Activations: A Conversation with Chris Kraus + Sabina Ott (Part 2)
Earlier this week, we posted part one of our conversation with Chris Kraus and Sabina Ott. Refresher: Chris is a feminist legend with a cult following based on her books and films (I Love Dick is one example). Sabina Ott is a Chicago art world star (Guggenheim fellow, Jackman Goldwasser artist-in-resident, educator, curator, and founder of Terrain Exhibitions.)
Chris and Sabina sat down with Helena Bassett of the Hyde Park Art Center and talked the role of the white artist in the contemporary moment, activism as theory, art as making space for transformation, what’s on their bookshelves, and some people they wanted to hype (Helena was super excited about Joni Murphy’s Double Teenage because it’s based in New Mexico where kye is from -- hit kye up for a bookclub with kyr colleague Ariel!)
Helena Bassett: What is the role of the white artist in the contemporary moment, in which black and brown people are criminalized on a mass scale, put in cages, and killed by police? When art is being made in struggle, how do you conceive of your own role in this moment?
Sabina Ott: My work doesn’t address, in a didactic way, any of that reality. What I do well is creating a scene that’s so experiential that there’s a freedom that’s offered, a freedom that is for everyone, and it’s real. I know it’s real. All these classes are here [at the Hyde Park Art Center] and there are teens every day after school in the hall, and usually they’re teens of color. I’ve just been sitting in the mountain and usually kids come up and they’re just enthralled -- “I didn’t know an art thing could do this! I didn’t know a thing could do this!” What they’re saying is, “I didn’t know I could make this.” To me, that’s a different kind of offering.
So in talking about trauma, do you keep re-iterating the trauma or do you offer a space where that trauma becomes something else. For me in my work, I’ve had my share of traumas and I want to offer a space where it becomes something else. Not to deny that it exists, but that it becomes something else. Thats an opportunity. That’s how I think about it.
As a human being - I’m an activist. I go to protests, I do what I can to combat systemic racism and individual racism. But it feels very frustrating and limiting. As a human being it’s like [frustrated scream] but as an artist, I can do it non-directly.
HB: Lauren Berlant talks about two modes of approaching historical violence. Are you going to experience the re-injury of it again, like Mapplethorpe does, sort of to shock the viewer into their own racial imaginary through these photos? Or, do you not want to participate in the reinjury and instead choose to explode a world around it that can transform something differently? What I’m hearing you say is that you want to make room for that space of transformation, that you want to invent a thing for a world that doesn’t exist yet, or make space for a repair yet to come. And what I think is really important about what you said is that you are in the space; it’s not like ‘Here is my art! Take it!’ But you are there talking to people and that’s a pedagogical strategy -- it’s not just on a museum wall, you are literally alive and in the world with people.
Chris Kraus: These things bother me, all the time, on a daily basis. But I can only work on one thing at a time as a writer. Summer of Hate came out of that. I couldn’t breathe during the Bush years -- the American flag lapel pins and the war, the introduction of screens everywhere, and then personally being in the Southwest and close to the border. Seeing the prison system up so close. Things that I always theoretically knew, but seeing that being confirmed with actual people that I knew. I spent 2-3 years writing a book about that.
But I have another chance with Semiotext(e), to act on these feelings. We have an activist series now that’s one of the streams in print with Semiotext(e) called Active Agents, where we’ve been looking beyond theory towards publishing work of and about more domestic activism. We’re trying to get Jackie Wang to do a project. Did you see the ebook called “Lies: Everything We Write Will Be Used Against Us”? She was a member of that collective. She wrote Against Innocence, a brilliant text that we published in a pamphlet series in 2014 for the Whitney. We’ve also been working with Sergio González Rodríguez, who was a journalist from Mexico City who was very involved in reporting from the Juarez femicides and murders. We’ve done two of his books and are about to do a third book of his, this time on the murder of the 43 students in Ayotzinapa. It’s already come out in Spanish, we will do the American version of it.
HB: How does that work, shifting from a focus on theory to this Activations series?
CK: It’s very fluid. It doesn’t mean we’re not going to publish theory or fiction anymore. The Active Agents thing started long ago when Sylvere and I did a book together by some former Black Panthers when Dhoruba Bin Wahad was just being released from prison. And we knew someone who was friends with Dhoruba’s partner, Tanaquil Jones, and we published those texts within the book Still Black, Still Strong. So the imprint has been going since then and we keep looking for things that will fall into it because we think all the things animate each other. The activism is a reflection of the theory, especially the theory that we published in the last decade, which is Italian economic theory. Everything about the collapse, before/during/after -- Christian Marazzi, Franco Berardi, Maurizio Lazzarato -- those are really important books about the global economy.
The fiction books recently are kind of a way of sharing the psychic other side of this macro economic structure. One of our books just out, Natasha Staggs Surveys: A Novel, was reviewed in the New York Times today. The first time ever a Semiotext(e) has ever been reviewed in the New York Times.
SO: What I like about Semiotext(e), even though it’s been going for 40 years, is that there’s always this underground aspect of what it is you do that is really powerful. It’s stealth.
HB: Are there any questions you two would like to ask each other?
HB: I want to let you go soon, so I’m just going to present my last three questions and you can choose between them: What’s on your bookshelf? What are you craving? Who is someone you want to hype, that you’re really interested in right now? Or you can just rapidly list off answers.
CK: I’ll give you the truthful answer. I’m traveling so it’s more like what’s in my backpack. Wuthering Heights for the plane, because I’ve never read it. Bruce Boone, a San Francisco New Narrative writer, he’s an incredible writer, his work changed my life when I read it in the early 80s and we’re reading together April 2nd and so I thought I should re-read some of his work. He wants to talk about UFOs and aliens and I need to kind of be up with it. So that’s the bookshelf. I’m also craving time to get back to Baja to work on another chapter of my book. I’m more than halfway through and every time I have to leave it now, it’s very frustrating. So I’m craving to be left in peace and finish my book. What do I want to hype? Joni Murphy’s Double Teenage is coming out in a couple of weeks. As a New Mexican, you must read this book. It’s about two girls growing up in Los Cruces, it’s synchronous with all the border disasters of the 90’s and NAFTA and she kind of brings together NAFTA issues with Tiqqun young girl issues. It’s a brilliant book:
SO: Thats a hard one, for me. I would like to hype Anna Showers-Cruser, who’s my assistant but more importantly she’s a grad student at the University of Chicago, and I’m really interested in her work. She’s really into materials as well. Iris Bernblum, she has a show at Aspect Ratio, my gallery. It’s really good, it’s creepy. I also have a book answer. I’ve been really bad -- I’ve been listening to audiobooks but I only get halfway through everything -- bad attention span. I have a book that I’m trying to read, though. Margaret Cavendish, who is dead but she was around in the 1700s I believe, she wrote a book called The Blazing World. It’s a science fiction book where she proposes this matriarchy. She was one of those disappeared women authors. She was from a wealthy family, she wrote constantly, she wrote tons of books, and she has pretty much disappeared. I got interested in it because I really like that Siri Hustvedt book, The Blazing World, which is a new book written about a woman artist who has no success and everyone trashes her work. So she gets three guys to be the frontmen to her work and each time the people love her work but it’s under the name of a young man. She gets these false identities. Its this really internal, great, weird story that I loved. It freed me. You think about all the women that have been working, that have always been secondary. You just get buried -- you’re not a sexy package with a dick. [Shared laughter]
