Chris Kraus on Art, Democracy and Escaping the Apocalypse in New Zealand

I meet Chris Kraus in the dimly lit hotel lobby. She had emailed several days prior, inviting me to accompany her to "a cocktail type thing", which turns out to be a formal reception for writers in town for the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival–and not, as I'd assumed, a small art–crowd affair in a gallery downtown.
While the festival coordinator debates whether to take the hotel bus or walk through the heavy rain to the gallery, Kraus says she knows where we're going and leads the group of writers down to Queen Street. In response to the pained faces staring out into the squally downpour the coordinator races ahead to retrieve umbrellas to distribute. Kraus promises we won't stay long.

Reaching the bright white of the venue, she strides ahead with bouncy, purposeful intent, and downs a wine. Kraus is small, bird–like, in low–heeled boots and a floor–length skirt,her hair cinched up by a tortoise–shell claw clasp. She has all the dualisms of a teenager–fluctuating between poised and uncomfortable, hiding under strands of dyed blonde fringe, or issuing wide–eyed stares across the room. I wait while she does her thing among the suits and bobs, until a hand clasps my wrist. "let's get out of here," she says in candied valley girl drawl, "away from these people". She laughs.
Reaching for my half–filled glass to aid a quicker escape, we take turns gulping down wine like two bratty imposters at a party we stumbled into for the free drinks.

***

We make our way to a Korean joint she'd chanced upon the previous day in a jet–lagged daze, and she talks about the nature of being an outsider within the literary world.
Hidden up three flights of stairs, it's like entering a video game set in a 90's cybernet cafe. Tags scrawled up the stairwell, TV monitors dangling in corners, pinned–up swaths of fabric shielding makeshift entrances to labyrinthine exits and alleys.

It's the kind of place Kraus would find; somewhere unexpected, oddly funny, uncategorisable; the kind of place I'll likely return to, the same way that I've returned to her books over the years, using their sense of fracture and displacement to make sense of the complexities and fragmentations of being, especially as a woman, in the world.

With a background in art writing, not literature, she's a little bemused at being embraced by the mainstream since I Love Dick was birthed into a second life with a new readership, mostly stemming from Amazon's TV adaption.
In her most recent novel, Summer of Hate, Kraus describes her fan base as "Asperger's boys, girls who'd been hospitalised for mental illness, assistant professors who would not be receiving their tenure, lap dancers, cutters and whores."
To see her embraced, cited, instagrammed by those wielding social capital, popularity and influence feels a little uncomfortable, like, wait; she's ours.

Kraus has always been an outsider of sorts. She's wryly referred to herself as an "academic groupie", straddling the worlds of art, literature and academia. An accident years ago left her partially deaf, which makes noisy spaces difficult, and she relies on lip–reading.
In her work, she's ardent observer of the complexities of desire, romance and power struggle within human relationships–and maybe this further layer of forced retreat has made her more porous to those subtleties, in the way only those with a sense of being 'outside' access.

She ponders where she'd live in New Zealand if she left Los Angeles– "Is there somewhere like Devonport, but not as expensive?" It may be an option, she says, when facing the realities of living under Trump's America.

Democracy, she says, is a failed experiment.

"Democracy is completely corrupted now. On both sides, because there's so much corruption and it goes so deep that one could never hope to unravel it, it's just a bottomless pit of special interests and it's a closed world of greed. And everybody knows that."

"And on the other side, the populist side, for there to be a democracy there has to be some kind of common language and common level of information which we don't have anymore."

"I think maybe the only thing that will save us is a theocratic state–but not the kind that's depicted in A Handmaid's Tale, more of a kind of prophetic, ecological, New Testament, ethical, profound love version, but that billions of people can get behind–but how does that happen? I don't know, it hasn't happened yet. But, I think democracy is over."

From that perspective, she's intrigued by the "apocalypse insurance" phenomenon that New Zealand's played host to: becoming a sanctuary for the uber–rich buying getaways in case of a future economic or environmental meltdown.
She's not been to New Zealand since 2013, and avoided Auckland for Wellington, where she once lived, years ago. Kraus says she's noticed a marked shift.
Last time she drove the length of the country, stopping for scones and crustless white–bread sandwiches at the vanishing tea rooms that once dotted the highways south.
"Why are there so many more people now?" she asks. "I don't understand this. In first world countries middle class people have been accused of not breeding sufficiently–not maintaining their demographic for the birth rate, and yet everywhere you look there's too many people, everywhere. It feels like there are too many people in New Zealand, too–billionaires from all over the world can buy their way in, buy vacation places, and it's become this survivalist paradise."

Kraus recalls a passing conversation with a man intending to build a "big–ass house as a retreat".

"This is very common now, the virtue for these extremely wealthy people is that it's so far–it's going to be as far away from the apocalypse that you're beaming yourself back into by moving back to LA–they're all trying to get out."

Kraus doesn't see the point of survivalism, but rather, how we might arrange communities–and how willing we are to experiment with new forms of living in response to economic crises. Politically, campaigning toward a living wage is important, but so is reimagining cities and repopulating centres that have been hollowed out.

Her books following I Love Dick explore more explicitly life under neoliberalism, particularly Summer of Hate, which illustrates the grinding cycles of poverty. Markers of class that hum like a fly around each roadblock encountered by the main protagonist. Stained by the label of 'criminal' for the pettiest of crimes means constant reminders of past transgressions and an inability to atone for his basic mistakes; something he can't merely swat away.

Back in her hotel room she slouches on the sofa eating chocolate, finishing wine and looking out over the expanse of the city lights below.
Kraus suggests it's easier to talk about I Love Dick because it's more glamorous than such hard realism.

"The reason I Love Dick became popular is because people read this lifestyle element into it. It's like, elevated chick–lit."

Now, situated in the gaps between art, literature and entertainment, Kraus observes subtle differences between the way each operates, and still finds the most robust conversations are happening in art.
She says while the TV adaption does a good job with the text there's still something missing.

"There's a 'thing' in art which is hard to understand. What makes an artist is a commitment to something very intangible, almost inarticulable. It's an associative process of going deep into a constellation, and when it's depicted on screen it's often a joke. It's about looking at the thing as being the tip of the iceberg and also seeing the thing as evoking the iceberg."

There's one scene in the show where each woman talks about their background, and how the reader finds themselves, and a community, through the text.

She sits up, "that episode is so good! It becomes about the phenomena of the book. It's about the readers of the book, which is so beautiful. That's something I felt happened with my work–it's created this community, people have come together through reading my work–what could be better than that?"

Did she seek this, I ask, was this something envisioned when writing into a real or imagined audience?

"No," she says, laughing. "I always wanted to be like those people at the cocktail party! You know…sort of taken seriously as a writer–you could see that I'm not quite taken seriously as a writer there."

She is, of course–does she not want to be?

"It's never gonna happen–forget it!"

I tell her she's cooler–that other writers can't get the audience she has.

"Well, that was my dream," says Kraus.
"But I ended up getting something much better."

NB: The author is an associate editor on a book project for publishing house, Semiotext(e) of which Kraus is a co–founder.