a slim volume in the semiotext(e) intervention series called Where Art Belongs, is described as follows: “Chronicling the sometimes doomed but persistently heroic efforts of small groups of artists to reclaim public space and time, Where Art Belongs describes the trend towards collectivity manifested in the visual art world during the past decade, and the small forms of resistance to digital disembodiment and the hegemony of the entertainment/media/culture industry.” For all its faults, Kraus argues, the “art world remains the last frontier for the desire to live differently.” The claim is ambitious, but it also begs the question of what, exactly, is being resisted, and whose desire is being reflected. Where Art Belongs is an interesting, but ultimately uneven, effort at answering its own title question.

Kraus takes a critical approach that strives to be radically democratic, suggesting decades of interest in participatory and the influence of the DIY nineties. There’s a delightful arbitrariness to the works she chooses, which seem as much informed by personal experience as by overarching philosophical, ethical and narrative concerns. The first essay, for instance, on the art collective Tiny Creatures, gives credit to a series of haphazard and often juvenile happenings of dubious impact, both inside and out of the art world. This goes back to the difficulty of measuring, for example, how LA Chinatown’s art scene in the early 2000′s changed our relationship to art or life. Without a focused metric of measurement, the central question becomes not only impossible to answer, but the answers make the question itself look a bit silly.

Kraus correctly realizes that the only way to engage with something so broad is through targeted analyses. Consequently, the book is organized into four sections with specific, pithily oblique titles, like “Body not Apart” and “Drift”. Though its structure is ambitious, the writing of Where Art Belongs doesn’t hold it up as well as one would like. Its lack of tonal consistency is more confusing, even jarring, than charming or productively destabilizing.

Take, for instance, Kraus’s dealing with Janet Kim’s Tiny Creatures, a loose and deliberately (even stubbornly) unstructured series of Los Angeles-based events and network of artists united by Kim’s “Tiny Creatures Manifesto.” “In the winter or spring or maybe the summer– depending on who and when you ask– of 2006, Janet Kim moved into the storefront at 628 North Alvarado that would become Tiny Creatures.” Kraus affects this tone – which I suspect is a strongly love-it-or-hate-it affair – on and off throughout the book, a kind of wasn’t-it-cool deadpan casual that reads a bit like a Rolling Stone article about the early days of Nirvana. Here’s a description of Kim during one of their conversations: “She pauses and puffs on a $1.50 cheroot [...] Teaching piano and working part-time as a coffee-shop waitress in Montebello, she felt completely alone.” Kraus is eager to glamorize the starving artist working a dead-end-job and feeling alienated. She does it a lot, and her focus on veneer is often distracting, preventing the reader from getting a sense of the art. There are many moments when Kraus does let the work shine through, and those are exciting and engaging, but they are too often interrupted by the writer’s riot grrl routine.

Kraus’s work spans several genres, and the strength of each section is determined not only by which genre takes precedence, but also genre’s relationship to the work itself. The Tiny Creatures section, for instance, better succeeds as a microcosmic cultural history than as a work of art-philosophy or criticism. This may be because the works in question are not that interesting, or because the writing about the works is unsuccessful in piquing our interest, or, finally, because what is interesting is not the work but what happens around it. “Pioneered by MFA graduates, [In 2006] Chinatown was still the epicenter of Los Angeles art,” Kraus writes, raising charged issues of class and praxis with just three little letters. In referencing this “scene” in this way, Kraus creates (or at least, doesn’t resist) the division between those who “get it” and those who don’t, letting us know, as she does, that that scene is over, that Chinatown is no longer the epicenter of LA art.

Insider-ness is a problem in other places; too, like in Kraus’s description of a community art space in the border town of Mexicali Rose: “Edgar Moreno, a pizza delivery boy, strapped a video camera onto his bike to create a poetic montage of city lights that struck me as more accomplished than most MFA-program neo-structuralist films.” That’s intended as a compliment, but the implied surprise and accompanying condescension at the fact that a pizza delivery boy could create something “accomplished” (whatever that means) is intense in its class implications, and more than a little off-putting. You Are Invited to Be the Last Tiny Creature is the essay that raises the question most sharply: is Kraus matching her cadences to the aesthetics of the scene? Or is she allowing them to intervene where they don’t contribute much? I suspect it’s the latter. Happily, later essays deal with work that’s more interesting, giving Kraus space to step back and let us see them through a less stylized intermediary.

While not immune to the flaws of the subject in question, Kraus’s study of the Bernadette Corporation is the most satisfying engagement with the questions the book sets out to answer. Engaging with the Corporation’s production of an epic poem displayed as art in a commercial gallery, Kraus finds the perfect dynamic subject for her inquiry, and this allows her to do some really fine critical work. “For dozens of pages, the poem turns on the formal conceit of “branding” the text by including words beginning with the letters B and C in each skinny line.” In addressing the materiality of the text and the physical shape of the letters, Kraus details how the conceit — “branding” — is successfully carried out at the level of form.. We see how the Corporation brands itself (as an artistic presence, art-world commodity, participant in and perpetuator of gallery economies) through the piece’s construction. Kraus’s dexterity in mapping the internal consistency of a “successful” piece reflects a sensitive and incisive critical approach that the book could stand more of. These focused and intriguing observations are much more powerful than sweeping generalizations about “the raw material of poetry.” Her articulations of place are also illuminating, as when she writes, “By sheer proximity… the poem, though written in turns by individuals, assumes a single collective voice.” Kraus, though, has an advantage here. Through the Corporation’s focus on genre, space and place — and their strongly articulated sense of purpose — Kraus can ask, where does art belong contextually, historically, geographically, philosophically, spatially? The philosophical consistency of their work gives Kraus (and the reader) a solid springboard for consideration, and her essay succeeds in raising huge questions in minimal space.

The various artistic practices examined here are relatively successful at demonstrating how it is possible to embody the kind of “living differently” Kraus claims. In some ways, it’s hard to see what artists are living differently from — after all, art-school grads working in each other’s ad-hoc spaces hardly represent a new phenomenon. These unanswered issues make it difficult to say with certainty whether Kraus has made her point. When she goes on to write that “Art direction succeeds to the extent that it locks down our fleeting perceptions of an ambient present into coherent images. There’s an amazing potential contained in that freeze”, she gives hints at what she’s getting at, and begins to justify her approach. If we accept that artists are searching for a new kind of living, documenting their approaches and placing them in relation to each other gives us a context in which to understand their particular relationship to the art-world, and their larger relationships to structures outside it. Consciously or not, Kraus is also offering an excellent criticism of her own work. The works she chooses to freeze — and the alternatives they represent — are exposed to our inquisitive gaze, but they also suffer some in this particular becoming coherent of their otherwise fleeting image.

Sheer Proximity: Chris Kraus’s Where Art Belongs

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