E-Mail This Article to a Friend BOOKING IT Kraus’s critical discoveries BY CAMILLE DODERO

Chris Kraus isn’t a traditional art critic. "The only experience that comes close to the totalizing effect of theater now is sadomasochism," she declares in "Emotional Technologies," a piece included in her new essay collection, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness (Semiotext(e)). "There is no experimental theater in sadomasochism. That’s why I like it. Character is completely preordained and circumscribed. You’re only either top or bottom."

Kraus, 49, writes about art as a personal experience — the digressive observations, emotions, and memories that artworks trigger in an individual. Taken mostly from first-person columns Kraus wrote for the art magazine Artext, Video Green begins after the native New Zealander relocated to the West Coast from Manhattan, away from her erudite husband, Columbia professor and independent publisher Sylvère Lotringer, to teach at a prominent Pasadena art school. "The book really functions as a kind of diary of my years of coming to LA," she says. Compared with New York, Los Angeles’s art world was sleek, empty, corporatized — a stark contrast to the experimental, ragged, provocative scene in the East Village. "In New York at that time, people were still biting heads off rats and splattering HIV blood around the audience," she says. "This confrontational kind of work was considered so uncool and so excessive in LA." But she wasn’t willing to dismiss LA’s hollowness. "Rather, I wanted to say, there is this blankness, and what does it tell us about the life of the city, our desired image of ourselves, and our culture at large? To me, the art world is always interesting inasmuch as it reflects the larger culture."

But Kraus isn’t just an art critic; she’s also an underground novelist. Her first book was 1997’s I Love Dick, a ream of letters Kraus addressed to Dick, her husband’s friend and cultural critic, with whom she’d become inordinately infatuated when the threesome shared one wintry dinner. "I didn’t see myself as a writer until I started writing those crazy letters to Dick," says Kraus, who’d never published anything before. "It was only after a year, when Dick completely refused to acknowledge them, that I realized I’d done all this writing, and the letters had turned to essays, and maybe I’d written a book." In the end, the missives weren’t really about the elusive object of desire — their muse simply became a defined audience for Kraus’s thoughts. "Often when you write badly and have all of these false starts, it’s because you don’t know who you’re writing to," she points out. But Dick didn’t see the experience as innocuous. "He tried to block publication of the book. He sent the lawyers a cease-and-desist letter. Which was ridiculous: he wasn’t named, he wasn’t identified. In fact, he only identified himself because he was so eager to say what a horrible thing this was. And New York magazine picked up on it."

Although both I Love Dick and Kraus’s second novel, Aliens & Anorexia (2000), are clearly rooted in personal experience, the author sees them as works of fiction. Aliens & Anorexia "is not memoir because its purpose is not self-analysis," she explains. "The purpose of the book is to use my experience to kind of tunnel through all this other phenomenon. It’s always seemed so unfortunate that when women writers do that, it’s usually called diarist fiction or it’s called memoir." She adds, "Henry Miller didn’t write memoirs, he wrote novels; Jack Kerouac wrote novels."

And that’s what Kraus has done as an editor at Semiotext(e), an imprint founded by her husband that also has printed the work of French critical theorists Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault. In the Native Agents series, Kraus wanted to give a voice to "a female first-person that would be a public ‘I’ that would be extroverted and moving through the world." She’s published avant-garde, transgressive fiction from the likes of Michelle Tea, Eileen Myles, and Kathy Acker, and didn’t see pairing French male theorists with them as conflicting. The goal was "to bring female fiction and the male theory together, under the same cover, so that Michelle Tea and Michel Foucault could live side by side, so Cookie Mueller and Jean Baudrillard could live side by side — as we feel they should."

Right now, Kraus is at work on Torpor, a novel about the experience of "traveling around Eastern Europe in 1991 after the fall of the Berlin Wall," intertwined with her husband’s experience as a child of the Holocaust. But it’s not supposed to be as morbid as it sounds. "Oh yeah," she adds, "and it’s a comedy."

Chris Kraus will appear at 7 p.m. on Thursday, November 11, at the Institute of Contemporary Art Bookstore, in Boston. Call (617) 927-6620