by Chris Kraus
This is not mere sex therapy. I’m confiding in you, not in the position of a penitent with his tail between his legs, ready to assume the position of abject sinner. No, the Renaissance has come, and whether you have anything to do with it’s debatable. Emma’s desiring elsewhere enabled me to regain desire. How it happened remains a miracle. It returned suddenly about a week ago—the spirit of sex, like one of these little Roman gods, touching every part of my body, arousing them to the sacredness of pleasure. As if the veil was lifted and a new field of human possibility revealed.
I can assure you, Dick, that it was not a mere attempt to match your fabulous sexual powers that produced this change in me. You can call it denial, and take pride in the healing you’ve accomplished in our favor. But for this, Dick, you would’ve had to be in some kind of contact with us, which you’ve carefilly managed to make impossible. So don’t be too fast to attribute yourself with miraculous sexual powers, The Christ of Love. Emma and I created you out of nothing, or very little, and in all fairness, You owe us everything. While you flounder in your daily life we have built you up as a truly poweful icon of erotic integrity.
I dedicate this letter to you, Dick, with all my
Love,
Charles
But sex with Charles did not replace Dick for Emma. While Sylvère sorted through his manuscripts and boxes, Chris settled into a dreamy delirium that could only last another week or so. Next Monday she’d agreed to drive the windows to East Hampton; from there she and Sylvère would fly back to LA for his studio visits at Art Center. And then Sylvère’s job started in New York and they’d live in the East Village until May.
She read Harlequin Romances, wrote her diary and scribbled margin notes about her love for Dick in Sylvère’s treasured copy of Heidegger’s La question de la technique. The book was evidence of the intellectual roots of German fascism. She called it La technique de Dick.
Time was short. She needed answers and so like Emma Bovary in Yonville she found solace in religion. Loving Dick helped her understand the difference between Jesus and the saints. “You love the saints for what they do,” she wrote him. “They’re self-invented people who’ve worked hard to attain some state of grace. George Mosher, the horse logger on Bowen Hill, is a kind of saint. But Jesus is like a girl. He doesn’t have to do anything. You love him ’cause he’s beautiful.”
On Friday January 13 Chris’ friends Carol Irving and Jim Fletcher drove up to visit them in Thurman. They stayed up late reading Paul Blackburn’s translations of the Troubadour poems out loud. Jim’s deep midwestern twang soared over the one by Aimerac de Beleno—
When I set her graceful body within my heart
the soft thought there is so agreeable I
sicken, I burn for joy—
And it occurred to them that love’s like dying, how Ron Padgett had once called death “the time the person moves inside.” Sylvère the specialist abstained, finding their earnest conversation too jejune. And then Ann called to read a passage from the new book she was writing. The night was perfect.
January 19, 1995
Sylvère and Chris checked in to The Regal Inn Motel in Pasadena Wednesday night. On Thursday afternoon Sylvère called Dick expecting to get his answerphone, but unexpectedly reached him. Mick and Rachel Tausig, two friends from New York, were visiting. Would Sylvère and Chris like to join them all for dinner Sunday at his house?
“By the way, Sylvère,” Dick added before hanging up, “I didn’t get Chris’ fax the day she sent it. It got mixed up with the Christmas mail so I only read it two weeks later.”
“Ah—a little Christmas present,” Sylvère chuckled.
“Well, it’s been some time now,” Dick replied. “I expect the temperature’s dropped.”
“Yessss,” Sylvère said uneasily.
On Sunday, January 22 Sylvère and Chris drove out to Antelope Valley in their rental car. She was carrying a xerox of the letters—90 pages, single-spaced. Sylvère doubted she’d be mad enough to give them to him. But the way that Dick embraced her at the door, a contact that was more than social, that might be even sexual, made her stumble. That was sign enough.
Dinner with Dick and Mick and Rachel, two curators from the Getty, an art critic and Sylvère was very hard. The atmosphere was countercultural-casual. Chris felt like a cockroach beside the poised and glamorous Rachel, who was the only other woman in the room. Dick sat next to Chris, across from Rachel. Perhaps Dick noticed Chris was silent and she hadn’t touched the food. At any rate he turned to her with a slight, complicitous smile to ask: “How’s the… ah,…project going?” Rachel, also smiling, was all ears. Chris gave up trying to find the right pitch for her reply. “Actually it’s changed. It’s turned into an epistolary novel, really.” Rachel rose to it. “Ah, that’s so bourgeois.” “Huh?” “Didn’t Habermas say once that the epistolary genre marked the advent of the bourgeois novel?” Chris flashed back to a breakfast she and Sylvère had once with Andrew Ross and Constance Penley at a conference in Montreal. Constance brilliantly corrected Chris’ bumbling appreciation of Henry James, touching every intellectual base. How articulate this woman was at 8:30 in the morning! But still she wondered to herself: Rachel, didn’t Lukács say it first?
At any rate the other guests were gone by midnight. She and Sylvère stayed for one last drink. It seemed Sylvère and Dick would never finish talking about new media technology. Chris reached into her purse. “Here,” she said. “What I was talking about.”
Well. Dick was gobstruck and Sylvère for once was speechless. But Dick was generous and kind. He took the 90 pages. “Chris,” he said, “I promise you I’ll read them.”
January 26, 1995
Back in New York winter, Sylvère and Chris drove up to Thurman one last time. On Saturday they’d close the house in time to drive down again for Joseph Kosuth’s birthday party.
On Sunday morning, January 29, they woke up woozy and hung-over, happy to be back in New York. Joseph’s party had been perfect, intimate and large. So many of Sylvère’s old friends from the Mudd Club days had been there. They got up slowly and had brunch at Rattner’s, heading for the Lower East Side. Sylvère’d be attending his first dinner soon with trustees from the MOMA to discuss the Artaud catalogue: surely he should dress the part.
The proprietor of the store on Orchard Street where Sylvère spent several hundred dollars on Italian clothes was a remarkable person, a true light. He lived in Crown Heights and studied Kabbala. Customers drifted in and out as he and Sylvère exchanged ideas about 17th-century Jewish mysticism, Jakob Franck and Lévinas.
It was late afternoon when they left Orchard Street, mild and sunny. They walked with shopping bags back through the freshly landscaped, newly curfewed Tompkins Square Park. Suddenly it hit Chris she was a stranger here and the East Village used to be her home. Her name last night had been missing from the list at Joseph’s party and yes, she’d never been part of any glamour-scene in ’70s New York. But she’d had friends here…friends who’d mostly either died or given up trying to be artists and disappeared into other lives and jobs. Before she met Sylvère, she’d been a strange and lonely girl but now she wasn’t anyone.
“Who’s Chris Kraus?” she screamed. “She’s no one! She’s Sylvère Lotringer’s wife! She’s his ‘Plus-One’!” No matter how many films she made or books she edited, she’d always keep being seen as no one by anyone who mattered so long as she was living with Sylvère. “It’s not my fault!” Sylvère yelled back.
But she remembered all the times they’d worked together when her name had been omitted, how equivocal Sylvère’d been, how reluctant to offend anyone who paid them. She remembered the abortions, all the holidays she’d been told to leave the house so Sylvère could be alone with his daughter. In ten years, she’d erased herself. No matter how affectionate Sylvère’d been, he’d never been in love with her.
(The first night they ever stayed together in Sylvère’s loft, Chris asked him if he ever thought ab
out history. At that time Chris saw history like the New York Public Library, a place to meet dead friends. “All the time,” Sylvère replied, thinking about the Holocaust. It was then she fell in love with him.)
“Nothing is irrevocable,” Sylvère said. “No,” she screamed, “you’re wrong!” By this time she was crying. “History isn’t dialectical, it’s essential! Some things will never go away!”
And the next day, Monday, January 30, she left him.
PART 2: EVERY LETTER IS A LOVE LETTER
EVERY LETTER IS A LOVE LETTER
Love has led me to a point
where I now live badly
’cause I’m dying of desire
I therefore can’t feel sorry for myself
and —
—Anonymous, 14th-century French Provençal
Thurman, New York
Wednesday, February 1, 1995
Dear Dick,
I’m writing to you from the country, the Town of Thurman in upstate New York. Yesterday I drove up here without stopping except for gas in Catskill at the Stewart’s store. Tad’s moved back to Pam’s in Warrensburg. The house is empty and it’s the first time I’ve been up here alone. It’s funny how I don’t feel lonely, though. Maybe it’s the ghost of Mrs. Gideon. Or maybe ’cause I know the whole Thurman cast of characters from buying wood and fixing up the house and working at the school. The Adirondack Times reports on local happenings like Evie Cox’s visit to the podiatrist in Glens Falls. Somehow this redneck town allows the possibility of a middle-aged New York City woman bouncing round a house alone more generously than Woodstock or East Hampton. It’s a community of exiles anyway. No one asks me any questions ’cause there’s no frame of reference to put the answers in.
For several days now I’ve been wanting to tell you about an installation I saw last week in New York. It was called Minetta Lane —A Ghost Story, by Eleanor Antin, an artist/filmmaker who I don’t know very much about. The installation was pure magic. I sat in it for about an hour and felt I could have stayed all day. It was at Ronald Feldman Gallery on Mercer Street. You entered it through a sharply cornered narrow corridor—the white sheet rock of the gallery abruptly changed to crumbling plaster, rotting slats and boards, rolls of chicken-wire and other prewar tenement debris. You stumbled over this stuff the way you stumbled up the stairs, maybe, if you were lucky enough to’ve lived in NYC in the ’50s when people still lived this way, on your way to a party or to visit friends. And as you rounded the last corner you came to a kind of foyer, a semi-circular wall with two large windows mounted on one side and a single window mounted, slightly higher, on the other.
There was a single wooden chair in front of the two windows and you sat down in it uneasily, not wanting to get your feet covered in plaster dust (I can’t remember if the dust beside the chair was real or not). Three films played simultaneously in each of the three windows, rear-projected against the window panes. The corridor’d led you to this point so you could attend a kind of seance, becoming a voyeur.
Through the far-left window a middle-aged woman was painting on a large canvas. We saw her from behind, rumpled shirt and rumpled body, curly rumpled hair, painting, looking, thinking, drawing on a cigarette, reaching down onto the floor to take a few drinks from a bottle of Jim Beam here and there. It was an ordinary scene (though it’s very ordinariness made it subversively utopian: how many pictures from the ’50s do we have of nameless women painting late into the night and living lives?). And this ordinariness unleashed a flood of historical nostalgia, a warmth and closeness to a past I’ve never known—the same nostalgia that I felt from seeing a photo exhibition at St. Mark’s Church a few years ago. There were maybe a hundred photos gathered by the Photographic/Oral History Project of the Lower East Side of artists living, drinking, working, in their habitat between the years 1948 and 1972. The photos were meticulously captioned with the artists’ names and disciplines, but 98% of them were names I didn’t know. The photos tapped into that same unwritten moment as Antin’s show—it was the first time in American art history, thanks to allowances provided by the GI Bill, that lower-middle class Americans had a chance to live as artists, given time to kill. Antin recalls: “There was enough money around from the GI Bill to live and work in a low-rent district… Studios were cheap, so were paints and canvases, booze and cigarettes. All over the Village young people were writing, painting, getting psychoanalyzed and fucking the bourgeoisie.” Where are they now? The Photographic/Oral History Project show transformed the streets of the East Village into tribal ground. I felt a rush of empathetic curiosity about the lives of the unfamous, the unrecorded desires and ambitions of artists who had been here too. What’s the ratio of working artists to the sum total of art stars? A hundred or a thousand? The first window did the job of shamanistic art, drawing together hundreds of disparate thoughts, associations (photos in the exhibition; lives; the fact that some of them were female too) into a single image. A rumpled woman paints and smokes a cigarette. And don’t you think a “sacred space” is sacred only because of the collectivity it distills?
And then there was strange magic in this window too: a magic that would connect this window with the very different states depicted in the other two. After several minutes a little girl wearing a velvet dress and a large bow walks into the frame, the painter’s “room.” Is this girl the woman’s daughter? Is she the daughter of a friend? It’s certain right away that the little girl lives in an entirely different metabolic and perceptual universe than her mother/caretaker/older friend. The canvas holds no particular appeal, though she’s not pointedly disinterested in it either. She looks at it, then drifts away to look at something (us?) outside the window. Then this gets boring too, (She’s got so much energy!) So she starts jumping up and down. Up ’til now the painter has been just peripherally aware of the little girl. But now she puts her brush down, lets herself glide into the game. The woman and the little girl jump up and down together. Then that moment passes too and the woman’s drawn back into her work again.
(This installation grounds the structuralist fascination with the minutiae of varied states of concentration, passing moments, in the only thing that gives these moments any meaning: history and time passing through other people’s lives…)
Through the second window on the right-side of the painter, a young couple cavort in a tenement kitchen bathtub. The girl’s pale blonde, maybe 16, laughing, splashing water on her partner, a tall Black man in his 20s. They slip and slide, arm wrestling in and out of soggy embraces. It’s not clear which one of them lives here (perhaps they both do, or maybe it’s an apartment that they borrow?). At one point the little girl wanders out of the painter’s window in this apartment chomping on a sandwich. She sits and eats, watching them from a ledge above the tub.
Her entry is a strange twist of voyeurism: we’re watching her watching them. But of course there’s no pornography in real-time. There isn’t any story, either. Who these people are or where they’re coming from is not what makes us want to watch them. It’s a fact that’s hinted at, that may or may not be revealed. We’re outsiders, choosing just how much of this alternately awkward and cinematic slice of life we’ll watch before shifting our gaze to another window. The couple are oblivious to us and continuous. They exist much more forcefully than we do.
After a while the little girl leaves and the young woman gets out of the bath, leaves the frame and returns wearing a big wool skirt and cotton camisole. She pulls on a white blouse (Catholic school uniform or standard boho-wear? Either way the intimacy of the scene is very casual and untransgressive) as her partner grabs a towel and climbs out of the bath.
In the third window, the one you have to turn your head or move the chair to see, an old European man gazes, quietly transfixed, into an empty ornamental bird cage in the foreground of his elaborately decorated prewar apartment. The walls behind him are deep green. Obviously he’s lived in them for many years. There’s a crystal chandelier above the bird cage and a warm
light cuts across his face. The scene is timeless, concentrated, existing someplace outside ambivalence or emotion. We don’t see any of what the man is seeing or pretends to, but we see shadows of it across his face. It’s the most compelling, least definable of all three windows. Looking through it we’re watching someone totally absorbed by something we can’t see: a missing bird, a stranger’s past, the mysteries of aging.
Later on (maybe segueing with an erotic highpoint in Window #2 and the little girl’s arrival in the painter’s room) a woman’s face with golden Jean Harlow hair, lit ’30s style by the chandelier, leans above the bird cage that the man so intently watches. The woman is an angel or a gift that the man doesn’t seem to react to. Was she there all this time? Is his expression numbness, is it bliss? The man just keeps looking into the birdcage.
“The form of a city changes faster than the human heart,” Eleanor Antin quoting Baudelaire. The installation was a magic Cornell box, a tiny epic: all ages, modes of life, existing equally and together through the keyhole of this lost time. The installation was troubling and ecstatic.
Dick, its 10:30 at night, I broke off this morning after describing to you the first window and I’m too tired to continue now. This afternoon I went out for a walk feeling very light and clear—“Bright days,” I thought, thinking about an old movie idea I’d once had depicting the suicide of Lew Welch, the San Francisco poet, another beneficiary of the GI Bill, who walked off into the Sierra Mountains one winter in the mid-’70s never to be seen again… How perfectly this upstate winter landscape fits such a scene. I was even debating the kind of camera I would use, the kind of film, where I’d get it and the tripod, would there be another story, any actors?…when the logging road trailed off.