Chris Kraus: Social Practices

A border isn’t a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other’s lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros.
– Chris Kraus, Social Practices

 

To mark the launch of her book Social Practices, Chris Kraus will read two new stories, and be in conversation with writer and artist Kristen Kreider about the blurred lines between fiction and criticism.

 

Across the production of essays and novels since the mid-1990s, Chris Kraus’s writing has spanned art criticism and the generation of layered and philosophical narratives that merge the autobiographical with the fictional. Her new book, Social Practices, is a collation of essays and short stories that pursue the anthropological exploration of artists’ lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. The book stands as a proposition for how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence and revenge.

 

This is the first in a series of events titled Transmissions: Mapping Communicability through Artistic and Creative Research, organised by the Mountain of Art Research (MARs) at Goldsmiths College, and is a collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The series is generously funded by the CHASE research consortium.

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, three books of art and cultural criticism, and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. Her first novel, I Love Dick, was adapted for television. Kraus is a co-editor of the independent press Semiotexte, alongside Hedi El Kholti and Sylvère Lotringer. She is a frequent contributor to Artforum, Bookforum and other magazines, and lives in Los Angeles.

 

Kristen Kreider is a poet and Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She works in collaboration with architect James O'Leary as Kreider + O’Leary. Books include Poetics & Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site (I.B. Taurus) and, with Kreider + O'Leary, Falling (Copy Press) and Field Poetics (MA Bibliotheque).