“We used to think we could change the world.” – Gavin Brice in Aliens and Anorexia
Chris Kraus, a New Zealander, arrives in New York as a penniless young artist, armed with neither formal education nor feminine wiles. It is the early 1970s and she supports herself by doing clerical work and dancing in topless bars. She joins the experimental theater circles of the day, a heady mixture of gestalt therapy and spontaneous gesture. Gawky and intense, she is a Serious Young Woman, the kind whom men abandon, saying, "'I've met someone who's not like you. She's really nice.'"
Nevertheless she marries Sylvere Lotringer, the Downtown Philosopher, editor of Semiotext(e) and a Columbia professor. She makes a film, Gravity and Grace, which she refers to as "just a little film about God."
The first part of the film, whose story line forms the last section of Kraus's 2000 memoir and wide-ranging philosophical exploration Aliens and Anorexia http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1584350016/frigatthetransvr , is set in her home country. Her New Zealand is a backwater where a small group of uneasy provincials falls prey to a cult. The film is also about girlfriends – Grace, the beautiful Maori, and Gravity, "who was driven, though to nothing in particular"; an extraterrestrial institute; and the complicated responses of intelligent people to the need for faith. Her New Zealand is a place where people are prone to wonder, Is sheep-fucking a trope? Or is the trope Rangitoto, the dead volcano…?
The second part of Gravity and Grace follows Gravity to New York where she has become an artist, welding aluminum insects to Coke cans and teaching adult education in Harlem. Again the occult offers itself – first the Tarot, then a workshop called "Chanting for Money." Kraus also takes a series of cracks at the art world, for example, a performance piece entitled "The Vagina and the American People" and a hilarious send-up of a museum curator who rejects her work, saying, "'The trouble is, you're neither abject nor sublime!'"
The filming is a disaster from beginning to end: the production careens out of control, the crew runs up insurmountable bills and threatens to strike, and Kraus is ripped off by the beautiful Delphine B, a production assistant.