Chris Kraus: 'Films'--A Look Back at Movies by the Noted Art Writer

Real Fine Arts—a little Berlin in Brooklyn—hosts the retro

Comments (0) By Martha Schwendener Wednesday, Jun 1 2011

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Courtesy Real Fine Arts

Might confuse Henry James: The Golden Bowl or Repression

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Chris Kraus: �Films�
Real Fine Arts
673 Meeker Avenue, Brooklyn
realfinearts.com
Through June 19

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But it’s a perfect pairing, not only in light of Kraus’s post-punk roots, but also because it gives the films another level of credibility. Showing them at RFA taps into that hardest-to-access art economy, where younger artists validate older ones, and visa versa. And Kraus knows better than almost anyone the critical value of DIY spaces, having profiled, in Where Art Belongs (2011), L.A.’s Tiny Creatures, a kind of non-artist/artist-space that showcased pan-creatives like Ariel Pink.

Her failure then is a partial fiction. Kraus’s experimental work was screened and reviewed in the ’80s and ’90s, and she got funding for a feature-length film. She didn’t become Kathryn Bigelow, the former Lotringer student and collaborator who won an Academy Award for The Hurt Locker (2008), but it’s hard to imagine her in that context. Kraus is better in the art world, where failure can be theorized, as well as dramatized—or, in her case, used as a springboard for success.