Social Practices (Semiotext(e) / Active Agents)

About this book

Essays on and around art and art practices by the author of I Love Dick. A border isnt a metaphor. Knowing each other for over a decade makes us witnesses to each others 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 EventThree Days in the Desert with Jean Baudrillard (1996) and Radical Localism an exhibition of art and media from Puerto Nuevos 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 thats 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.