Chris Kraus (born 1955) is an American and New Zealand writer, critic, editor, filmmaker, performance artist, and educator. Her work includes the novels I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia, and Torpor, which form a loose trilogy that navigates between autobiography, fiction, philosophy, critical theory, and art criticism. She has also written a sequence of novels dealing with American underclass experience, beginning with Summer of Hate. Her approach to writing has been described as ‘performance art within the medium of writing’ and ‘a bright map of presence’. Kraus' work often blends intellectual, political, and sexual concerns with wit, oscillating between esoteric referencing and parody. Her work has drawn controversy for equalizing high and low culture, mixing critical theory with colloquial language, and graphic representations of sex.
Kraus has also produced plays and films, including the feature film Gravity & Grace. Her work has featured in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Afterall, The New Yorker, The New York Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and Texte zur Kunst. She taught creative writing and art writing at The European Graduate School/EGS for ten years and has been Writer in Residence at ArtCenter College of Design. Kraus is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for General Non-Fiction (2016), a Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant (2011), and Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association (2008).
Kraus is co-editor of the publishing house Semiotext(e). Her bestselling novel, I Love Dick, was adapted for television by Joey Soloway and released on Amazon Video in 2018. Holland Cotter has described her as ‘one of our smartest and most original writers on contemporary art and culture’.
Personal history and education Chris Kraus was born in The Bronx, New York City, in 1955, and moved to Milford, Connecticut, with her family when she was 5 years old. In 1969, she emigrated to New Zealand under the government's Assisted Passage Scheme. She attended Wellington High School and later the Victoria University of Wellington, where she received a Wellington Publishing Scholarship in Journalism at the age of 16. She has credited moving to New Zealand at such a young age with "saving her life."
She worked in journalism for five years, as a feature writer for the New Zealand Sunday Times and as a TV critic and page editor for the Evening Post. In 1976, she left New Zealand for London, where she lived for a short time before moving to New York. There, she worked odd jobs and studied theatre, first with Richard Schechner and The Performance Group, and later with Ruth Maleczech and Mabou Mines, becoming a member of their studio, ReCherChez.Guthrie, Kayla. "Interview: Performing Is Storytelling: Q+A with Chris Kraus ." Art in America. 2011 June 22. Kraus, along with her collaborator Suzan Cooper, worked for artist Louise Bourgeois who became their friend and associate. Kraus cites Bourgeois as an influence on her as a developing artist, describing her as an exemplar and mentor, for whom Kraus worked as a messenger, often transporting artworks by bicycle. Kraus recalled that Bourgeois would always 'tell you the straight shit,’ a lesson that Kraus carried forward in her own teaching, stating: ‘To just put it all on the table, to say everything you see and you know, and let people work with that’.Paton, J. (2023). The heart of something: an interview with Chris Kraus. Louise Bourgeois: Has the day invaded the night or has the night invaded the day? Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Kraus also worked as a personal assistant to actor Rip Torn. In 1980, she achieved her first success with her play Disparate Action/Desperate Action at ReCherChez, in which she acted alongside critical theory professor Tom Yemm. In 1983, she abandoned her acting career on the advice of Ruth Maleczech, who encouraged her to pursue filmmaking, saying, 'You're a director, you should make films'. Between 1983 and 1984, Kraus worked as Monday Night Coordinator at St. Mark's Poetry Project.
She met critical theory professor Sylvère Lotringer in 1984 and began collaborating with him on creative projects, including working as co-editor at his independent publishing house Semiotext(e). In 1987, they relocated as a couple to Thurman, New York, in the Southern Adirondacks, which would later become the setting for Kraus's third novel, Torpor.
Writing style Kraus’ writing is characterized by a mix of high and low culture, oscillating between sex writing, art criticism, philosophy, critical theory, street slang and classical forms. She has been influenced by French theory, French autofiction, and American New Narrative, of which she has been a key proponent. Her debut novel, I Love Dick, is an exemplar of autofiction, blending autobiography, experimentation, and a mix of graphic sex and intellectualism. The novel's combination of art criticism and autobiography, which Kraus coined as ‘Ficto-criticism’, is considered a milestone in the development of the autotheory genre. Kraus’ subsequent novels have continued to develop this style, employing autobiographical loops, as in Aliens and Anorexia, and combining contemporary life writing with classical third-person prose, as in Torpor.
Form is central to the development of each of Kraus’ works, with the author stating ‘The form is everything. The form is really how I arrive at how I'm going to write and what the book is going to be’. Much of her work dealing with female emotion contains writing that alternates between fragmentary bursts of obsession, desire, and vulnerability, often stepping back to analyze itself philosophically.
Since her film How to Shoot a Crime provoked audiences with its mix of transgressive content and cerebral frameworks, Kraus has continued to court controversy. By equalizing the base and the theoretical and blending theory with an effortless, colloquial style that contrasts with academic conventions, Kraus’ use of autobiography challenges expectations of how a female writer should write. She has drawn parallels between notions of ‘privacy’ in contemporary female art and accusations of ‘obscenity’ directed at certain male artists of the 1960s, embracing the analysis of female vulnerability as an act of assertion. Her presention of personal experiences outside traditional confessional frameworks has been described as confrontational. As Kraus explained in an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, ‘What really fucks with everyone's heads is when women, gay men, combine graphic first-person sex stuff with quote-unquote objective, analytic cultural thought. There's a deep pity and horror of female sexuality behind this, as if it's this mushy botanical subordinate thing at total variance with the dynamic integrity, the ‘masculinity’ of analytical thought [...] In I Love Dick, I consciously set out to see if I could say ‘cunt’ and ‘Kierkegaard’ in the same sentence. And I did it, it drives people crazy’.
Her work has been variously received, in part due to its refusal to conform to genre expectations. While ‘confessing’ private experiences, Kraus complicates these disclosures by refusing to define their genre. As Ann Yoder says, ‘Kraus often creates intimacy through self-revelation and prostration on the page, and part of her genius resides in masking where reality cedes to fiction’.
Kraus has spoken about her strive for accuracy and humor in her writing, stating: ‘maybe I can't be a ‘Great Writer', but I may have the ability to be accurate. And hopefully, at the same time, amusing—that's the NY School thing—to convey complicated ideas with some conversational charm’. Her work addresses themes of loneliness, failure, sexual politics, and the loneliness of globalization, weaving associative threads of history, theory, popular culture, and the diaristic with a punk rock attitude and critical insight.
Semiotext(e)/editorial In 1990, Kraus introduced the Native Agents imprint to Lotringer's independent press Semiotext(e), conceived as a complement or challenge to his highly regarded Foreign Agents series, which brought French theorists like Deleuze and Guattari to American readers.
Native Agents initially published a series of new first-person female fiction, featuring authors who used what Kraus described as 'the same public ‘I’ expressed in French theories... ' Kraus wanted to push back against the expectation that female ‘confession’ should be made within a repentant therapeutic narrative, insisting that 'all sorts of experience—even romantic obsession, dependence, and desperate pursuit, stereotypically ‘female’ states of abjection—hold universal significance'. Early writers include Ann Rower, Cookie Mueller, Kathy Acker, Eileen Myles, Kate Zambreno, and Michelle Tea. The imprint also included male writers such as Jarett Kobek's Atta and Lodovico Pignatti Moran's Nicola, Milan, demonstrating a commitment to diversity while resisting the idea of the straight middle-class white male as the ultimate subject.
In 2001, Hedi El Kholti joined Semiotext(e), furthering its mission of translating French authors for American readers and putting them in dialogue with American writers. El Kholti adopted the Native Agent's ethos of refusing to identify with any particular genre, going on to publish writers such as Marie Darrieussecq, Mathieu Lindon, Abdellah Taïa, Michel Leiris, and Hervé Guibert.
In 2009, Semiotext(e) launched a new imprint, the Intervention Series, which publishes ‘polemical texts by intellectual agitators'. The books are printed in a pocket-sized, simple format, featuring manifestos, essays, and critiques from a range of writers specializing in a variety of political and cultural topics, including Maurizio Lazzarato, Jackie Wang, and Paul D. Preciado. Kraus's book Where Art Belongs was the first book published by the imprint written by a female author, breaking its run of male writers or, potentially, unnamed or anonymous female members of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee.
Books
Novels
I Love Dick (1997)
Described by The Guardian as a ‘cult feminist classic’, Kraus’ bestselling debut is an epistolary novel with autofictional elements, blurring the lines of fiction, essay, and memoir. It tells the story of Chris, a 39-year-old ‘failed’ video artist, and her husband Sylvère, a cultural critic more than a decade her senior. When the couple visit Sylvère's friend, Dick, Chris conceives an unrequited passion for him, and her husband colludes with her to play it out in love letters- letters Sylvère reads, sometimes co-writes, and which they mostly do not send. These letters proliferate into autobiographical confessions, essays on artists and intellectual fashions, and rants against the position of women in the art world.
Kraus began writing the book as a series of letters detailing her infatuation. She has stated that, in an obsessional four-week burst, she composed 200 pages of letters before realizing her obsession was with writing itself, not the recipient . This marked her transition from ‘failed’ filmmaker to successful writer. With the book, Kraus introduced her ‘Lonely Girl Phenomenology’ as a new genre, embracing insecurities and a fascination with failure as a means to frame the narrator's relentless romantic pursuit as a generative and creative act. Framing the book as a high-wire act of self-exposure, Kraus balanced the narrator's yearning with the empowerment she experienced through the performance of her abjection.