Awards
2008 Frank Jewett Mather Award
Chris Kraus
Chris Kraus
Institutions may make critics, but Chris Kraus is not a made woman. Nor, perhaps to her regret, is she likely become one. She contributes to whatever we mean by art and criticism not by defining those words but by keeping them in their place—a morass of hypocrisy, compassion, inexplicable talent, humiliation, envy, wit, strategic fucking, courage, brilliance, theft, beauty, unrequited love, clueless sexism, loneliness, and unanswered email. Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004) comprises her occasional essays on art in Los Angeles at the turn of the twenty-first century. The next year she returned to this theme in LA Artland: Contemporary Art from Los Angeles, cowritten with Jan Tumlir and Jane McFadden, and contributed an essay to the catalogue for the New Zealand collective et al.’s installation at the 2005 Venice Bienniale. Her novels I Love Dick (1997), Aliens and Anorexia (2000), and Torpor (2006) mingle fiction, confession, and criticism. Her numerous films include How to Shoot a Crime (1987), The Golden Bowl, or, Repression (1990), and Gravity and Grace (1996).
Regardless of genre or medium, Kraus’s works exemplify honesty, wit, and plot. She transforms art writing’s possibilities by rescuing theories of privilege, gossip, and feminism from their occasional tumbles into the lackluster. Never one to hold her tongue, Kraus helps other women speak with equal force. As founding editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint, she has published powerful, idiosyncratic feminists and queer theorists as diverse as Eileen Myles, Michelle Tea, Lynn Tillman, Cookie Mueller, and Shulamith Firestone.
Jury: Charles Reeve, Ontario College of Art and Design, chair; Alejandro Anreus, William Paterson University; Charles Hagen, University of Connecticut, Storrs; and Catherine Lord, University of California, Irvine.
