by Chris Kraus
I think the downward rush of images from inside the cafe—history, our collective popular unconscious—performs ironic sabotage in the same way Huskies celebrates, subverts, the atmosphere of Pop Art and the New York School. We’re touched by the nostalgia, seeing Walter at the center of our extended European family, but our smarter selves find greater satisfaction knowing history as we understand it is really just an avalanche of garbage toppling down.
CHICKEN MARENGO
I come over to your house with a bag of groceries in the late afternoon. It’s beautiful California sunlight. I go into your kitchen and start making Chicken Marengo.
(Sautee garlic in olive oil, then add chicken for 20 minutes while cutting up onions, carrots and potatoes. When chicken’s brown, add crushed tomatoes, then the vegetables. Then add bay leaves, pepper…)
It’s an easy kind of scene and you walk in and out. When that’s all done I put it in a pot to stew. I come out and tell you it needs 45 minutes simmering. We go to bed. What else could fill the time as well? Is this the purpose of slow cooking?)
After we have sex we eat chicken marengo, talk awhile.
And then I go…
ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITANS
Lately I’ve been imagining other scenes of beauty too. Tearing down 2nd Avenue last night in my truck, plotting the best grid to beat traffic all the way to 8th & 5th I flash suddenly on parties that I’ve been to in New York, East Hampton: everybody jagged, brilliant, cinematic, all of these personas blurring as the night goes on, drugs, ambition, money, electricity… Do you remember the wretched movie Oliver Stone made about Jim Morrison’s life? According to Oliver, Jim was a wholesome California Boy—cute blonde girlfriend, magic mushrooms, milk & freckles—’til he met the Crazed Kike Witches of New York. The Witches dragged him down with their exotic drugs, their wild parties, their mindfuck demonology. They understood his poetry, though. The Witches are why Jim died of an overdose in the bathtub of a Paris hotel.
Realize, D, that I am one of those Crazed Kike Witches and I understand your fear.
And why’s Janis Joplin’s life read as a downward spiral into self-destruction? Everything she did is filtered through her death. Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, River Phoenix all suicided too but we see their deaths as aftermaths of lives that went too far. But let a girl choose death—Janis Joplin, Simone Weil—and death becomes her definition, the outcome of her “problems.” To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form. Dear Dick, I want to make the world more interesting than my problems. Therefore, I have to make my problems social.
The correspondence between Gustave Flaubert and Louise Colet reads like a Punch & Judy show. Louise Colet, female writer of the 19th-century, had rosy cheeks and little ringlet curls. Unlike her enemy George Sand who chose to “live like a man” until age shielded her as a grand matriarch, Louise wanted to write and she wanted to be femme. Louise turned the difficulty of combining those two occupations into a subject of her art. Flaubert thought: “You are a poet shackled to a woman! Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art. No! The heart’s dross does not find its way on paper.” For years they met in Paris at times and places designated by him—sex and dinner once a month whenever Flaubert needed a break from his writing schedule in Rouen. Once, Louise asked to meet his family. And here Flaubert’s biographer Francis Steegmuller steps in: “Flaubert’s depiction of Emma Bovary’s vehemence was doubtless nourished somewhat by Louise’s shrill demands.” When Flaubert finally broke her heart she wrote a poem about it and he replied: “You have made Art an outlet for the passions, a kind of chamberpot to catch the overflow of I don’t know what. It doesn’t smell good! It smells of hate!”
To be female in 19th century France was to be denied access to the apersonal. And still—
I found it hard to write about the second painting, the one paired with Walter Benjamin that everybody says deals with the Holocaust so I went back on Sunday to take another look. I drove down to New York City after spending Saturday with my old friend Suzan Cooper, a Crazed Kike Witch of the First Order. Suzan’s been exiled by her family after many years in New York to Woodstock, where she runs a gallery.
Suzan always has several hustles running. One of them is selling photos taken around Andy Warhol’s Factory by Billy Name. I bought a black & white print of John Cale, Gerard Malanga and Nico staring stoned into the distance in their Nehru jackets in a park that looks like the murder scene in Blow Up. I don’t know if Billy Name’s name at the bottom of the photo in silver magic marker was signed by Suzan or by Billy but I didn’t care.
There are two groups of three people (men) gathered in If Not, Not, the second picture. Each group is joined by one naked woman. The first group is gathered at the bottom left of the frame beside a blackish pool with floating objects. The subconscious is a dark oasis. The men are wounded soldiers. These are the objects in the pool:
—A sheep beneath a bushy olive tree
—Two blue-backed books, discarded
—A girl’s face looking straight up at the sky from underwater
—A broken pillar
—A naked man sitting up in bed from sleep
—A black crow perched on parchment writing
—A red cylindrical kitchen garbage can
The second group of men are resting in a palm-grove at top frame right. The palm trees move and bend like people’s backs. Between the resting men, a shadow or a cloud rears up from the ground like a wild rat or a pig. Have these men already visited the pool or are they looking towards it? Either way they’re exhausted, in a state (“where the river don’t bend”) that’s something like Richard Hell’s great cover of Dylan’s Going Going Gone.
The sky above these people’s streaky purple, orange, exploding nuclear Hawaiian from a tangerine funnel in the middle of the painting. But the sky on the left-side of the funnel’s very different—black-green thunderclouds drawn around a barn-like institutional building. Dachau, Auschwitz. A gaping double door: a mouth, a port of entry. We can make what we like of the differences between the two sides of this sky—are these skies evoking centuries or geography? Though everybody knows “there is nothing that can change the sky or make anything even approaching a wrinkle in its skin… no scream of terror or despair or hate or the imploring eyes of 60 million saints and innocent children ever moved it.” (The Angel, David Rattray) The nature of a sky is to be implacable.
A duckshit-colored roadway, leading to an arch against the sky, separates these two sides of the painting. But through it, in an opening where the tangerine-slashed sky ought to continue, we see the painting’s single act of superimposition. A blue tree on the roadway just before the arch points towards this archway. It’s the door to heaven. And heaven here’s some clustered bushy trees and blossoms, a Fra Angelico landscape in green and pink. And this tiny scene itself contains another superimposition: the sky behind the trees has been replaced by an abstracted close-up: a blurry mass of pink and green slammed up behind this almost Biblical landscape.
I didn’t like this painting very much. I thought its problem was the same problem many Jews have in wanting to “place” the Holocaust, to find some meaning or redemption. An end to rootless cosmopolitanism. This painting, particularly in relation to Paris Autumn/Walter Benjamin, is telling us that extreme suffering may be redeemed because it carries us back or forward into the Land of the Subconscious. If Not, Not suggests that the subconscious is what lies behind us and ahead of us. It’s the entire Tarot deck compressed into a single card. The subconscious is what history’s been reduced to. If Not, Not is one of the few paintings of Kitaj’s where disjunction’s used to unify the frame. The tools of study (rupture)
used this time to enact a mystical state or union. All the people (men) inhabit space only in relation to that murky pool: they approach it or avoid it or seek comfort from a naked woman after seeing it. But is the subconscious really irreducible?
I think Kitaj’s vision of the subconscious is mushier than both Chicken Marengo reheated on the second day and the little scene I wrote for you about cooking it. Why?
(Because it’s been torn away from time).
I didn’t really know I was a kike ’til I was 21 and met my relatives when I moved back to New York. Oh, there’d been intimations: that I picked Wendy Winer, one of 6 or 7 Jews, as my best friend out of 2000 kids in our little redneck town. That my only significant New Zealand boyfriends were named Rosenberg and Meltzer. The single out’ed Jew in my grade-school class, Lee Nadel, was taunted by the entire school as “Needle Nose.” Perhaps my parents, who both attended Christian church, were just trying to protect me.
The only person I admired among our family’s few relatives and friends was Aunt Elsie (surname, Hayman), an elegant self-invented woman with olive skin and long gray hair pulled back in a chignon. Elsie’s accent was a fascinating blend of roots and cultivation. She said “ain’t” and “cosTUME” instead of “costume,” she talked slang straight off the streets of working class New York where she grew up, but she talked about ballet, symphonies and books with the most astonishing precision. Elsie’d married into a family of stockbrokers, and with it, a modest amount of money—which she spent, after her husband’s death, with tremendous style—never maintaining a “fancy” place on Central Park like others in that family. Elsie lived in a 3 room flat in the East 70s and spent her money travelling the world—India, Europe, Bali, Indonesia. When she was 67 and a Buddhist she climbed the Himalayas.
Christians believe in the redemptive power of suffering. It’s the basis of the whole religion. Jesus was frailty personified, his life the Ur-text of suffering, betrayal and abandoned dreams. The suffering of Jesus teaches us that God understands. I don’t see any advantage in believing this. Kikes would rather side-step the whole question of redemption. They think that suffering brings knowledge but knowledge is just a step out into the world. Redemption’s meaningless because there’s nowhere else to go, as humans we’re all locked into the orbit of a life together.
“Jews don’t like images,” I said, explaining some of Sylvère’s work to you that evening in the restaurant, “because images are charged. They rob people of their power. Believing in the transcendental power of the image and its Beauty is like wanting to be an Abstract Expressionist or a Cowboy.” And isn’t undermining this the basis of Kitaj’s most successful work? His best paintings subvert the power of their image by tossing them around in a critical, cerebral mix. It’s through an act of will—collision, contradiction, that these paintings attain their power. Kitaj infiltrates the image in the same way certain Jews lived through World War 2 with phony passports. Kitaj the Sneaky Kike bluffs his way into the Host Culture, Painting, and turns it back upon itself. He paints to challenge iconography.
My father’s favorite writer is William Burroughs.
This morning, after dreaming about dead turtles, I wrote this in my notebook:
My entire state of being’s changed because I’ve become my sexuality: female, straight, wanting to love men, be fucked. Is there a way of living with this like a gay person, proudly?
One painting in this show maybe has the answer. There’s a Peter Handke story where a youngish German couple drive around America through the desert looking for the famous Hollywood director John Ford. They’ve lost the drift of why they were together, have no idea how to continue with their lives. (In Idaho last summer, Sylvère and I felt this way too.) The German couple thought John Ford would have the answer. (Sylvère and I never looked to anybody, though, for answers, except maybe the idea of you.) John Ford figured they were crazy. He didn’t want to be anybody’s saint, though in this particularly sentimental story he turns out to be.
Peter Handke and Kitaj must’ve known the same John Ford, likeably garrulous and ugly, the kind of guy who thinks that to be alive is to be in charge.
In this painting, John Ford on his Deathbed (1983/84), John Ford is sitting up presiding over his own deathbed, fully dressed, holding his rosary like a stopwatch and smoking a cigar.
It’s a brilliant and theatrical painting, art-directed like a Mexican-shot Western with its deep blue walls and straw-planked floors, color so strong it reconfigures the painting’s Euro-American script.
There’re several separate scenes within this painting. These scenes are dissonant, but not strategically oppositional. The painting is a chronicle of a life’s events, like the Medieval story paintings that prefigured comic books but these events are splayed like life, chaotic and abstracted. All the dissonance is drawn together in a frame that can contain them not through magic but through Ford’s formidable self-invented will.
At the bottom of the painting we see a scene from John Ford’s past: a man of boundless middle-age talking through a megaphone to actors costumed as poor immigrants in what must’ve been a Texas western—cobblers making cowboy boots. His legs are crossed, his broad face, oblivious to its own ugliness, is partly covered by dark glasses and a squat black hat. In the middle of the painting a matador, maitre’d or major domo holds an empty frame pierced by a salmon pink pole, the kind you’d see on a restaurant patio or in a dancehall. A dancing couple spread their arms around it, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (sort of) painted by Chagall. And there’re lights strung through the painting, extending out into the room, flesh-pink, like the lobster terrace restaurants in La Bufadora, Mexico. The painting frame above Ford’s bed is partly Mexican too, its green-red-yellow frame hanging askew, though its subject is decidedly European: a solitary man in black carrying something through the gray-white snow. It’s pogrom-land, it’s an old television movie.
In this painting dissonance’s disappeared and been reborn as elevated schtick. It’s a grand finale, the production number, where all the show’s motifs come back as jokes. And Kitaj-as-Ford delivers, like movies’re supposed to do, a dazzling punchline: at the upframe center of Ford’s blue wall there’s an Ed Ruscha knock-off framed in black that reads
THE
END
and below it, a tiny painting, window opening out from deep blue walls to deep blue sky. There is no road to immortality but there’s a porthole to it. In this painting objects, people, dance and move but still there’s flesh and weight. Transcendence isn’t only lightness; it’s attained by will.
And why do we crave lightness so?
Lightness is a ’60s lie, it’s Pop Art, early Godard, The Nice Man and the Pretty Girl (With Huskies). Lightness is the ecstacy of communication without the irony, it’s the lie of disembodied cyberspace.
Through his medium John Ford, Kitaj is telling us that matter moves but you can’t escape its weight. The dead come back to dance not as spirits but as skeletons.
DD,
On December 3, 1994 I started loving you.
I still do.
Chris
SYLVÈRE AND CHRIS WRITE
IN THEIR DIARIES
EXHIBIT A: SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER
Pasadena, California
March 15, 1995
“Gave Proust seminar and first lecture today at Dick’s school. One more to go. Dick was direct and friendly, though in the car I suddenly had flashes of his hand going across Chris’ cunt. Images. The whole situation is so weird. In any case, Chris once again has pulled a fast one. Even though Dick’s rejected her, she’s managed to cover all the bases: She doesn’t need him to respond for her love to go on. She can maintain a relationship with me, draw inspiration from Dick for her work, and even put her film into a vault without pushing it any further.
Chris faxed me her piece about Kitaj, the “kike” painter she identifies with. It’s very heady, spiralling around his idiosyncratic life, critical rejection, East Hampton in the ’60s. I’ve n
ever heard of him, but she manages to weave everything in, including her own present predicament.
I felt very moved by it, exhilarated. Chris now believes that the failure of Gravity & Grace was “destiny,” pushing her towards some further explication of all the emotion within her films. She’s writing without any destination or authority, unlike Dick, who’s off to give another talk in Amsterdam and never writes unless he’s asked to; unlike me, about to give my Evil lecture, collect my check and go home.
And yet Chris was feeling very sad, cut off from Dick, and I was sad too after talking to her. The situation was hopeless: she loved him, needed him, couldn’t stand the idea of not being close to him or communicating with him. I decided I will talk to Dick tomorrow night on our drive out to the airport. I don’t know how he’ll take it; after all, he’s been quite clear about ending this ambiguous situation. And yet if I happened to be heard by him, that would kill me: the idea of a strong connection between the two of them that excludes me. I ended up sobbing until 2 a.m., unable to fall asleep, feeling pretty down and desperate.”
EXHIBIT B: CHRIS KRAUS
Los Angeles, California
March 31, 1997
“I found Sylvère’s diary entry last night when I was searching all the backfiles of this computer for some link between Kike Art which I wrote that March and the last two essays in the book. Because I’d decided, and everyone agrees, that the only way to make this writing be a novel was to make the throughline very clear. But when I read his diary entry last night I was just so overwhelmed and moved. How much he loves me. How much he’s taken all my questions as his own.
On the phone this morning to Sylvère who’s in East Hampton I was talking about reading. How I like to dip into other people’s books, to catch the rhythm of their thinking, as I try to write my own. Writing around the edges of Philip K. Dick, Ann Rower, Marcel Proust, Eileen Myles and Alice Notley. It’s better than sex. Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill—getting larger ’cause you’re entering another person’s language, cadence, heart and mind.