You Break It, You Buy It: Kitty Kraus

Kitty Kraus's work often requires that she return to the precious objects she creates. Having installed one of her compositions of glass, cloth, and simple machinery, the artist will subsequently have to fix a dead lightbulb, a small box in a dark room carelessly kicked, or—slightly but not much more spectacularly—a piece whose inexpensive materials have exploded due to heat or pressure. This routine of mutual dependency would make Kraus' work a species of Relational Aesthetics, were she to link it to such a trajectory—or admit any outstanding references in her work, for that matter.























That propensity to deteriorate coincides with the slightness of Kraus' objects. Since, 2006, she has matched up planes of glass in precarious positions so slight as to require careful circumnavigation—an effect often desired but rarely achieved by artists in the context of a museum. Kraus is the second artist selected by the Guggenheim to participate in their Intervals program, a broadly defined series of exhibitions by young artists. In the Annex Level 5 gallery she has installed one of her glass pieces, up high where no one can knock it. The effect is a barely noticeable segment of material suspended above the viewer. Kraus has also installed a work from her Untitled series (2006–), for which she places a light bulb in a block of ice stained with ink. The heat from the lamp slowly melts the ice, staining the surrounding architecture with ink. In the Boros Collection in Berlin, where Kraus' installation is an acquisition, those stains mark the walls and floor in perpetuity. In the context of a museum, a permanent inkblot is less likely. We ask her about the meaning of her mark in this context:


GARTENFELD: You've installed in the Annex Level 5, a room off the Guggenheim's rotunda, completely enclosed and somewhat isolated. Was there anything specific about the room that you set out to address with your installation?
 
KRAUS: Yes and no. I like the room, which is very concentrated-because of this quality of the space, I thought to make a concentrated exhibition as well. It's just two pieces. The Guggenheim's rotunda is very loud, and there are a lot of people. And occupying it is a show of very colorful works by Kandinsky drawings... there's a lot going on.

GARTENFELD: Do you feel your work is in dialogue with the concurrent Kandinsky show?

KRAUS: I think my installation is somehow very much the opposite of the Kandinsky exhibition. Some people say that they see a lot of references in the ink stains I create to the shapes Kandinsky would paint. For me, not really. There are some similarities, sure.  Kandinsky's work is very straight and very strong, but possesses lightness. I think this is similar to my work.

GAERTENFELD: Have you spent time in the room since you installed? Do you watch people's reactions?
 
KRAUS: Yes, but I haven't seen people in the room walking through before. I have seen them walking through the Kandinsky exhibition, and I feel that they are walking very quickly. Maybe it's because they had to stand so long in front of the building waiting to get in, but they do not seem very concentrated, or peaceful. But what I do like about the Guggenheim show is that there are people coming who perhaps do not often go to art exhibitions.

GARTENFELD: How would you characterize the Guggenheim space?
 
KRAUS: It's very beautiful. I think I would like it when it's empty. There's something brutal about its narrow passages, which you have to pass through in one direction, one picture after another.

GARTENFELD: Could you characterize that "brutality?" It's a strong word.

KRAUS: There is just one way to proceed, and everyone is passing with you in the same direction. I like it when the museum is almost empty and you can walk for hours.

GARTENFELD: Is there anything about the history of the museum, or that specific room, that informed your choice of pieces for the installation?
 
KRAUS: No, I don't know about the history of the room.

GARTENFELD: You installed a work from your series of "ice lamps," wherein the heat created by a light source melts a block of ice stained with ink. The melting marks and stains the surrounding area, which sometimes gets cleaned up when your installation is over, and sometimes remains. When you finish your time there, will your piece leave a mark? Do you trace this marking to any critique of the museum form?
 
KRAUS: No, it will be cleaned up after the exhibition is finished, and I hope everything will be gone.

GARTENFELD: At the Boros Collection in Berlin, your ink stains have left permanent marks on a private collection. Does this type of commission change your approach to installation?

KRAUS: Boros is a place I can walk by and check in on. I also have mirror lamps installed there, and sometimes it could be necessary to go back, because a light goes off, or somebody runs into it. But I haven't been back to that particular installation since it was completed.

GARTENFELD: Is that something you appreciate, going back to tend on the works?
 
KRAUS: No, [LAUGHS] it's by force that I go back, if they can't fix it correctly.

GARTENFELD: Did the Guggenheim Museum ask anything of you specifically, going into the project?
 
KRAUS: When the museum first approached me to participate, I initially wanted to do a different show. Some things were not possible in the room. It was not possible to make holes in the floor, for example, and then it was difficult to make holes in the wall. I had to take care not to show dangerous pieces ... for obvious reasons, the museum was afraid to hurt people, and concerned visitors might run into a piece. I had to change my plans a bit.
 
GARTENFELD: What did you want to show that you could not?
 
KRAUS: I had two new works I wanted to show. I will show them somewhere else, I guess. One is a work in glass; three pieces of glass, set up like a post and lintel]. The suspended piece bows, and looks like it might perhaps break, because it is under such high tension. It's almost invisible, and so it heightens your eye's attention to all the things around it; you see every little scratch on the floor. I wanted to put it in the middle of the room, but the museum said I would need to make it visible with a cord or some other marker.  I thought this would not be as effective.
 
GARTENFELD: In one of your ongoing series, Untitled (2006–), you append panes of glass to one another and to the wall in tenuous ways, such that it's barely visible. Presumably a viewer could knock into it, but you have installed this one in the Guggenheim so high you can't see it.

KRAUS: It's so high that you can't reach it. The museum told me that seven thousand people are going through the museum every day, and they were afraid of something that people could run into.
 
GARTENFELD: Your work often combines these two elements: an entropic system, and a fear on the viewer's part that the results of such a system might hurt.

KRAUS: Well I certainly don't want to hurt to hurt anyone, and fortunately, it's never happened. That is not the intention. The ice pieces lend themselves to a discussion about entropy, because the block of ice goes through a state of less entropy into a state of high entropy, and back into a state of less entropy when it dries. But the piece I did not show, for instance, is not breaking. However, it is almost unbearable to look at, because is very beautiful. Perhaps if it would break, it would be loud. But you have the crash in your ear before anything breaks—it's embedded in the piece. And the curious thing is, if I would make it larger so that the suspended glass would break, there is no accession of entropy; it breaks in one straight line down the middle.


Intervals: Kitty Kraus is on view through January 6, 2010.

Image 1: Untitled, 2009. Courtesy Galerie Neu and the artist. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009. Photo: David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.
Image 2: Untitled, 2009. Courtesy Galerie Neu and the artist. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009. Photo: David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York