Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents) [Paperback]

Chris Kraus (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1584350229 | ISBN-13: 978-1584350224 | Publication Date: August 27, 2004

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Slow-witted, fat, 14, and dreaming constantly of being fucked by other boys, Bo found a kitten near a neighbor’s trash one day." One does not expect such a sentence in a collection of art criticism essays, but for Kraus, her life and relationships, including the one with her friend Bo, form an inseparable part of her take on art, and to leave them out would be untrue, she believes, to her perceptions of the works under consideration, and thus to her own writing. These 24 pieces reflecting on Los Angeles art, most previously published in Artext, therefore include Kraus’s sado-masochistic practice, her semi-estranged husband Sylvère Lotringer, the late Kathy Acker’s notebooks, her various living spaces, her visceral reactions as a New Yorker who relocates to L.A., and the San Diego Zoo. Along the way, Kraus, whose I Love Dick tracked her obsession with her husband’s eponymous colleague, offers some trenchant observations about young L.A. artists and works, and builds a scathing critique of the Master’s of Fine Arts programs around which the L.A. scene revolves. Idiosyncractic, scattered and compelling, Kraus’s take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"Idiosyncratic, scattered and compelling, Kraus's take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard." Publishers Weekly (online)

"Kraus predictably... plunges into [Los Angeles's] 'not-thereness' headfirst and takes the reader with her down every rabbit hole." Masha Gutkin San Francisco Bay Guardian

"Like all the great chroniclers of Los Angeles, Chris Kraus observes the city's emptiness, possibility and hallucination of meaning. But Kraus is Joan Didion cubed, writing herself into the narrative of the city." Tamar Brott Los Angeles Magazine

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Semiotext(e) (August 27, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584350229
• ISBN-13: 978-1584350224
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #866,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Art and Life, December 6, 2004

By 

Daniel Mendel-black - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents) (Paperback)

Video Green, just out in Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents Series, is the most recent compellation of Chris Kraus essays. Written in the early-to-mid-90s after the author and critic moved from New York to Los Angeles, the book is her second since the infamous I Love Dick, a fictionalized account of her short tryst with Dick Hebdige, author of Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Although it is true that Video Green casts a jaundiced eye on the academicism of Los Angeles art, it is almost by accident. Kraus happened to be teaching in the graduate program at the Art Center College of Design when she wrote the essays. Most of the writing is really much more about the culture shock of a New Yorker trying to acclimate herself to a West Coast world she found ironically lonely and inhuman. It so happened much of the art coming out of the schools during that period Kraus felt mirrored what was most empty about Los Angeles. The better part of the book, however, is actually not about art as much as it is about living. Kraus's larger subject is often the artifice of sincerity. Where psychology is at issue, nothing is certain or fixed in a Kraus piece. The writing is as much concerned with telling a story as it is with the story itself. As with Aliens and Anorexia or I Love Dick, these essays are about intimacy, both as something that is somehow produced by construction and as something that altogether escapes it. The Kraus self-portrayed in these essays is a super complex person, equally rendered in full emotional armor and simultaneously bared to the harshest scrutiny. Kraus devotes much of her book to recounting her experiences trying to connect to the new world around her. Much of the book is, in fact, an original exploration of bondage, etc. Video Green is illustrated with atmospheric photos by the artist Daniel Marlos.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A BRILLIANT, THOUGHT-PROVOKING, MUCH ANTICIPATED BOOK, October 7, 2004

By 

Gilad Elbom - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents) (Paperback)

A high-speed, thought-provoking, eye-opening account of the Los Angeles art scene in all its brutal, sexy, scary, narcissistic, oppressive, vacuous, seductive glory. Trying to find her way through the insane labyrinth of an art world that seems to be a byproduct of the entertainment and sex industries, struggling to fit into an MFA program without being "a part of the program," Chris Kraus delivers a powerful book where every sentence is as sharp as the pain of rejection, every observation as acute as the mental state of the scene itself. Not only does VIDEO GREEN stand on its own as a rare and priceless documentation of the dazzling emptiness behind the center of the universe, it can also be read as the third, much anticipated installment in Chris Kraus's wonderful L.A. trilogy. In other words, if you're looking for other books to buy with the excellent VIDEO GREEN, get I LOVE DICK and ALIENS & ANOREXIA.