Collective Response to Chris Kraus: Where Art Belongs
Printed as a zine by FluxSpace, Philadelphia, Pa
Jean Baudrillard is in rare form; he has donned his gold lamé jacket to properly figurehead Chris Kraus’s 1996 event in the casino littered desert. Across time he catches drifts of her reading You Are Invited to be the Last Tiny Creature at Cooper Union on September 28, 2010. What would he think? Would he feel slighted that she traded in her tremendous sense of cultural irony to eulogize a few of its epitomic misfits?
When Shitty Hippie (a work of true stoner-art in florescent marker and speed driven lines) went up in the lecture hall it did not inspire unanimous agreement that the post-punk artists’ collective called Tiny Creatures had really done something avant-garde. The discussion felt out of whack. Rather than rehash the romance of self-expression it was and is a ripe moment to acknowledge the roles of cultural mediation and spectacle that befall the task. Instead of weaving lineage from Dada to Fluxus to Alvarado Drive, we should consider the difference.
Or lack of difference, in this case, between counter and popular culture. “A collapse of the two traditional poles into each other: implosion.”[1] These are the fingercuffs of the contemporary artist that claims authenticity of the ‘real’ by using culture as raw material; there is relevance and heat in culture but the altruistic endeavor to package with “beauty, love, pain, and all that we can feel as humans”[2] is out of sync, subsumed by the language of commodity.
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