Performing Is Storytelling: Q+A With Chris Kraus

"I am a person who really had to experience what it would be like to be in jail," Chris Kraus muses out loud in character, in her 1986 film Foolproof Illusion. Kneeling outside on a winter day, she wears a black bra, studded belt and fingerless gloves, pencil skirt and sheer black pantyhose while patting handfuls of snow into a strange, two-pronged phallic sculpture. Shaking her wig of enormous blond curls, she sniffs, "But when I got there I was very unhappy because nobody would talk to me. Now, if Artaud had been in jail, he would have been a hero in steel pantyhose. But I was insignificant."

Kraus has a mind-bending talent for theorizing and performing femininity in the same monologue. The Los Angeles-based author and Semiotext(e) editor spent years directing independent films after training with the innovators of avant-garde theater in 1970s New York, a lineage that includes actress and theater director Ruth Maleczech and filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Marie Menken.
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Get Smart: Eileen Myles

Extracting precise impressions and rough truths from flash encounters and seemingly peripheral moments, Eileen Myles' prose disjoints familiar formats from the novel to the art review by relentlessly inhabiting the exactness of her particular experience. A New York icon and writer-about-town in literary and post-punk, feminist, and queer circles, since the 1970s, Myles has published numerous books of poetry and fiction, plays and a libretto, edited two anthologies, and written essays and articles for a wide range of magazines and journals. Many of these essays appeared in her collection of non-fiction, The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays on Art (Semiotexte, 2008), highlighting her interests, influences and collaborations, and showcasing the interconnected relationship between writers and the art world in New York, California, and, of course, Iceland.
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Painter as Pig, Painting as Prostitute

Describing the work of Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard, it's difficult to avoid a manic, rambling inventory of the materials and images used in his paintings and installations, which, in the case of "The Synthetic Slut: A Novel," currently on view at Greene Naftali, range from huge painted enlargements of 70s nightclub snapshots and nature photos of the duck-billed platypus, to a rack of rumpled Maison Martin Margiela suits and half-human marble figures caked in impasto and littered with abject photographs from the Serbian War and beefcake portraits of the artist. As his assistant for the past two years, I've helped him turn out the big brightly-colored canvases, cute animals, and piles of pricey stuff (furs, medical waste), trimmed with the gorey imagery and unsettling yarns that have been Bjarne's trademark since the 1990s, when his career in Europe took off with an early solo exhibition at the Stediljk Museum, Amsterdam. That also makes me something of a trimming, in Melgaard's aggressive interpretation of the relationship between artist, artwork, and art apparatus.

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