Where Art Belongs – the most hopeful project
Guestlecture and Presentation by Chris Kraus (author, L.A.) and Elke Krystufek (artist, Vienna, Berlin) organized by the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies, Sabeth Buchmann and Elisabeth von Samsonow.
In Where Art Belongs , Chris Kraus examines artistic enterprises of the past decade that reclaim the use of lived time as a material in the creation of visual art. In four interlinked essays, Kraus expands the argument begun in her earlier book Video Green that "the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it." Moving from New York to Berlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus addresses such subjects as the ubiquity of video, the legacy of the 1960s Amsterdam underground newspaper Suck, the activities of the New York art collective Bernadette Corporation, and Elke Krystufek's investigation into the structures of mythology. She examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix.
Chronicling the sometimes doomed but persistently heroic efforts of small groups of artists to reclaim public space and time, Where Art Belongs describes the trend towards collectivity manifested in the visual art world during the past decade, and the small forms of resistance to digital disembodiment and the hegemony of the entertainment/media/culture industry. For all its faults, Kraus argues, the art world remains the last frontier for the desire to live differently.
About the Author
Chris Kraus is an author, filmmaker, and professor of film at the European Graduate School. In her writing, she fuses the boundaries between privacy and arttheory.
About the artist
"My work is a form of movement - kind of like in dancing, where various figures are possible, but one cannot be really called better than the other one." Elke Krystufek is an internationally acclaimed austrian artist. 2009 she represented Austria at the 53. Venice Biennale
The two women have been in touch, and Chris Kraus contributed an essay for Elke Krystufeks Kestner Gesellschaft exhibtion, but they never published the catalogue. Said essay is part of Chris Kraus' new book "Where Art Belongs".