By Michelle Tea

AFTER YEARS OF ushering transgressive voices (including my own) into print as editor of Semiotext(e)'s Native Agents series – balancing the male theorists of the press's Foreign Agents line with female East Village first-person narratives – Chris Kraus offered up her own contribution to underground literary culture with the slightly scandalous I Love Dick, a brainy and revealing personal narrative masquerading as an obsessive love letter. Kraus's second book, Aliens and Anorexia, explored, among other things, an anorexia born of a sane rejection of an inedible world. With her latest, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Kraus brings us a world of bland grad-school art stars, blind dates with goateed S-M dudes, pornographic pandas, self-willed myths, and the dissing of identity-based art. And more. I interviewed Kraus about her new book in cyberspace, which felt quite appropriate.

Bay Guardian: Is the art world shallowness you critique in Video Green specific to Los Angeles?

Chris Kraus: I moved to L.A. from the East Village in 1995. By some fluke I was given a job in a very high-profile graduate program at Art Center College of Design. I didn't know much about visual art, in any traditional sense. In New York I'd been making underground films and was friends with a lot of performers and poets. But at that moment, people at Art Center were trying to carve out an identity separate from anything happening in New York. They were teaching and practicing neo-formalism – a return to the values of minimalism, though with none of its wit or its passion. I was busy adapting to the de-centeredness of life in L.A., and it blew me away, how perfectly this emphasis on painterly "surface" described the experience of this fluid city. And then again, no: because there are many L.A.s. L.A. is one of the great immigrant capitals, with huge concentrations of Asian, Latino, and east European people. It shocked me, how none of these other realities ever informed the art being made here. It was like Jean Baudrillard's great line about the Bush-Reagan era: The Poor Must Exit. That which we don't want to see, no longer exists.

BG: What cities have more community-oriented art scenes?

CK: Two years ago, when I started teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, I was amazed by its pluralism. SFAI and the other big San Francisco school, California College of the Arts, remind me of St. Martin's College in London or School for Visual Arts in New York. There's a much greater bandwidth of people and of ideas being taught. While the schools may not offer immediate access to A-list galleries upon graduation, you get the sense that lots of these students will continue working as artists, and find their own way. I think that's much healthier. This makes for an art scene.

BG: In Video Green you critique an art movement that denies that the personal is political and that such a stance is a valuable place to make art from. It feels like our country just confirmed that the politics tied to personal identity don't have a place, either. Are these things connected, or am I paranoid?

CK: I don't think you can ever be too paranoid. The job of corporate linguistics is to create a world where shit just happens and no one ever is really in charge. The blanker the better – a complete separation of cause from effect. The more amorphous things are, the more impossible they are to change. Once a decision is personalized, it can be questioned. So to exile the personal from contemporary art extends this atmosphere into a cultural realm.

BG: Do you see these trends spreading throughout the country?

CK: The need for artists to attend graduate school has become universal. But you can't blame the students. I think this has to do with the disappearance of cities. When I arrived in New York in the late 1970s, it was possible to pay rent by working one day a week and meet everyone socially you needed to learn from or know.

BG: In Video Green you write about the soullessness of the art scene, or of architecture, and then you bring it straight down to the crucial human root of it by, for example, detailing your failed blind date with John the Dom, a man who couldn't move beyond his sort of plasticky, surface expectations of who you would be. You have this almost metaphysical ability to connect trends and impulses in the larger world and link them to interpersonal phenomena.

CK: When I write, I like to feel ideas passing through me. That I am making myself available to certain things. I've always taken ideas really personally. So there's this great grandiosity, believing there's really no difference between John's behavior towards me and the cynically generic cinder block architecture on El Segundo. I like to make these connections. Writing is highly associative. I use my "personal" experience to get out of myself. The philosopher Simone Weil has a great line about this: "If the 'I' is the only thing we truly own, then why not use it? Use the 'I' to break down 'I.' " It's spiritual because it's completely apersonal. When I started the Native Agents series for Semiotext(e) in 1990, I wanted to posit this kind of female "I": an "I" that is public, not introspective, even when the things being talked about are excruciatingly close and real.

BG: What allows you to be so bravely vulnerable and personal in your work?

CK: Experience can often be clunky and failed and paradoxical. That's the essence of comedy. There's a great line in a Jim Thompson novel: the killer says at the end, "It doesn't matter why I did it, I just did it." If the writer doesn't get stuck in self-analysis but is willing to just put experience out there and let it exist alongside other things, then a larger "self" is being revealed.

BG: Have any dates or art-world people backlashed the book?

CK: The art world can't get enough critique of itself! Actually, I've been really pleased because people seem willing to consider the book on its own terms, as a book – there haven't been any of the weird reads that happened around Aliens and I Love Dick. As for the men – they're only in the book because they're not in my life! The sex stuff in Video Green charts an experiment ... using phone and computer meetings with S-M partners as a kind of loneliness-control during my first years in L.A. These kinds of random encounters seemed so perfectly suited to Los Angeles anomie. The San Francisco artist Irwin Swirnoff has written fabulous things about cruising in San Bernardino after coming out in his late teens – having sex with people you'd never meet anywhere else, in places you'd never imagine yourself going. But since moving downtown, my life's a little more urban and normal.

BG: Your books contain so much information about the lives of female and obscure artists and revolutionaries.

CK: I've always been a chain-reader. I like doing reading jags, where one thing leads to another. One of my favorite things about moving to California is how college libraries stay open 'til midnight, and anybody can use them. Lots of the biographies I use were discovered by chance – discovering somebody's work and thinking it could save my life. I've always read like a girl. Simone Weil is such a brilliant example of what someone can do if they push hard enough. You read her work, and you feel the incredible force of her effort – her will to achieve something, even though no one was watching. Her ambition to figure things out. Though she died at the age of 34, her life and work encompasses all the great moments of Europe in the mid-20th century. She was an effective political activist, and then later, a mystic. Lately I've been reading around late-19th-century art and political circles in London: Havelock Ellis, Annie Besant, and Eleanor Marx. These people led lives that were just huge. Fearlessly experimental in their own lives, often at great personal cost – Annie Besant lost custody of her only child after writing on birth control and sexual freedom. And meanwhile, involved in the self-effacing pragmatics of politics – organizing, forming committees, getting things done in the world. It's always inspiring to discover people who lived their ideas.

BG: You have another book, Torpor, due out soon – can you say something about it?

CK: Torpor's the last part of the informal trilogy I started with I Love Dick. It's a black comedy about negative entropy. The two characters, Jerome and Sylvie [who are really Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, her husband], cross eastern Europe into war-torn Romania after the fall of Ceausescu, thinking they'll grab a Romanian orphan. They've already aborted three perfectly viable fetuses of their own. It's 1991, the start of the New World Order. Jerome is a child survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, and I slam that experience up against the permanent trauma of life in Romania. How does trauma gets passed down through generations? How have some countries like Romania been exiled from the global economy into the Middle Ages? Meanwhile Sylvie's just trying to make everyone happy. Reagan is president, magazines talk about stay-at-home moms as the new traditionalists, and thirtysomething is the most popular show on TV.