Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness

""Slow-witted, fat, 14, and dreaming constantly of being fucked by other boys, Bo found a kitten near a neighbor's trash one day."" One does not expect such a sentence in a collection of art criticism essays, but for Kraus, her life and relationships, including the one with her friend Bo, form an inseparable part of her take on art, and to leave them out would be untrue, she believes, to her perceptions of the works under consideration, and thus to her own writing. These 24 pieces reflecting on Los Angeles art, most previously published in Artext, therefore include Kraus's sado-masochistic practice, her semi-estranged husband Sylvere Lotringer, the late Kathy Acker's notebooks, her various living spaces, her visceral reactions as a New Yorker who relocates to L.A., and the San Diego Zoo. Along the way, Kraus, whose I Love Dick tracked her obsession with her husband's eponymous colleague, offers some trenchant observations about young L.A. artists and works, and builds a scathing critique of the Master's of Fine Arts programs around which the L.A. scene revolves. Idiosyncractic, scattered and compelling, Kraus's take on L.A. and its art is decidedly and wonderfully nonstandard.