Chris Kraus: Jag blev en sitcomkaraktär – ingen dröm

Chris Kraus (born 1955) is a writer and critic. Her work includes the novels I Love Dick, Aliens and Anorexia, and Torpor, which form a loose trilogy that navigates between autobiography, fiction, philosophy, and art criticism, and a sequence of novels dealing with American underclass experience that began with Summer of Hate. Her approach to writing has been described as ‘performance art within the medium of writing’ and ‘a bright map of presence’. Her work has drawn controversy through its equalisation of high and low culture, mixing critical theory with colloquial language and graphic representations of sex. Her books often blend intellectual, political, and sexual concerns with wit, oscillating between esoteric referencing and parody. She has written extensively in the fields of art and cultural criticism. Kraus has also produced numerous plays and films, including the feature film Gravity & Grace. Her work has featured in publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, Afterall, The New Yorker, The New York Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, and Texte zur Kunst. She taught creative writing and art writing at The European Graduate School/EGS for ten years and has been Writer in Residence at ArtCenter College of Design. Kraus is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for General Non-Fiction (2016), a Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Grant (2011), and Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism from the College Art Association (2008). Kraus is co-editor of the publishing house Semiotext(e). Her bestselling novel, I Love Dick, was adapted for television by Joey Soloway and released on Amazon Video (2018). Holland Cotter has described her as ‘one of our smartest and most original writers on contemporary art and culture’.

I Love Dick is an epistolary novel with autofiction elements by American artist and author Chris Kraus. It was published in 1997 by Semiotext(e). I Love Dick merges fiction and memoir formats to explore the writer's psycho-sexual obsession with the eponymous "Dick", a media theorist and sociologist whose last name is never given over the course of the text, despite other art world personalities appearing as themselves. Critics hailed it as both "radical" and "gossipy". The book announced Kraus' particular brand of "confessional literature" that she herself described as "lonely girl phenomenology". American writer Rick Moody called it "one of the most explosive, revealing, lacerating and unusual memoirs ever committed to the page". I Love Dick is written as a series of love letters written to an addressee who is derived from the real-life cultural critic Dick Hebdige. Hebdige described the novel as a violation of his privacy. "Dick"'s sporadic presence in "Chris Kraus"'s life changes her thinking about her marriage (to philosopher and Semiotext(e) founder "Sylvère Lotringer") and to her work, as well. The Guardian described the novel as "a cult feminist classic" despite its poor reception on release in 1997. In 2016, Joey Soloway adapted the novel as a television series, produced by Amazon Studios. The first season was released on May 12, 2017. It was directed by Joey Soloway and stars Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon.