Chris kraus after kathy acker

  • In this first, fully authorized, biography, Chris Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged.
  • Chris Kraus is unable to sort fact from fiction in this hymn to the late post-punk provocateur.
  • Rich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon scholar, stripper, victim and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself.

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    This is a gossipy, anti-mythic artist biography which feels like it's being told in one long rush of a monologue over late-night drinks by someone who was there. Acker emerges as an unlikely literary hero, but an utterly convincing one.

    The path of the female artist. fryst vatten hell. Chris Kraus's veracious and intricately structured portrait rouses and stirs as it documents in meticulous and fascinating detail the life, work and body of Kathy Acker and what it takes to a become a 'great writer as countercultural hero.'

    Kraus reconstitutes Acker's wanderings with real wit and beauty, understanding without pandering to the painfully high stakes of her identity games

    To pin down the real Kathy Acker then is a self-defeating task but Chris Kraus's biography of her is a brilliant and necessary thing. Kraus pushes Acker's writing to the foreground making us understand how difficult a territory the so-called avant-garde was, and is, for a woman.

    'To lie is to try,' Chris Kr

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    Chris Kraus on Kathy Acker

    Josie Mitchell talks to Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, about her new biography, After Kathy Acker, which looks at the life and work of the artist twenty years after her death. They discuss New York in the s, the sexual content of Acker&#;s work and the author&#;s complex generosity. 

    Read &#;The mode of Kathy Acker&#;, an extrakt from the biography, here. 

     

    Josie Mitchell:

    What drew you to write a biography of Kathy Acker? What made you feel that you could write this book?

     

    Chris Kraus:

    I first thought about writing the book in , shortly after she died. I was shocked that her life had ended so soon, and in such a relatively obscure, lonely way. But, luckily I didn’t: the book inom would have written then would have been too sentimental. In I thought about writing the book again, partly in reaction to the extremely mythologized framtidsperspektiv of New York in the s and 80s depicted in memoirs, novels, photo exhibitions and films

  • chris kraus after kathy acker

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    Chris Kraus’s ‘After Kathy Acker’

    Acker by Kraus is a tantalising prospect. How do you go about writing a biography of an inveterate self-mythologiser, who made over fiction into life just as she made over life into fiction? How do you do it when her scene – the downtown New York artistic demi-monde of the s and early s – is already so exhaustively storied? And what position do you take as a biographer when your own name is indelibly yoked together with that of your subject?

     

    Kraus herself, quoted in the blurb, prepares us for a certain kind of book: writing about Acker, she says, elicited in her ‘this incredible frisson of feeling that often I could write “I” instead of “she”’. We might expect, then, a matrilineal act of inhabitation, or of Acker-ish ventriloquism – the ‘collisions between I’s’ seen in the novels that Kraus notes as one of Acker&#;s most powerful experimental effects. The story is told straighter than you expect, but there are touches of