Why This Famed Art Writer Turned to True Crime

0:00Chris Kraus:I've really been trying to leave the mindset of the art world and capture something of the language and the consciousness of underclass America. I mean, forget about people don't read any cultural references.

0:20I'm Ben Davis and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:31Chris Krauss is one of the most well-known contemporary art writers. She is also an important tastemaker, co-editor of independent publisher Semiotext, which played a key role in introducing French theory to U.S. audiences. But Krauss is probably best known today as a novelist. Her 1997 autobiographical novel, I Love Dick, became a buzzy literary reference in the 2010s and a model for autofiction. It was even made into an Amazon show. This fall, Krauss put out a new novel titled The Four Spent the Day Together. It has a cryptic three-part structure that I think I should set up here. The first part focuses on a young woman named Kat Green.

1:14Drawing heavily on Krauss' own life, it describes a childhood growing up in Connecticut, being bullied, and dreaming of leaving the hardships of her depressing lower-class life behind through experiments with drugs and sex, activism and art. The second part of the book focuses on Kat many decades later, now an art critic and novelist who has found unexpected success with a novel called I Love Dick, which is being made into an Amazon show. But it also focuses on the character of Paul, Kat's husband and addiction counselor who struggles with addiction himself, which slowly tears the couple apart.

1:52Like the real-life Krause, the character Kat Green owns properties in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which she rents out. Like Krause, Green is attacked by online critics in the late 2010s for being a landlord. This leads to part three of the book. Feeling demonized and that her own life is running out of raw material to turn into literature, Kat Green finds herself drawn to investigating a real-life murder in bleak rural Minnesota. The character of Kat Green and Krause through her, attempt to reconstruct the grisly facts of the case, and try to make sense of it. That's probably enough setup. Chris Krause joins me to talk about her writing, her life, and her new book.

2:33Chris Krause, nice to talk to you this morning.

2:36Chris Kraus:Thanks. You too, Ben. Where are you at? I'm home in LA. Well, I am very excited to talk to you about this novel. It's complicated to talk about. You know, you make it complicated, difficult to talk about work. The Four Spent the Day Together is largely told through Kat, a character who is a novelist who also writes about art like you. And I feel like her sense in the book and your sense of what art represents is very complicated. And since this is an art podcast, I wanted to start there. How do you think about the art world now? What does it represent to you? Early on, when I just started to write about art, from a pretty outsider and amateur perspective, the pieces that I wrote for art texts that were collected in Video Green, written in the first person, originally written as a column, I was taking a more anthropological view of the art world because it was still kind of foreign and interesting to me.

3:38Chris Kraus:And of course, sort of, you know, how many different ways can I poke the bear and how will the bear respond? But eventually, say by the time I published Where I Belongs and Social Practices, I was much more embedded in the art world. I was teaching regularly in MFA art programs, and I was invited to write catalog essays for major artists for blue-chip galleries. So I was coming from a much more insider place. And I think my writing also changed as a consequence of that relationship, became a little more serious, a little less, quote, irresponsible. I wasn't going to sort of write a whole essay about my kinky sex adventures and then mention the art in the last paragraph.

4:22Chris Kraus:I was treating the art, you know, with the seriousness that it deserves. But maybe I was getting a little jaded and burnt out on that high seriousness. So I guess at the moment that you see Kat as an art critic in the novel, she's realizing that the catalog essays are just kind of a glorified form of advertising. for the artist and wondering why she's spending so much time doing this. Yeah, that's literally something the character says in the book. And the character, you know, I want to ask you about this, but, you know, it's sort of autobiographical, but not in that very Chris Krause way. I mean, I did want to start with you as an art writer, not just because I'm really interested in your art writing, but I think you played a really important role for art writers in the 2010s, which is partly when this novel is set, that because of your connection to theory and the fact that was very important in the 2000s, that's what brought me into art writing was critical theory.

5:24But then your voice also pivoted towards this more personal, voice-y driven style of art narration that became the major currency of the 2010s in the social media age. And you also brought, which you really see in the character of Kat in this novel, this sense of scrutinizing the power dynamics, the class micro dynamics of the art world. So I think you see all that in there. So I did want to start with asking you about how you think the evolution of you as an art writer.

5:55Chris Kraus:Yeah. Well, the great antecedent, I feel like, for my work, was Jill Johnston. She was such a powerful influence, and definitely an influence on Bruce Hanley, Gary Indiana. Do you know Jill Johnston's work? I don't, actually. That means that some people in our audience won't easily show. She was an amazing writer. Axel Leder, when he was at Bergen a few years ago, actually did an entire exhibition devoted to Jill Johnston's work as a critic. She was a village voice dance critic in the early 1960s and later kind of more of a public personage in kind of feminism and lesbian activism. She was so witty.

6:39Chris Kraus:and she would write the endless kind of stream of consciousness pieces for her Village Voice column. Her voice kind of loosened up increasingly over the years from straight criticism to these kind of stream of consciousness rants that were just so incredibly brilliant. She was such a strong influence for me on what you could do as an art writer. And all of that, of course, it's not about the writer per se. who really cares about the writer. It's about the act of directly accessing the work in the present moment. You know, as the writer is doing it, vicariously, the reader is doing it too. The reader is piggybacking on the writer's encounter with the work.

7:25Chris Kraus:And that's what it offers. That's the kind of electrical charge of that kind of approach. and I guess the class scrutiny because I really feel like that's the major theme of this novel you know even the journey of this novel from the first part of the novel is about the character's childhood growing up which very closely mirrors some of the things about your childhood as I understand it and the sense that culture is aspirational and a way out of the kind of inertia and small-mindedness of a certain kind of American lower class or lower middle class experience. Well, art is the escape from all class experience.

8:05Oh, well, ideally, yeah. But it's not, though, really in the novel. I mean, it's interesting you say that because, I mean, the novel is extremely jaded and cynical about the art world. And the character, at least, finds the art world kind of repellent in that exact sense that you just talked about of a transcending class. The character sees privilege everywhere in the art world in a way that is unacknowledged and unforegrounded. And almost like the journey of the novel is to say, let's talk about what really goes on with money and the life experience that doesn't get talked about.

8:37Chris Kraus:Okay, that's a really big question. So let's take it apart a little bit into some pieces. The first is, I certainly wasn't trying to express any disgust for the art world in the book. You know, there's five pages in a 300 and some page book that talks about the castle culture of the 2010s. But the art world is much bigger than that. You know, I wouldn't say that my relation to the art world is one of disgust. I have a huge affinity and affection and gratitude towards a number of artists' work that have really changed my life. And same goes for the galleries and the curators. the whole structure that facilitates that.

9:20Chris Kraus:But I've also, as a writer, having grown up working class, the thing that I've never really talked about explicitly until this book, having grown up working class aware of the class situation of people coming to the art world as outsiders. You know, I wrote a lot about Julie Becker's work, and I felt a tremendous affinity with Julie's situation. You know, her early success, her presence at CalArts coming from such a precarious background, her dad working at a Home Depot. Certain artists that I have felt close to come from these precarious backgrounds that seem very underrepresented in American culture and increasingly underrepresented.

10:07Chris Kraus:I taught for years in the MFA program at ArtCenter, a great program really interesting people. But I've got to say that people whose parents were things like college professors and architects and lawyers felt like the underclass because other people, their peer competitors, were coming from such wealth that they could count on family support way beyond grad school. And that's really what it takes now. If you're going to live in a major city and enter the art world, I can't really see a way of doing it unless you have an independent income stream. And that's become increasingly true over the last 10 or 20 years.

10:53Chris Kraus:So people like Julie just kind of slipped through the cracks. Yeah, well, I was reading the interview you did with Jared Earnest in the book, What It Means to Write About Art, which is a collection of important art writers. and the point you make about the imprint you do with semiotext, you say, you know, we don't publish stories about people on the Upper East Side, you know, talking about their daily routine. You've always had like this attention to outsider-ness within these kind of cultural spheres. One of my favorite art essays that you've written is one that was published in this book called Academy X, where you talk about art as this interesting space that is kind of like accumulating practices that kind of lose their ability to make money elsewhere, like kind of absorbs other things.

11:43I always think of that as the Chris Krause lint trap idea of what art represents right now.

11:48Chris Kraus:Yeah, that's so funny. I had this epiphany when I was invited to visit UCSG one year, their fine art program, and everyone in that program was doing something other than studio art. There was one woman doing translations, another person making pinatas, another person setting up an alternative school. And I thought about it and I realized that each of those occupations, they exist in the world, but they're not given much value or prestige. And by pulling them under the umbrella of the art world, it gives them a scrutiny and a glamour and a visibility that they totally lack now. I mean, who wants to be a translator?

12:32Chris Kraus:Just put it into Google, right? There's no glamour there. A school teacher, forget about it. I mean, that's just like a garbage collector. That's just the lowest of the low. And yet there's so many creative possibilities within these occupations. They're not just crafts. They're not just artisanal. Just as their cultural weight diminishes in the larger world, they get sucked into the art world, and the art world becomes the last refuge for experimentation and worldbuilding. Related to that is you straddle the worlds of art and letters or literature. Gosh, it seems like a lot of recent novelists are writing art novels or about the art world.

13:16Do you have a theory about that? Like why people are drawn to the art world as a subject or a milieu?

13:21Chris Kraus:Nobody gets it right. So let's name some names. What art novels are you talking about? Well, I'm thinking of Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers to Hari Kunzru's Blue Ruin, which came out last year. We interviewed him on the show. Catherine Lacey did a fantastic art world book, The Biography of X. Did you read that one? Nope. So good. So good. What do you think people get wrong, though, in general? Well, I mean, whenever there's a movie like Art School Confidential, right, whenever people try and capture the sort of social pecking order, the whole sort of social schema of the art world, they get it wrong.

14:00Chris Kraus:People are more covert than they're depicted. And, you know, of course, intelligence is always more complicated than it's depicted in a kind of mainstream-ready movie or book. Having done a little study of artist movies themselves, I think you really see that culture has really only two gears when it comes to why they think about artists. They're either, you know, they represent the ecstatic, pure truth of creativity that most people can't access and pure consciousness, pure living like Vincent van Gogh, or they represent total phonies and frauds and intellectual pretension. I totally agree with you.

14:38Chris Kraus:And that's so false, isn't it? Yeah, there's a big, wide space to play in between those two poles. And that's most of reality. Of course, there's politics and intrigue, but so is there in every profession. I don't think there's any more kind of intrigue and backstabbing and, you know, all of that in the art world than the legal profession or any other world. I guess this is the moment when I should pivot to asking you about the novel and what makes it difficult to talk about. I mean, it is true of all your novels that you yourself are and are not a character in them. What is the relationship of this novel to your biography or to autobiography?

15:23Chris Kraus:It's such a tricky question, and I don't know why people fixate on that aspect so much. I mean, there's so many writers that use themselves as a narrator, that use their presence as a guide to the different worlds that they're exploring. You know, Christopher Isherwood, novel after novel that comes from his life. But I wouldn't really say that he's writing autobiography. He's writing fiction. I mean, the French tradition of literary fiction. I mean, Bruce did the character in his novels, but it's not really. It's about what he sees. And that's always really what I've aimed to do. I'm present in the book, but I'm not the central character in the book.

16:11Chris Kraus:It's about the worlds that I'm moving through and what I see, the observations that I make while I'm there. I don't even really think that I'm the protagonist. The character, Kat Green, in this book is not really the protagonist of the book. It's really much more about Paul Garcia's addiction, just as he was the protagonist of Summer of Hate. She's there. She's a character. And, you know, because most of my readers are in the art world, and that's a thing that I've always really appreciated. My character sort of as a sort of art world figure has to be there as a hook. But the people I'm writing about are of much greater interest, and it's like their trajectories that I'm really trying to follow.

16:54So I've set out to write kind of a mini epic about working class life in America over nearly a century.

17:04Chris Kraus:From the lives of my parents in the aspirational Bronx in the mid 20th century, all the way to northern Minnesota, the Rust Belt, and the lives of these kids at the end of the 20 teens in 2019. That's a bandwidth of like 70 or 80 years. And it's astonishing to me the devolution of working class life from the experience of my parents who went to public school. My mother's favorite subjects were French and Latin, subjects that are never taught in public schools anymore. The kids don't even really go to school. They have online school as an option, which really means no school at all. when Trump won the first time in 2016, all of the media swarmed to the Rust Belt and people spent three or four days doing interviews and writing their stories about the white working class.

18:02Chris Kraus:That became a new focus of interest. How did the white working class turn MAGA? And yet these stories didn't really capture any of the reality of these people's lives, It's who they are, what they think, how they feel, how they experience things. And that's what I wanted to do. I mean, since writing Summer of Hate, that came out in, what, 2012 or 13, I've really been trying to leave the mindset of the art world and capture something of the language and the consciousness of underclass America. I mean, forget about people don't read any cultural references beyond this very kind of narrow feed of Internet mass culture that they're exposed to.

18:51Just the language, the use of language.

18:54Chris Kraus:I tried to highlight that in the appendix of the book by reproducing the text messages that the kids sent back and forth verbatim. This is their language's consciousness, you know? So that's really interesting. That unlocks something for me about the book, which has what is to me a sort of enigmatic three-part structure, but does begin with the character of Kat's interaction with her father, this sort of piece of wordplay over a bucket frozen in the ice. And it's an ice bucket. It's a nice bucket. And the kind of joy of discovering this kind of poetic figure. And then, yeah, this is something Elvia Wilk brought out in her review of the book for Four Columns, that it's really a book about language and ends with these sort of catalogs of text messages sent around this crime.

19:41And what you just said that unlocked for me was the narrative of like a epochal degeneration in the relationship to language from that kind of aspiration towards a, you know, a kind of working class intellectualism towards a sort of much more emptied out kind of experience.

20:01Chris Kraus:Yes, absolutely. With not a lot of meaning in it. Absolutely. I spent two and a half years researching the crime. I talked to more than 100 people. I visited the kids in prison, had correspondences with them, and got to know their friends, families, everyone in the community, the police, the social workers, the teachers. And I mean, there's no excusing what they did. You know, this guy is dead and he doesn't need to be. There's hundreds of mitigating circumstances. And I'm kind of in awe of how these people manage to put their lives together, given the circumstances that they're living in.

20:49The novel is a story of an attempted act of empathy or to define meaning of the crime. That's one of the stories. Like, I mean, I guess I feel like you're more of a character or the cat is more of a character, central character. Maybe you're saying here, I mean, there's a lot of her story in this novel. Although it does thread back and forth with her husband, Paul, and his struggles with alcoholism. But then there's this novelist character does literally have a moment saying, like, I've done a lot of work about myself. Maybe my own life is exhausted as a subject matter. And as almost a political gesture turns towards trying to investigate this world.

21:33Chris Kraus:Trying to understand the crime is, you know, kind of a tautology in a way, because there's a line in the book where she's talking to one of the homicide detectives. He's been on the job for almost 20 years. Every single homicide that he has investigated on the Iron Range had to do with methamphetamine. so this idea of a whodunit a true crime story with a motive like greed or sexual jealousy that's really archaic i mean there's all these kind of atrocious violent crimes that are being committed by people just whacked out of their minds and that's psychosis i mean i felt it was like the first movie of the 21st century did you ever see the movie gamora no i haven't it's about the Sicilian Mafia, and it came out, I guess, on the heels of the Sopranos.

22:25Chris Kraus:And the difference between the Sopranos and Gamora is like night and day. Gamora was adopted from a book. He had dealt with what's put out against him by the Sicilian Mafia. And the killings are so mechanical, cold, and routine. It's like multi-level marketing. They have a foot in every pie in this society, in construction, in municipal politics, in the garment industry. It's all business, and that's all it is. You know, you look for a larger motivation, you look to these kind of humanistic motives, psychological motivations, but there are none. There are none. Yeah. And I feel like that's an important part of the present that we need to recognize.

23:11is the kind of structural causality or the kind of larger just crime of disintegration, I guess. Yeah. That's it. I mean, I think it's a really harrowing and bleak final section in many, many ways that sort of follows some conventions of true crime, of like a horrible thing happens, everyone's trying to understand to try and get the bottom of it. But it does sort of end with a sense that it may not be possible to get to the bottom of that. But there's also a great awareness, though, of the cat character's position, like negotiating the ability to even cross the line of empathy. Like, I guess I'm asking you, is this based on real experience?

23:53Puts up flyers to ask, you know, meth, interested in talking to people who are meth users, you know, and gets no response. Some of the narrative is about people saying, like, I'm hearing that there's a writer asking around. It's best if you just stop asking around. No one wants to talk to you.

24:11Chris Kraus:Yes, that's all true. That all happened. So it is really not just the story of, you know, a world that doesn't lack meaning, but of also kind of like lines that might not be possible to cross, correct? Well, whether I interviewed a meth user in Harding, Minnesota or not, or whether the meth community, as they call it up there, kind of warned people not to talk about me, it doesn't really change your ability to access what it's like to grow up there by talking to dozens and dozens of people. It's not as if a meth user had talked to me. Some secret would have been revealed. It's not like that. If you spend the time and you get to know the people, you get a bit of what it's like to live there.