Authors: Chris Kraus
I Love Dick (4 page)
FAX TO: DICK
ââ
FROM: CHRIS KRAUS & SYLVÃRE LOTRINGER
DATE: DECEMBER 10, 1994
Dear Dick,
It's a pity that we missed each other Sunday morning. It's funny, both of us thought a lot about your videoâso much that we've had an idea for a collaborative piece, inspired by and hopefully involving you. It's kind of like, Calle Art. We've written about 50 pages over the last few days and were hoping we could shoot something with you out in Antelope Valley soon before we leave (Dec. 14).
Basically our idea was to paste the text we've written all over your car, house and cactus garden. We (i.e., Sylvère) would videotape me (i.e., Chris) doing thisâprobably a wideshot of all the papers flapping in the breeze. Then, if you like, you could enter and discover it.
I guess the piece is all about obsession, although we wouldn't think of using images that belong to you without your agreeing to it. What do you think? Are you game?
Best regards,
Chris & Sylvère
But of course the fax was never sent. Instead, Sylvère left one more message on Dick's answering machine:
“Hi Dick, it's Sylvère. I'd like to talk to you about an idea I had, a collaborative piece we could do before I leave on Wednesday. I hope you won't find it too crazy. Call me back.”
Expecting no more response from Dick than they'd had all week, Chris left to do some errands in San Bernardino. But at 6:45 p.m. that Saturday, December 10, around the time that she was driving up the mountain, he called.
Upper Crestline seemed so dismal that night. A liquor store, a pizza parlor. A single row of woodframe facaded storefronts from the '50s, Depression-era recollections of the West, half boarded up. Wendy and Michael Tolkin had visited last month with their two daughters. Michael's film
The New Age
had just come out, following his other great films,
The Rapture
and
The Player.
He was a Hollywood intellectual and Wendy was the wittiest and nicest psychotherapist Sylvère and Chris had ever met. After expressing their delight in Crestline's quaint-ness, Wendy remarked: It must be very lonely living in a place you don't belong. Chris and Sylvère had no children, three abortions, and they'd been shuttling between low-rent rural slums on both coasts for the past two years in order to put money into Chris' film. And of course Michael, who was Sylvère's friend, really, because Sylvère was someone in LA who knew more than he about French theory, couldn't, wouldn't, do anything to help her with the film.
When Chris got home and Sylvère told her he'd talked to Dick, she nearly swooned. “I don't want to know!” she cried. And then she wanted to know everything. “I have a little present, a surprise,” he said, showing her the audiotape. Chris looked at Sylvère as if seeing him for the first time. Taping their phone call was such a violation. It gave her a kind of creepy feeling, like the time the writer Walter Abish'd discovered the tape recorder Sylvère had hidden underneath the table when they were having drinks. Sylvère laughed it off, calling himself a Foreign Agent. But to be a spy is being no one. Still, Chris had to hear it now.
EXHIBIT C: Â Â TRANSCRIPT OF A PHONE CONVERSATION BETWEEN DICK ââAND SYLVÃRE LOTRINGER
December 10, 1994: 6:45 p.m.
D:
So, could we talk about the possibility of your coming out in the next semesterâ
S:
Yeah. I guess the easiest for me would be between March 10 and 20. Do you want me to do something about cultural anthropology? Is that what you're doing now?
D:
If it's not something you're interested in, we can maybe, uh, forget about it butâ(inaudible).
S:
Yeah?
D:
(inaudible)âI don't know if you'd be enthusiastic about you know summarizing James Clifford and other discourses around anthropology, but if you want to do something more original, more, uh, primary, it's up to you.
S:
Okay. And the fee would be 2500 dollars for two lectures and one seminar?
D:
Two lectures and a seminar and maybe some studio visits.
S:
Oh. Marvin said the crits paid extraâ¦500 dollars more?
D:
Uh, look, I'll see what I can do. I hope coming here is worth your while.
S:
(inaudible) Well, I want it to be worth your while too.
D:
We'll get a clearer picture of what's coming up in the semester in the next couple of weeks, and well, I can phone you in New York. (Inaudible)
S:
Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. WeâI want to sound you about a project that's a little weird, but I know you don't mind things that are weirdâ(laughs)â(silence) Right?
D:
I don't think so, it depends. There's weird and weird. There's weird, and there's impossible weird. Impossible weird is more interesting.
S:
Well okay, I might have something you're looking for then. (Laughs) Well, let meâit's a, uh, it's a collaborative project we were thinking of possibly doing before we leave on Wednesday, otherwise we'd have to postpone it to the end of January. And, uh, it started really with our visit to your place. And how we didn't reconnect in the morningâ
D:
(Inaudible)
S:
Yeah, it was very odd. And then youâ
D:
I got back about 10:30 and you'd gone.
S:
Uh huh, uh huh.
D:
I'd crept out the back. I didn't expect you to know that I'd done that, but I thought I'd find you here so that was very weird.
S:
Uh huh. Chris thought that somehow you were in your bed and you were just waiting for us to leave because you were in a different mood.
D:
(Inaudible)
S:
Yeah?
D:
I'd just gone out and done a few errands andâI'm a bit of an insomniac so I'd driven around to Pear Blossom and Palmdale and I picked up some eggs and bacon. That was what I'd been doing.
S:
Uh huh. So. What happened was, we had a very strange thing, I don't know how I can summarize it but basically, Chris felt very attracted to you.
D:
(Snickers, exhales)
S:
And uh, then we started talking about it, and writing you letters?
D:
(Laughs, exhales)
S:
(Laughs) and uh, these letters included you, both as yourself and as some sort of object of, you know, seduction or desire or fascination or something, and thenâWell, I wrote a letter and she wrote a letter and we planned to send them to you and get you involved in a kind of fax correspondence. But somehow it got a little out of hand and we started riffing around it and getting paranoid and writing all these letters.
D:
(Laughs, exhales)
S:
And it kind of grewâ¦into a, um, 20, 30, 40 pages and then it became impossible to send you that or sound you about it or involve you (laughs)âSo we thought maybe we should do something a little bit more drastic to involve you in some way, and that's what I wanted to sound you about. We, uh, we got the idea that maybe we should just go back to your place before we leave on Monday or Tuesday with a video camera. Is that something you would like? I mean, I didn't want you to feel invaded in your territory and all that, but basically it would turn into some kind of an art piece with a text that could be, maybe, hanged on the cactuses and your car and something like that? And you'd come upon it and you know, we'd basically improvise from there.
D:
(Inaudible)
S:
The Invasion of the Heart Snatchers.
Uh, it's a Calle Art piece. You know, like Sophie Calle? (Laughs) And it involvesâI mean we've been caught up in a strange storm for several days, it just got a little out of handâin our emotions and there's all these ups and downs where we connect and disconnect and somehow it seems so strange that you may not be connected to it at all, because we were totally convinced that you were a part of itâ(Laughs)âBut then we couldn't get hold of you, and, well, I don't know if you had a sense of it but we had such storm in a teapot here. (Laughs)
D:
You mean aâtempest?
S:
(Laughs) Yeah. Anyway what do you think about it?
D:
Well I, I, uh, I need a little bit of breathing space to work out theâ, wade through what you've told meâ(Laughs) But uh, I mean it'sâif we can just ah⦠Let me think about it yet.
S:
Of course.
D:
And I'll phone you back tomorrow and say what my dreams are andâkind ofâcreating a disposition in relation to this project.
S:
Okay that's perfectly legitimate. In any case we liked your piece a lot, the video, seeing you rambling got us rambling too. After all, Chris is a filmmaker and she's working in video too.
D:
Maybe the timing isn't great but the timing never is, I suppose. Let's think about it and I'll give you a call tomorrow.
S:
Okay we'll be here all day.
D:
Thank you for letting me in on the secret. I will think about it. Bye bye.
S:
Okay you too. Yes don't tell anyone. Take care. Bye bye.
And then Chris went alone into her room and wrote a letter, thinking she would send it, about sex and love. She was all confused about wanting to have sex, sensing that at this point if she slept with Dick the whole thing would be over.
THE
â
UNEXAMINED
â
LIFE
â
IS NOT
â
WORTH
â
LIVING
flashed the titles of a Ken Kobland film against the backbeat of a carfuck 1950s song. “As soon as sex takes place, we fall,” she wrote, thinking, knowing from experience, that sex short circuits all imaginative exchange. The two together get too scary. So she wrote some more about Henry James. Although she really wanted both. “Is there a way,” she wrote in closing, “to dignify sex, make it as complicated as we are, to make it not grotesque?”
Sylvère must've known that she was writing and at the same moment, in his room, he wrote:
“Dear Dick, it's funny how things have a way of turning around. Just when I thought I was taking some initiative I find myself in the position of the Dumb Dick, pushed around by other people's drives. Actually what hurt me most was how confused and disoriented Chris was, reverting to her reaction to younger crushes that I wasn't around to witness the first time. And then the difference between our ages widened to the half century. And I felt old and sad. And yet we're sharing something.”
And yet being together as a couple was all either of them could imagine. Did they read their “private” letters to each other out loud? Probably. And then they made love, thinking about what? The absent Dick? At any rate they were on the bus again, committed to the game. Lying in bed beside Sylvère, Chris wrote this post-coital letter:
Crestline, California
December 10, 1994
Dear Dick,
It's several hours later and we've just had sex and before that spent the last two hours talking about you. Since you've come into our lives our house has turned into a brothel. We smoke cigarettes, knock ashtrays over without picking them up, lay around for hours. We've only worked halfheartedly and for a few hours at a time. We've lost all interest in packing for the move, or trips ahead, the future, consolidating our possessions or moving forward with our work and our careers. It isn't fair that you're so unaffected. Are you spending Saturday night thinking about Sylvère's phone call? I doubt it. Sylvère says you're right to tune it out, because this correspondence has nothing to do with you. He says it's just about us as a couple, but that's not true.
When I was 23 my best friend Liza Martin and I invited a famous rock star known for his forays into the bizarre to fuck us as if we were one person. Under the guidance of two artists we revered, Richard Schechner and Louise Bourgeois, we'd been developing a schizophrenic twin act in the backrooms of several topless bars (Oops the phone is ringing. Is it you? No, it's just another fax about the fucked up EDL of my movie from the negative cutter in New Zealand, which I've become so indifferent to.) Anyway we told him Liza'd do the physical part of sex, I'd do the verbal. Together we incarnated the cyborgian split projected on all females by this culture. We even offered ââhis choice of venue: the Gramercy Park Hotel or the Chelsea. But
ââ
never answered. Easier I guess to fuck a bimbo than get involved with such weird girls.
And now Sylvère and I are the weird girls. I never dreamed I'd do anything like this again, especially never with Sylvère. But frankly I feel like I've come to the end of something with the movie. I don't know what will happen next and maybe you've fallen into the vacuum. Don't you think the only way of truly understanding things is through Case Studies? I read a book last month about the Guatemalan Coca Cola strike by Henry Frundt: a total reconstruction of events through documents and transcripts. By understanding one simple thingâa strikeâit's possible to understand everything about corporate capitalism in third world countries. Anyway I think a case study is what we've started to create with you.