The Future of Modernist Risk: Chris Kraus at the Limits of Global Art

ABSTRACT

This article examines Chris Kraus’s work, especially her 2016 short story ‘Face’ and her 2006 novel Torpor, to argue that women’s engagement with modernism returns in global art as a risk, bound up with the material inequalities produced by globalisation. It shows how, in Kraus’s work, the legacies of modernism, the production of ‘backwardness’, and the exclusion of reproductive labour together generate an uneven temporality for the global, whereby futurity becomes anachronistic. It concludes by suggesting that ‘Face’ provides the outlines of an alternate global art, premised in the embrace of risky exchanges between women.

KEYWORDS:

• Chris Kraus
• world art
• global art
• modernism
• futurity
• reproduction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alys Moody is a Senior Lecturer in English at Macquarie University. She was the 2018–19 Early Career Fellow in the Humanities Centre at the University of Pittsburgh and, beginning in 2019, she will be an Assistant Professor of Literature at Bard College. She is the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2018), and, with Stephen J. Ross, the editor of Global Modernists on Modernism (forthcoming with Bloomsbury in late 2019). She is currently writing her second monograph, provisionally entitled, 'The Literature of World Hunger: Poverty, Global Modernism, and the Emergence of a World Literary System.'

ORCID

Alys Moody http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7584-4510

Notes

1 This account also parallels Freud’s analysis of the development of modern neuroticism from tribal primitivism in Totem and Taboo (see Freud 1950).