Chris Kraus

Summer of Hate is the story of Catt Dunlop who, like Kraus, is an art critic and occasional professor of Cultural Studies. Emerging rattled from a dangerous relationship with a dominant sex partner she met online, Catt invests in a handful of corroding properties in Albuquerque and moves there to prepare them for rental. She hires Paul Garcia to work as her property manager, and they begin a romantic relationship, though Catt is still married to an older philosopher in New York City. A recovering alcoholic, Paul is on parole after spending two years in prison for “stealing less than an art gallery spends on an after-party.” Eventually Paul is pulled over for speeding and arrested in fulfillment of an outstanding warrant, and the pair embarks on a grueling legal process involving inhumane prison practices and impossible parole stipulations. Back in Los Angeles Catt studies and teaches “all the books about symbolic violence, soft forms of control,” but the forms of control to which Paul is subject are neither soft nor symbolic. As the course of her life fuses with the course of Paul’s, Catt's relationship to class, race, citizenship and criminality become increasingly complicated, forming the basis of Kraus' novelistic critique.

In 2017, Kraus published After Kathy Acker, a biography of Kathy Acker.

I Love Dick is an epistolary novel, a series of love letters to an elusive addressee, later identified as Dick Hebdige. In an introduction to the second edition of the novel, Eileen Myles writes, "Chris' ultimate achievement is philosophical. She's turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man. As if her decades of experience were both a painting and a weapon. As if she, a hag, a jew, a poet, a failed filmmaker, a former go-go dancer—an intellectual, a wife, as if she had the right to go right up to the end of the book and live having felt all that. I Love Dick boldly suggests that Chris Kraus' unswervingly attempted and felt female life is a total work and it didn't kill her." In 2016, Jill Soloway adapted the novel as a TV series, produced by Amazon Studios. The first season was released on May 12, 2017.

In an introduction to her September 2013 interview with Kraus in The Believer, author Sheila Heti wrote "I know there was a time before I read Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (in fact, that time was only five years ago), but it’s hard to imagine; some works of art do this to you. They tear down so many assumptions about what the form can handle (in this case, what the form of the novel can handle) that there is no way to re-create your mind before your encounter with them."

Before beginning her career as writer, Kraus was an artist and filmmaker, making a number of short films and videos, including one feature Gravity & Grace. Her films have been the focus of a number of international retrospective exhibitions and screenings, beginning in 2008 with “Plastic is Leather, Fuck You: Film and Video 1983-1993” at Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin. In the press release for the 2011 exhibition at Real Fine Arts in Brooklyn, Kraus detailed her thoughts behind the production of these films.

In 2008, Kraus received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association.

One of Kraus' non-fiction works is Where Art Belongs, a book-length essay examining contemporary art and sexuality. In a series of vignettes, Kraus treats various forms of early 21st century art, detailing her personal association with some of the artists. Artists whose work is discussed include Ariel Pink, Bernadette Corporation, Bas Jan Ader, Elke Krystufek, Moyra Davey, Louis Malle, and James Benning. Ariel Pink's visual art is discussed in connection with Tiny Creatures, an art collective that was active in Los Angeles from 2006-2007. Elke Krystufek's visits to Easter Island and Palau are described as being inspired by Ader's disappearance at sea, journeys that were undertaken for the purpose of producing art. Photographer Moyra Davey's diagnosis of multiple sclerosis is described as influencing her choice to incorporate writing into her artwork, particularly fragments by Walter Benjamin. Kraus also discusses her participation in the Sex Workers' Art Show, a touring show which precipiated the firing of Gene Nichol, president of the College of William & Mary, when he allowed the troupe to perform at the college.

A series of 23 essays written between 1998 and 2003, mostly in her column "Torpor" in the magazine Artext, Video Green is dense with the literary, the personal, and the culturally marginal. A few of the collection's notable essays not about L.A. include the elegiac "Posthumous Lives", about the performance artist Penny Arcade's loving curation of the estate of the filmmaker Jack Smith, and "How to Shoot a Crime," about Kraus's 1987 film of the same name. The volume's first essay and its lengthiest, "Art Collection" follows the idea of collecting through L.A.'s M.F.A. art scene and real estate market, ending up in rural upstate New York with the extraordinary poetry—and art collection—of the all-but forgotten William Bronk.

The Chance Event: Three Days in the Desert: Primm, Nevada, November 1996. Curated by Chris Kraus, Chance brought together Jean Baudrillard, Rosanne Alluquere Stone, DJ Spooky, Diane Di Prima, the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, visual artists, garage noise bands and 600 participants to investigate the mystery of chance at Whiskey Pete's Casino. Variously described as "a philosophy rave" and "one of the landmark LA events of the 90s," The Chance Event was reviewed on the front page of the LA Times and throughout the art press. Highlights, including a performance by Baudrillard wearing a gold Elvis-inspired blazer and accompanied by the 'Chance' band, were broadcast on European television. The event was funded by the French Cultural Service and Art Center College of Design.

She continued to make films through the mid-1990s. As of 2006 she was married to Sylvère Lotringer, a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust as a child, but they had divorced by 2016. Some of her works are based on her marriage and her ex-husband. She now lives in Los Angeles.

Sylvère Lotringer, Kraus's husband from the late eighties to the late nineties, founded Semiotexte's Foreign Agents series, which mostly published French critical theorists, in 1980. Ten years later Kraus founded the press's Native Agents imprint to publish fiction, mostly by women, as an analogue to the French theories of subjectivity in the Foreign Agents series. In addition to groundbreaking works of fiction by writers like Michelle Tea and Ann Rower, Native Agents has published notable volumes of poetry and prose by Eileen Myles, Barbara Barg, and Fanny Howe, as well as memoirs and interviews by Kathy Acker, Bob Flanagan, David Rattray, and William Burroughs. In a 2012 piece for n+1, senior editor Elizabeth Gumport wrote "What united the Native Agents authors was the way their work combined elements of theory, fiction, and biography, explicitly refusing to identify absolutely with any single genre."

Kraus was born in New York City and spent her childhood in Connecticut and New Zealand. After obtaining a BA at a young age from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Kraus worked as a journalist for five years, and then moved to New York City. Kraus was aged 21 when she arrived in New York and began studying with actor Ruth Maleczech and director Lee Breuer, whose studio in the East Village was called ReCherChez. Kraus made films and video art and staged performances and plays at many venues. In the late 1970s she was a member of The Artists Project, a City-funded public service venture of painters, poets, writers, filmmakers and dancers.

Additionally, Kraus cites two historical countercultural documents on sexuality which have informed contemporary art. Suck was an underground newspaper founded in 1969 by Jim Haynes, Germaine Greer, Bill Levy, Heathcote Williams and Jean Shrimpton. The twelfth issue of Recherches, a French journal, was edited by Félix Guattari in collaboration with the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire, a gay rights group. Titled "Three Billion Perverts", the issue was devoted to homosexuality, with many copies being seized and destroyed by French authorities. Kraus cites Andrea Fraser's Untitled (2003), a video work showing a sexual encounter between the artist and a collector who subsequently purchased a copy of the video, as an example of an artwork informed by the literature.

Chris Kraus (born 1955) is an American writer and filmmaker. Her novels include I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. Video Green, Kraus' first non-fiction book, examines the explosion of late 1990s art by high-profile graduate programs that catapulted Los Angeles into the center of the international art world. Her films include Gravity & Grace, How To Shoot A Crime, and The Golden Bowl, or, Repression.