Social Practices
Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick.

A border isn't a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other's lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros.
—from Social Practices

Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness.
Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as “social practice,” her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.

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Social Practices
Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick.

A border isn't a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other's lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros.
—from Social Practices

Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness.
Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as “social practice,” her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.

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Social Practices

Social Practices

by Chris Kraus
Social Practices

Social Practices

by Chris Kraus

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Overview

Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick.

A border isn't a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each other's lives. My escape is his prison. We meet in a bar and smoke Marlboros.
—from Social Practices

Mixing biography, autobiography, fiction, criticism, and conversations among friends, with Social Practices Chris Kraus continues the anthropological exploration of artistic lives and the art world begun in 2004 with Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness.
Social Practices includes writings from and around the legendary “Chance Event—Three Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard” (1996), and “Radical Localism,” an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevo's Mexicali Rose that Kraus co-organized with Marco Vera and Richard Birkett in 2012. Attuned to the odd and the anomalous, Kraus profiles Elias Fontes, an Imperial Valley hay merchant who has become an important collector of contemporary Mexican art, and chronicles the demise of a rural convenience store in northern Minnesota. She considers the work of such major contemporary artists as Jason Rhoades, Channa Horowitz, Simon Denny, Yayoi Kusama, Henry Taylor, Julie Becker, Ryan McGinley, and Leigh Ledare. Although Kraus casts a skeptical eye at the genre that's come to be known as “social practice,” her book is less a critique than a proposition as to how art might be read through desire and circumstance, delirium, gossip, coincidence, and revenge. All art, she implies, is a social practice.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781635900392
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 10/30/2018
Series: Semiotext(e) / Active Agents
Pages: 296
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels, including I Love Dick and Summer of Hate; two books of art and cultural criticism; and most recently, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography. She received the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism in 2008, and a Warhol Foundation Art Writing grant in 2011. She lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

The Cult of Freedom 12

1 Personal Histories

Trick 17

This Is Chance 25

A Walk around the Neighborhood 41

Sparkle Girl (Julie Becker) 63

What I Couldn't Write 66

Kate Newby's Bones 76

The New Universal 85

Experimental Film 95

2 Social Practices

Kelly Lake Store and Other Stories 101

Radical Localism 119

Fernando Corona: In Love with the Animals 130

Lost Properties 136

The Happy Beneficiary (Tao Wells) 156

It's Very Sad, Ready: Art Writing, Orphaning, Migration of the Humanities and (No) Information 163

Face 171

3 The Dystopian Present

Jason Rhoades, American Artist 195

Here Begins the Dark Sea (Simon Denny) 210

A History of Destabilization (Lucie Stahl) 223

Pseudofiction, Myth and Contingency (Ryan McGinley) 231

Channa Horwitz 241

Blanket 244

Pretend You're Actually Alive (Leigh Ledare) 246

Accumulation (Yayoi Kusama) 265

4 Ambition, Humility, Happiness

Ambition, Humility, Happiness 271

Resistance 279

Notes 287

Acknowledgments 293

What People are Saying About This

Endorsement

Chris Kraus, one of our most innovative art critics, who is also one of our best fiction writers, now becomes one of our more adventurous biographers.

Holland Cotter, New York Times

From the Publisher

Hardly anyone writes better or more insightfully than Chris Kraus about the lives of women or artists.

Julie Phillips, author of The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon

Chris Kraus, one of our most innovative art critics, who is also one of our best fiction writers, now becomes one of our more adventurous biographers.

Holland Cotter, New York Times

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