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Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness
Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.
224 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2004
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649 people want to read
About the author
Chris Kraus
76 books901 followersChris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism—Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020–2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 11, 2009
this book reflects the reasons for which i love los angeles: seeming chaos inexplicably leading to moments of beauty. i loved it.
July 21, 2015
On Friday mornings I taught a diary-writing class at the art school. Attendance in it was the kiss of death for anyone expecting to succeed within the institution. The diary-writing class attracted mostly girls, of course, who'd drifted foolishly into art, thinking art might be a medium for change or self-expression. Girls who'd slit their wrists and been hospitalized for mental illness. Unlike the girls who'd go on to good careers making videotapes of lawn-sprinklers, the diary-writers wondered why there were no senior female faculty at the school and why the Institution's only black employees were security guards and secretaries. The diary-writers wondered why the institution's only class on "feminism" was perennially taught by men. They wondered why the works of major 20th century black writers were referred to at the school as "crappy."
Still, in Los Angeles, it was possible to make a lot of money. Neoconceptual art-school art was flourishing around the world: it was a blue-sky opportunity. LA artists rightly saw themselves as trained professionals: like doctors, lawyers and other lapdogs of the ruling class, they referred to what went on inside their studios as their "practice." Once inside the loop, there was very little competition so long as you abided by the rules: 25% percent of institution graduates obtained major representation within their first year out of school. Meanwhile in New York, artists who'd worked for twenty years languished without galleries.
At that moment in LA it was also possible to make a lot of money buying real estate. Since this required a certain curiosity about neighborhoods and human nature, it interested me much more than artistic practice. And so I bought and sold. Meanwhile colleagues who'd arrived here from New York were establishing great careers as curators and critics. Anyone from a decent northeast college willing to work a New York 60-hour week could become a leader in their field. You didn't have to be that smart, or rich, or lucky. In Los Angeles, anything was possible.
Still, in Los Angeles, it was possible to make a lot of money. Neoconceptual art-school art was flourishing around the world: it was a blue-sky opportunity. LA artists rightly saw themselves as trained professionals: like doctors, lawyers and other lapdogs of the ruling class, they referred to what went on inside their studios as their "practice." Once inside the loop, there was very little competition so long as you abided by the rules: 25% percent of institution graduates obtained major representation within their first year out of school. Meanwhile in New York, artists who'd worked for twenty years languished without galleries.
At that moment in LA it was also possible to make a lot of money buying real estate. Since this required a certain curiosity about neighborhoods and human nature, it interested me much more than artistic practice. And so I bought and sold. Meanwhile colleagues who'd arrived here from New York were establishing great careers as curators and critics. Anyone from a decent northeast college willing to work a New York 60-hour week could become a leader in their field. You didn't have to be that smart, or rich, or lucky. In Los Angeles, anything was possible.
January 28, 2019
What I expected: a book about video art in los angeles in the 90’s
What I got: a book about some artists Kraus was friends with in the 90’s, yet mostly an extensive knowledge of her sadomasochistic practices
I struggle a lot to understand what is now considered to be cool. I think that in Brooklyn, it is considered cool to have read Chris Kraus’ “I Love Dick”, a book I have not finished twice for various reasons.
The artists that Kraus mentions in this book are difficult to find via a google search, which pairs interestingly with what she says about the longevity of artists. It’s interesting to gauge this culture as one of the last local “cool” art scenes in America before the internet displaced everything, and there is certainly a lot of originality to the people that populate this book. But the pretension is thick. I don’t frankly believe that the “cool” that dominated the art scene here, where sentiment and the personal, even the notion of identity, are considered passé, would find contemporary art being made at this moment (2019) to be good or interesting - a large deal of art today hones in on the artist’s identity signifiers. Granted, my understanding of this is very surface level and I am sure ripe to be disproven.
I have lately been feeling that algorithms, lack of leisure time, and on-demand culture services are limiting our scope of what art is and thinking new ideas (you no longer have a DVD collection; netflix provides you with a temporary and terrible library of options - your success as an artist is determined by your follower count.) In Video Green, neoconceptual art prevents anyone outside of the elitist LA art world bubble from understanding or appreciating their work, but the wealth of artists creating individual work is impressive. While I frankly find her depiction of bdsm to be vanilla by today’s standards, the world that she talks about genuinely feels “cool” to me in a way that I don’t really experience in my day-to-day understanding of the world. And one day, when I finish I Love Dick, I too can claim to be “cool” and finally move to New York.
Some of her essays, particularly “Art Collection”, are fantastic.
What I got: a book about some artists Kraus was friends with in the 90’s, yet mostly an extensive knowledge of her sadomasochistic practices
I struggle a lot to understand what is now considered to be cool. I think that in Brooklyn, it is considered cool to have read Chris Kraus’ “I Love Dick”, a book I have not finished twice for various reasons.
The artists that Kraus mentions in this book are difficult to find via a google search, which pairs interestingly with what she says about the longevity of artists. It’s interesting to gauge this culture as one of the last local “cool” art scenes in America before the internet displaced everything, and there is certainly a lot of originality to the people that populate this book. But the pretension is thick. I don’t frankly believe that the “cool” that dominated the art scene here, where sentiment and the personal, even the notion of identity, are considered passé, would find contemporary art being made at this moment (2019) to be good or interesting - a large deal of art today hones in on the artist’s identity signifiers. Granted, my understanding of this is very surface level and I am sure ripe to be disproven.
I have lately been feeling that algorithms, lack of leisure time, and on-demand culture services are limiting our scope of what art is and thinking new ideas (you no longer have a DVD collection; netflix provides you with a temporary and terrible library of options - your success as an artist is determined by your follower count.) In Video Green, neoconceptual art prevents anyone outside of the elitist LA art world bubble from understanding or appreciating their work, but the wealth of artists creating individual work is impressive. While I frankly find her depiction of bdsm to be vanilla by today’s standards, the world that she talks about genuinely feels “cool” to me in a way that I don’t really experience in my day-to-day understanding of the world. And one day, when I finish I Love Dick, I too can claim to be “cool” and finally move to New York.
Some of her essays, particularly “Art Collection”, are fantastic.
June 6, 2024
hay algo en las escritoras que me gustan que sólo se obtiene a los sesenta años. el estilo de chris está tan consolidado (publicó este en el 2004), y funciona tan bien: el arte underground como excusa para hablar de sus hogares temporales, del sexo telefónico, de sus relaciones s/m, de que al chico que limpia su casa le dio sida, de lo que dicen las estudiantes de las clases que da, de que sylvère tiene escondido un diario original de artaud. en realidad leí la edición de consanni, traducción de ceci pavón, con un plus inesperado: cada volumen guardaba un objeto cotidiano que alguna de las personas que participaron en el proyecto usó como separador. me tocó la tirita de una bolsa de té.
July 6, 2025
Read this in prep for a trip to LA, good primer. Gave a backbone to a sentiment that is pretty palpable on the surface of the city, the drama of live obscured by the alienating system of a driving culture. Funny how art has changed since this books publication. Sadly the high note end of Julie Becker hasn’t materialized as a more pronounced or common attitude in art making.
October 11, 2017
I have a really, really low tolerance for this style of writing and I reeeeeaaaaaallyyyyy can't stand the whole ny art elite coming to la to write about how empty and dull it is thing. Not only am I really over New York, I'm really over reading someone wax poetic about photos in a place that ships containers to Central America. Guess what!! People in LA would already rather look at a hand-painted wall of a carniceria than whatever is on at that museum where everyone takes their tinder bio photos like a block over, and we routinely go slightly out of our ways when going from a production meeting on the west side to getting Korean fried chicken so we can get a little look. Then we go write other stuff, I guess.
May 21, 2019
side-by-side smart/scathing critique of art world with vulnerable bits of boredom/sex diary ~ trying to harness an understanding of need for escape from urban desolation, whether through a chaotic art installation where a model of a bank slips through a (w)hole in the floor, or through bdsm partners whose cruelness cannot be discerned as play or real. all of this seems to practice death, practice nothingness. somewhere in here, Arendt wonders "about how in these 'dark times' the intellectual world becomes increasingly self-referential and recedes from public life." and kraus responds: "-anything is permissible in the contemporary art world so long as it is pedigreed, substantiated, referentialized." contemporary art in L.A. comes thru a blank slate, trying to copy the horrors and confusions of real contemporary world ~ prisoners, war tactics, a white male artist who spray-paints "fuck the police" in his gallery ~ but not actually providing any kind of solace or "alternative to it." kraus carries around the diaries of dead kathy acker, she gives money to her male housekeeper who is dying of AIDS, she obsessively longs for the simplicity of art-collecting and lifelong poetry-writing of artist William Bronk, she follows Penny Arcade, an executor of NY artists who died obscurely (she will soon die obscurely herself, no doubt), leaving behind boxes of forgotten brilliant projects...photographs of Billie Holiday's face resting in casket....the sentimental collecting of art becomes a madness. who gets recognized in the art world, and who dies silently? and the madness of sexual submission, letting yourself go to someone else's demands: "it occurs to me that sex can be a conduit to something else, like madness: a means of fixing points upon an interstitial landscape that would otherwise be markerless; where the question 'Who am I' is best answered by asking 'Whom do I haunt?'" the landscape is empty, chris burden shames us jewish sluts for wanting to draw and write about people's lives, and the meaning of the video is just that the green color matches the astro-turf.
December 11, 2021
A introspective collection of essays analyzing art,pop culture,and the history of Los Angeles
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 2, 2022
Isn't my favourite Chris Kraus, this collection is lacking but she has a meta-commentary on this through Summer of Hate. . . A lot of it is about how sexless BDSM is.
November 12, 2007
My Guardian review ...
A collection of essays written by Chris Kraus while she was teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness examines the privileging of surface and the censure of subjectivity in L.A.'s institutionally sanctioned, neo-conceptual art of the latter 1990s. L.A. itself takes a major measure of the blame for what Kraus describes as the "pre-emptive emptiness that pervades the artwork" coming from its art schools. Although Kraus predictably derides Los Angeles as an interstitial landscape without history, where "the dead are missing," she plunges into its "not-thereness" headfirst and takes the reader with her down the rabbit hole. Against the ethos that it's "better to be everywhere than somewhere," Kraus asserts her own messy subjectivity. The particularities of her personal connections – with Jeigh, the New Age dom, and Bo, the HIV-positive housekeeper who loves kittens – stand in contrast to the "coolness," both figurative and literal (as in, devoid of the heat of actual emotion and confrontation), that prevails in art from institutions. In "Bad Nostalgia," Kraus describes artist Zhenya Gershman's paintings as "as ugly as real life," and that's a compliment.
Although familiarity with the work of the artists Kraus writes about would doubtless be helpful in reading Video Green, it's by no means necessary. At their best, these essays are far from insular critiques: they're stories "where people exist and everything counts," as Kraus concludes in "Art Collection," the whirlwind opening essay that sets up the book's themes. Via cybersex correspondence, the experience of living in a dying Hudson Valley town, and an appreciation of the artistic afterlife of now-obscure poet and idiosyncratic art collector William Bronk, Kraus examines issues of power, class, romance, and context and celebrates specificity.
A different Daniel Marlos photo of a crappy interior lit by an extraterrestrial glow accompanies each essay. Focusing on nothing in particular and yet completely specific – a broom and an electrical outlet, a dirty ashtray bathed in a divine spotlight beside an ugly couch – they're like mysterious anthropological studies. Blankness is an illusion, the photos suggest. "There's never really nothing," Kraus writes, "there's only ever the problem of describing what there really is."
A collection of essays written by Chris Kraus while she was teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness examines the privileging of surface and the censure of subjectivity in L.A.'s institutionally sanctioned, neo-conceptual art of the latter 1990s. L.A. itself takes a major measure of the blame for what Kraus describes as the "pre-emptive emptiness that pervades the artwork" coming from its art schools. Although Kraus predictably derides Los Angeles as an interstitial landscape without history, where "the dead are missing," she plunges into its "not-thereness" headfirst and takes the reader with her down the rabbit hole. Against the ethos that it's "better to be everywhere than somewhere," Kraus asserts her own messy subjectivity. The particularities of her personal connections – with Jeigh, the New Age dom, and Bo, the HIV-positive housekeeper who loves kittens – stand in contrast to the "coolness," both figurative and literal (as in, devoid of the heat of actual emotion and confrontation), that prevails in art from institutions. In "Bad Nostalgia," Kraus describes artist Zhenya Gershman's paintings as "as ugly as real life," and that's a compliment.
Although familiarity with the work of the artists Kraus writes about would doubtless be helpful in reading Video Green, it's by no means necessary. At their best, these essays are far from insular critiques: they're stories "where people exist and everything counts," as Kraus concludes in "Art Collection," the whirlwind opening essay that sets up the book's themes. Via cybersex correspondence, the experience of living in a dying Hudson Valley town, and an appreciation of the artistic afterlife of now-obscure poet and idiosyncratic art collector William Bronk, Kraus examines issues of power, class, romance, and context and celebrates specificity.
A different Daniel Marlos photo of a crappy interior lit by an extraterrestrial glow accompanies each essay. Focusing on nothing in particular and yet completely specific – a broom and an electrical outlet, a dirty ashtray bathed in a divine spotlight beside an ugly couch – they're like mysterious anthropological studies. Blankness is an illusion, the photos suggest. "There's never really nothing," Kraus writes, "there's only ever the problem of describing what there really is."
April 10, 2011
I picked up this one at New Orlean's annual indie publisher book fair thinking I had found a hidden gem in the rough. But, I must say I was underwhelmed with this book. Not to say it is not a well-written, well-conceived work, just that my expectations were high and the delivery was not as high. I was expecting an in-depth expose on the turn-of-this-century LA art scene and all I got was a collection of musings from an insider of that world. The subtitle of the book although appropriate for the unintended theme in Krause's perspective on the genre, seems to have been an after-thought and not an actual result of her work.
I must emphasize it is not a bad book. It is an insightful post-modern critique of the contemporary post-modern art world. A number of sound-bites and snippets of inspiration litter the book in an aptly collage like manner. But there is only so much that ties it in directly with LA (such as the Whole Film work of Julie Becker) amongst so much that more ties it in with the US art scene in general (the lengthy discourse on the Bronk collection) with neither editing or interstitial setup making it into a seamless entity. I suspect it is because the writing of these articles were not intended to be read as a whole body of work. They are primarily collected from a run in the seminal Art+text as well as a few other disparate locations. But the disjointed personal narratives of Krause's life in the S/m and Dom worlds at the breaking of the digital age or her life in an LA art school confidential just doesn't make me feel it as much as I think it should.
Bottom line: In many ways this book resembles the final Baudrilliard work with a very similar theme, but this book does not deliver as well as that one in its organization nor its aestheticism. Read it if you can find it but, but going out of your way to find it may well be a let-down unless you are a Krause fan.
I must emphasize it is not a bad book. It is an insightful post-modern critique of the contemporary post-modern art world. A number of sound-bites and snippets of inspiration litter the book in an aptly collage like manner. But there is only so much that ties it in directly with LA (such as the Whole Film work of Julie Becker) amongst so much that more ties it in with the US art scene in general (the lengthy discourse on the Bronk collection) with neither editing or interstitial setup making it into a seamless entity. I suspect it is because the writing of these articles were not intended to be read as a whole body of work. They are primarily collected from a run in the seminal Art+text as well as a few other disparate locations. But the disjointed personal narratives of Krause's life in the S/m and Dom worlds at the breaking of the digital age or her life in an LA art school confidential just doesn't make me feel it as much as I think it should.
Bottom line: In many ways this book resembles the final Baudrilliard work with a very similar theme, but this book does not deliver as well as that one in its organization nor its aestheticism. Read it if you can find it but, but going out of your way to find it may well be a let-down unless you are a Krause fan.
January 29, 2009
There are three or four essays in this book that are great. There are several shorter pieces, originally written for a column, which are good, but they can't stand up next to the longer pieces. Kraus is really good at the long form, dragging all kinds of things into it and digging into them. Showing as opposed to telling: They're alike this way. They're different that way. She's also really good at pushing the essay right up to the point where the next paragraph is going to be explainy, then stopping, without writing that last paragraph, which lets you sit there for a moment a watch all the pieces fall into place in your own head. She talks a lot of shit about the "contemporary art world," which is deeply satisfying. She also makes LA sound like a shrine to the absence of god. Also deeply satisfying.
September 11, 2015
The essays collected here--Kraus's art journal columns and occasional texts written alongside "Aliens and Anorexia" and "Torpor"--are individually incisive, and she's deft at dissecting the vacuity and political conservatism of late '90s "defenses of beauty" (think of Dave Hickey), but there's a good deal of repetition from one brief essay to the next. Kraus's skill at juxtaposing seemingly disparate texts and registers of experience comes out mostly in the few long texts, especially "Art Collection", "The Blessed", and "Emotional Technologies". Unless you have a strong preexisting interest in contemporary art in LA, this is mostly worth reading as a series of preparatory sketches for Kraus's novels, which make a stronger case for her brilliance as a cultural critic.
April 12, 2008
This book should be required reading for all first year art students ... Chris Kraus taught at the Art Center in Los Angeles during the late nineties and shares her insights about how elite graduate programs prepare artists for the neocorporate art market. Excellent passages include a description of a body falling from the sky onto the freeway and holding up traffic, as Kraus drives to a conceptual art exhibit where the artists have separated 'form' from 'surface' ... The prose is interstitial: personal recollections of clumsy internet S/M seep in and out of Kraus's reflections on artists, the art world and the landscape of Los Angeles.
March 25, 2008
Kraus' discussion of the Los Angeles art scene is as personal as it is smart and critical. The text is autobiographical and sincere. I am especially interested in her writing as a call for a reconsideration of identity-based work. She offers up here a serious and personal critique of work after the repudiation of identity politics in the Eighties and underscores the importance of the personal in art-making.
November 17, 2008
Nothing like some hot s/m anecdotes to spice up art criticism!
September 10, 2008
I had the pleasure of hearing Kraus read "Panda Porn" at a bar last year... of her essays, this is among my favorites.
August 4, 2009
I enjoyed the way this book makes art crit into a new, personal form: highly personal, essayistic, with memories mixed in between narratives about art viewed. Interesting and important.
October 25, 2016
Loved the naughty bits especially.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews