Where Art Belongs

In Where Art Belongs, Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decadethat reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. In four interlinkedessays, Kraus expands the argument begun in her earlier book Video Green that "the art world isinteresting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it." Moving from New York toBerlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus addresses such subjects as theubiquity of video, the legacy of the 1960s Amsterdam underground newspaper Suck, and the activitiesof the New York art collective Bernadette Corporation. She examines the uses of boredom, poetry,privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, anddiscarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within thematrix.Chronicling the sometimes doomed but persistently heroic efforts of small groups of artiststo reclaim public space and time, Where Art Belongs describes the trend towards collectivitymanifested in the visual art world during the past decade, and the small forms of resistance todigital disembodiment and the hegemony of the entertainment/media/culture industry. For all itsfaults, Kraus argues, the art world remains the last frontier for the desire to livedifferently.

Chris Kraus is the author of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (2004) and the novels Aliens and Anorexia (2000), I Love Dick (new edition, 2006), and Torpor (2006), all published by Semiotext(e). The 2007 recipient of the Frank Mather Award in Art Criticism and a 2010 Warhol Foundation Arts Writer's grant, she has taught art writing in graduate programs at University of California, Irvine, European Graduate School, Art Center College, and Columbia College Chicago.