Where Art Belongs

Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. In Where Art Belongs, Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. In four interlinked essays, Kraus expands the argument begun in her earlier book 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 such subjects as the ubiquity of video, the legacy of the 1960s Amsterdam underground newspaper Suck, and the activities of the New York art collective Bernadette Corporation. She examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix. 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.

“"Writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus is searingly aware of the discourse in which shefunctions, and transforms it into something redolent of Simone Weil's poeticism and its dauntingtheoretical undercurrents." -- Bookforum”

Chris Kraus [is] one of our smartest and most original writers on contemporary art and culture.

Writer and filmmaker Chris Kraus is searingly aware of the discourse in which she functions, and transforms it into something redolent of Simone Weil's poeticism and its daunting theoretical undercurrents.

Kraus's text is not a collective call to arms, but an incitement to find art, to read in a heroic way, and to create a moment—as an individual or within a group—where one's relationship to the past is dictated only by the chance nature of what the present has thrown at you.

Chris Kraus's nuanced approach is akin to a cultural anthropologist who considers creativity in its natural habitats, the spaces where art comes into being.

InWhere Art Belongs, art theory becomes political philosophy: art matters insofar as it remains a practice, not a product. For Kraus, such practice is a means for establishing a way of life outside accepted capitalist conventions.

[A] super fascinating thing in this book is an essay called 'Indelible Video'... This essay is a total milestone...'Indelible Video' is so fascinating and consequential that it can't be summarized here, however it is way worth the price of the book.

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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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