by Frida Sandström
There are many differences between Chris Kraus and Yvonne Rainer, one being a novelist and art critic, and the other a dancer and a choreographer. What connects them is that they both have had careers as filmmakers, years that had a big influence on their main occupations. Since then, they both think through the frame of analogue video editing.
For Rainer, the filmic frame was a central component when working in film. Often, she would focus on the figure on the edge of the frame.
– In live performance, this is possible with the help of lights, but I don't think that that is characteristic of what I am doing now – I prefer a brightly lit space and I don’t go in for atmospheric effects from lighting; I prefer everything to be equally observable.
Rainer’s first films were more about dancing. In Lives of Performers from 1972, there is no synchronized sound – only voice-over.
– The framing of that «speaking, soundless figure» was important to me when writing the script, in the shooting, and in the editing. I guess there is a correspondence between this method and my choreo-graphies.
Lives of Performers (Yvonne Rainer, 1972)
Today, Kraus write mainly through a montage of various sources, but earlier on, her texts were more linear. And even then she still felt that she was transcribing a movie in her mind. She still writes in a small room with the curtains all closed – equal to an editing room. The darkness makes it easier for her to see the picture.
– I definitely learned the importance of seeing and that there are various ways of seeing though filmmaking. It was a way of «writing without writing». Moving things around, a new meaning is conceived – a meta-meaning, beyond any of the individual components. Thus, the editing and the montage is a kind of writing for me.
Radical juxtapositions
Both Rainer and Kraus are intertwining found and lived-through material in their work. Having sourced material from daily life for decades, Rainer now mines old works for source material.
– It is important, since I almost never invent from my own body anymore.
Kraus sees all her old films – even though they are not essay films – as essays, in the way that they emerge as studies of a certain subject.
– The drama comes from the study of the subject that goes out of control, starting to ricochet off into other areas that I didn’t expect.
This ricocheting is similar to how Kraus allows her daily life to be imported into the films. First, she included all her friends, and then for a long time, she collaborated with her partner at the time, literary critic and cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer.
– For me, there’s something quite intimate with making art. It’s the deepest thing that you could do. To get to that place together with people that you don’t know intimately would be very hard, Kraus states. For her, making a critical reflection in the form of an artwork – in a film – and doing it in an art review, doesn’t differ much.
Also Rainer depends on long-term collaborators, especially when she doesn’t remember herself what she once did. With the help from other’s bodily memories and notes alongside her own, she returns to what she once «found» and «finds it again». Sometimes she no longer understands or has any relation to it. But it works anyhow.
– Since I don’t make overall or through-line narrative dances, anything that surfaces from the past is fair game for being re-introduced in a current performance. Susan Sontag’s term from long ago applies here: «radical juxtaposition», and of course Cage’s ideas about chance and indeterminacy, Rainer explains. When she finds something old, it is always remade. That’s why every performance of a particular work of hers is different. But sometimes the moving body is not enough.
– One reason that I went into film was because I thought that my own body and what came out of it was so limited, especially as I aged. Simultaneously, I was getting more interested in the use of text in film, through subtitles, intertitles, speech, et cetera.
Coming back to dance, Rainer still needed this language for specific references and meanings beyond dance and art history. It enabled her to continue performing without a trained body.
The now well-established art critic Chris Kraus once knew nothing about art. Most of her friends were poets and she didn’t have much to do with the art world.
– For a long time, art was really a mystery for me, and the films that I made were closer to the field of performance and theatre than to the art world. Visual arts performance at the time included no acting, no comedy, no costumes. It was more opaque and alienating.
Kraus had to find her way into it. After a while, she was hired at an art school. During the obligatory studio visits, she started to learn from her students.
– I simply learned from listening to them talking about their works. So if anyone would ask me who are my influences, I’d say them!
Authorships and impersonations
Today, the art fields are more generously intertwined than before. After decades of artistic actions by Kraus, Rainer and others, dance and literature are no longer separate practices, but rather part of the same, growing art world. As an art critic and teacher, Kraus notices the difference.
– Art magazines are to cover more performance works than they used to do, while there are fewer distribution channels for fields such as performances or independent film, or even theatre. So all of these now find a home in the art world.
After twenty years outside the academy, Kraus recently started to teach again. The difference is clear. Before, writing was more tangential and art students would do a little writing on the side. Today, art students actively pursue writing even though they are in studio courses, she believes.
– Today, within 15 people in the class, at least five of them conceive themselves as writers. And yet they don’t go to a writing course, since those courses in the states are very commercial. So anyone who is writing more creatively now gravitates toward the arts.
It not only positive, though, Kraus adds, that all artistic disciplines are floating in the same world of art. When it comes to film, she thinks that something is lost when the medium is absorbed within this flux.
– Maybe it’s the power of the individual film that gets lost when the works are presented through the lens of the artist and their overall career rather than through the lens of the particular art object.
The same goes for Kraus’ own films, which now are exhibited as part of her larger body of work, although she once made them through the lens of each particular montage of moving images. All mashed together, the author gets too much attention, Kraus thinks.
– If the film is presented individually, the author is more secondary. I’d really like them to be seen as such. But at the same time, I think that I’ve exhausted the body of material that the films were made of. I’m not really turning there again for source material, instead I turn to new things.
Rainer has also turned to new methods. In her on-going lecture and forthcoming book A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies: A Rant Dance (2017–), she impersonates the character of the Greek god Apollo. From that position, she refers directly to political matters that she, as Apollo, had tried to influence in the U.S.
– Expanding via Apollo, I can speak in a different voice and in a form that I would never have thought to express myself. This impersona-tion opened up a whole new arena of possibilities.
This is a new direction for Rainer, although she has used fictional characters before, especially in her later films. But this solo she speaks in the voice of Yvonne Rainer.
– Political statements and reflections have always appeared in my work, but different from it being read by fictional characters, it is all much more integrated in one voice. If you know me and have seen my work and my films, you can identify the source of a lot of this material.
Start and finish with writing
Rainer is a frequent reader of newspapers and periodicals, and for those who are too, the on-going events in the world to which Apollo refers to will be recognised from there. In the lecture, she comments on what she reads. Kraus, in her turn, gives a verbal language to something visual, through her art criticism.
– I verbalise my way of seeing the work and offer this to someone else. It’s like saying to the reader: here it is, now you can compare it to your point of view.
Both in Kraus’ writing and in her films, references are most often visible. Thus, she credits others’ ways of seeing within her own ways of doing it. These «others» are most often her close friends, since bringing people together was an early method of hers.
– I think I learned to make films by studying theatre. I always thought that theatre was about making the most wonderful dinner party with all the most wonderful people that you’d like to bring together, and then see what happens.
Installation view of Chris Kraus: Films Before and After at Index
This is also how her films were made – in small parties of people who didn’t necessarily know each other but whom Kraus knew and wanted to see how they reacted on a specific situation or task. Different from performances, the material was later to be edited and turned into something other than what initially happened. When editing, she turns back to writing.
– Somehow I always start and finish with writing, while the form of my work alters as my life changes. But I would never self-produce a film again, and no one has proposed me a production budget for it. Thus, it is much easier to stay at home and write, since I don’t have to ask for anyone’s free labour or permission. But I’m still writing with pictures.
Rainer turned back to choreography from filmmaking in the early 2000s, mainly because the cinematic production process became too expensive. Each film cost two or three times more than its predecessor, and there were no smartphones at sight at the time. All of the sudden, she was invited by choreographer Mikhail Baryshnikov to make a dance for his company.
– I was ready to come back, I love working with dancers. In dance, there is no laboratory, where all that you have done can get lost in a second. I hated the production process of films, with ten people hanging around, and the lights, and so on. With dancers, I can see what I want immediately, with no technological intermediaries. I’m a techno-dummy.
These two conversations took place in Stockholm in October 2018 (Rainer) and May 2019 (Kraus).