Richard Kraft

David Gilsinn

DISTRIB I, an Impurity Redistribution Computer Program

Joe Biel

John Cage

David A. Rose

Diary

Danielle Dutton

In this wildly irreverent collage narrative, Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft reassembles a pre-perestroika era comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis, orchestrating a multiplicity of voices into joyous cacophony. Like an Indian miniature painting, each comic book page is densely layered, collapsing foreground and background, breaking the frame and merging time. An enormous cast of characters emerges as Kraft appropriates images and texts from an extraordinary variety of sources (the Amar Chitra Katha comics of Hindu mythology, Jimmy Swaggart's Old and New Testament stories, the 1960s English football annual "Scorcher, " underground porn comics like "Cherry," images from art history, outdated encyclopedias and more). Kraft constructs a world constantly in flux, rich with dark humor and revelatory nonsense. Writer Danielle Dutton's set of 16 interpolations punctuate the book using similar strategies of appropriation and juxtaposition to create texts that sing in the same arresting register as Kraft's collages. "Here Comes Kitty" also includes a conversation between poet Ann Lauterbach and artist Richard Kraft.

A Comic Opera

Richard Kraft: Here Comes Kitty

Lisa Pearson

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) is one of the most significant artists to have emerged in the 1980s. An artist whose beautiful, restrained and often mutable works are abundant in compelling contradictions, Gonzalez-Torres was committed to a democratic form of art informed as much by the aesthetic and conceptual as by politics. His work challenges authority and our obeisance to it, dissolves the delineations between public and private, and creates a rich, open field into which the viewer is invited to complete works with her own inferences, imagination, and actions.00The photostats are a series of fixed works with white text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface bringing the viewers' reflection into the work. Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, these profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references disrupt hierarchies of information and linear chronology, asking how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats also recall the screens (the television, and now the computer) which furiously deliver information from which we must parse substance from surface and choose what to assimilate and what to reject.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Photostats

Dies ist eine kurze Geschichte aus der Zeit, als wir im schrecklichen Schattenreich des eskalierenden Bombenkrieges heranwuchsen. Morgens im Gymnasium lasen wir Goethe und Schiller. Mal auch Hoelderlin. Doch dann zitterten wir auch voller Angst im Splittergraben um unser Leben. War da ein Ausweg? War denn "Ueberleben" ueberhaupt noch der einzige Sinn des Lebens? Und ich wollte im Grunde auch herausfinden, was da wohl unter der strammen Bluse der "Neuen" zu finden war. Karin hiess sie. Ja, Liebe gab es auch zwischen all den Truemmern. Dem Chaos. Wir waren jung, und wenn's mal zu schlimm wurde, bloedelten wir lautstark: "Hallo, MacBrown, was macht Ihr Harem? Wir tanzen Swing und rauchen Salem..."

Hallo, MacBrown

Richard Kraft

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