Video Green

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs.Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle- the live autopsy of a ghost city.

“"Like all the great chroniclers of Los Angeles, Chris Kraus observes the city'semptiness, possibility and hallucination of meaning. But Kraus is Joan Didion cubed, writing herselfinto the narrative of the city." Tamar Brott Los AngelesMagazine”

"Semiotext(e) has for a generation been the leading edge of the most incendiary and exciting intellectual revolution in the West." - Rick Moody; "Semiotext(e) invented a new plateau of thought which is dizzyingly complex and deeply subjective...at once responsible to the past and bravely forward looking." - Avital Ronell; "It is a nondescript day, all emptiness and breathless heat, and I'm driving through Fontana, east along the 10. There are a lot of billboards, Smelly Credit? Pssst, I'm at Flesh. The Spearmint Rhino ad girl gazes straight ahead, all ivory and pink and I'm wondering how her face achieves its state of pornographic blankness. Unlike the blankness of contemporary art, which references the futility of gesture, her vacancy is a verb and the viewer its direct object. Her face says, Come all over me." - from Video Green; "More anthropologist than art historian, Chris Kraus skewers the received ideas of LA neoconceptualism: beauty, ambiguity, and the yawning vacancy of the technological sublime." - Charlie Finch, Artnet"

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker- A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

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