Chris Kraus - I Love Dick

The geography and land-use blurs as you drive west from orange groves to onion fields to flower farms. But who does the work is clear: small produce stands owned by second generation Chicanos “banking on America” line the road; undocumented Mexican and Central Americans still work six or seven days a week in the fields. They live in rented propane-heated shacks. Several years ago a virtual slave-trade was discovered operating out of Camarillo. Shades of Rigoberta Menchú’s childhood on plantations along the Guatemalan coast: desperate people rounded up in villages, packed standing into the airless backs of trucks—just an introduction to the horrors that await them. Dachau South.

Route 126 is a trucker’s detour to Ventura around the weigh-station on Highway 101. It’s a good place to buy speed. The road behind the town of Fillmore running to what used to be the National Condor Preserve is the venue for illegal drag races. When the Condor population dropped to three, they were rounded up and moved. The artist Nancy Barton recalls a project made in 1982 by Nan Border: she located the unsolved murder sites of eight female hitchhikers and prostitutes along Route 126 and mounted plaques beside their shallow graves.

In 1972 the artist Miriam Shapiro began a Feminist Art Program at CalArts. Mostly, the Program happened because her husband was then President of the School. But CalArts was a Jeffersonian democracy, so Shapiro had to spend six months playing Scheherazade: inviting every male department head, separately, to dinner, to coax and charm and guarantee their votes.

Artists in the program wanted, according to Faith Wilding, to “represent our sexuality in different, more assertive ways… ‘Cunt’ signified to us an awakened consciousness about our bodies… [We made] drawings and constructions of bleeding slits, holes and gashes…” The program lasted for one year. “Our art…which was meant to contest formalist standards,” Wilding continues, “was subjected to scathing criticism by many in the school.”

That spring everyone in Judy Chicago’s class collaborated on a 24 hour performance called Route 126 . The curator Moira Roth recalls: “the group created a sequence of events throughout the day along the highway. The day began with Suzanne Lacy’s Car Renovation in which the group decorated an abandoned car… and ended with the women standing on a beach watching Nancy Youdelman, wrapped in yards of gossamer silk, slowly wade out to sea until she drowned, apparently…” There’s a fabulous photo taken by Faith Wilding of the car—a Kotex-pink jalopy washed up on desert rocks. The trunk’s flung open and underneath it’s painted cuntblood red. Strands of desert grass spill from the crumpled hood like Rapunzel’s fucked-up hair. According to Performance Anthology — Source Book For A Decade Of California Art , this remarkable event received no critical coverage at the time though contemporaneous work by Baldessari, Burden, Terry Fox boasts bibliographies several pages long. Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the ’70s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.” The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names.

By the time I turned off Route 126 onto Antelope Valley Road I really had to piss. You were expecting me at 8 and it was already 8:05 and pissing suddenly became so problematic. I didn’t want to have to do it the moment I walked into your house, how gauche, a telltale sign of female nervousness. And yet considering everything I knew about Route 126 I was afraid to take a slash outside. Every 20 seconds the headlights of another car clipped by: marauding rednecks, cops, angry migrant workers? I pulled over at the Antelope Valley turnoff, turned off the headlights, stopped the car. Outside the grass was wet with rain. Who was it, Marx or Wittgenstein, who said that “every question, problem, contains the seeds of its own answer or solution through negation”? There was a half-drunk styrofoam cup of coffee in the car. I rolled down the window, dumped it, slid my jeans down past my knees and pissed into the empty cup. The cup was full before my bladder emptied but what the hell, I’d hold the rest. With shaking hands I tipped the brimming cup of urine in the grass.

That left the evidence. Several large drops still clung to the styrofoam, what if it smelled? I was afraid to litter. Dear Dick, sometimes there just isn’t a right answer. I scrunched the cup up, tossed it under the back seat and wiped my hands. By this time I was feeling very drawn.

It was after midnight when our bus finally crossed the border into Guatemala. Klieg lights, a guard shack, barricades and the start of seventy miles of unpaved rutted road where Belize’s National Highway ended. We were separated into groups by nationality and questioned while soldiers searched the luggage on the bus. The visa officer, a suave middle-aged mestizo with a handlebar mustache, scrutinized my passport, deep in thought, pretending not to recognize my picture. Finally he smiled and said: Welcome to Guatemala, Christina. When I got back to the bus the Rigoberta Menchú book was gone.

Hundreds of little colored Christmas lights were draped around the cactus plants outside your house. And there you were: sitting by the picture window in the living room, grading papers or pretending to, deep in thought. You got up and at the door we kissed hello kind of brusquely without lingering. The last time I was at your house for dinner back in January you kissed me when my husband, Mick and Rachel and the two men from the Getty were seven feet away. That kiss radiated such intensity I stumbled past you through the door.

Later on that night in January, when all the other guests had gone and the three of us were drinking vodka, Sylvère and I confessed to twelve years of fidelity. And suddenly that concept seemed so high-school and absurd we started laughing. “Ah but what,” Sylvère said, “is fidelity?” That night the Some Girls album cover with the chicks in pointy bras was still propped up against your wall. I’d spent eleven weeks deliberating whether your display of it was camp or real and decided I agreed with Kierkegaard, that the sign will always triumph through the screen of an ironic signifier.

But tonight you were expecting me alone. I looked around the living room and saw the Some Girls album cover missing. Were you responding to my second letter, questioning your taste?

After the kiss, you invited me to sit down in the living room. Right away we started drinking wine. After half a glass I told you how I’d left my husband.

“Hmmm,” you said compassionately, “I could’ve seen it coming.”

And then I wanted you to understand the reasons. “It’s like last night,” I said, “I met Sylvère in New York for a French department dinner. Régis Debray, the guest of honor, never showed and everyone was kind of tense and uneasy. I was bored and spacing out but Sylvère thought I was suffering from a linguistic disability. He took my hand and said in English to the Beckett specialist Tom Bishop, ‘Chris is an avid reader.’ I mean, C’MON. Does Denis Hollier say this about Rosalind Krauss? I may have no credentials or career but I’m way too old to be an academic groupie.”

You sympathized and said, “Well, I guess now the game is over.”

How could I make you understand the letters were the realest thing I’d ever done? By calling it a game you were negating all my feelings. Even if this love for you could never be returned I wanted recognition. And so I started ranting on about Guatemala. The femme seduction trip seemed so corrupt and I was clueless how to do it. The only way I knew of reaching you apart from fucking was through ideas and words.