I <3 Chris Kraus

Here are some passages from her book Video Green.

At the art school where I teach, there’s a lot of talk about “multiple subjectivities.” … While the word “personal” is generally used as a pejorative, multiple subjectivities—the knack of being everywhere and therefore no where in particular— are seen to be a very good thing. (79, 1999)

[Writing about the artists Carol Irving and Jennifer Schlosberg] Perhaps because they are female, it is both Irving and Schlosberg themselves and not their works who are critiqued…

The willingness of someone to use her life as primary material is still deeply disturbing, and even more so if she views her own experience at some remove.  There is no problem with female confession providing it is made within a repentant therapeutic narrative.  But to examine things coolly, to thrust experience out of one’s own brain and put it on the table, is still too confrontational.  Like the most canonical conceptual art, Schlosberg and Irving’s work forges an interaction that implicates its viewers.  It’s the distancing of female experience that drives art critics crazy.  Refusing the realm of abject memoir/confession, Schlosberg and Irving’s projects presume to treat female experience universally. (63, 1999)

It’s best, of course, for the artist to be heterosexual and monogamously settled in a couple.  This guards againt messy leaks of subjectivity which might compromise the work and throw it back into the realm of the “abject,” which, as we all supposedly agree, was a 1980s excess that has long since been discredited.  If imagery of a sexual subculture is to be deployed… it’s important that any undercurrents of desire be cooled off and distanced… the viewer is led into that most desired state of neocorporate neoconceptualism: the empty space of ambiguity, which is completely different from the messy space of contradiction.  (17, 2004)

The artist’s own biography doesn’t matter much at all.  What life?  The blanker the better. The life experience of the artist, if channeled into the artwork, can only impede art’s neocorporate, neoconceptual purpose.  It is the biography of the institution that we want to read. (21-22, 2004)