Let's call the whole thing off Chris Kraus Having just come back to L.A.

from a trip through Eastern Europe to Romania, I am obsessed with relativity. Yesterday, at the art school where I teach, I watched Julie D'Agostino's hypnotic video, Eden Between (1998). The camera remained static for four takes, and each take lasted two minutes. The centerpiece of the image onscreen (and the party) was a rented trampoline. Cyclorama blue sky, sheared green hedges, attractive people of many and mixed races dressed in baggy hip-hop clothes bouncing singly and in pairs on the big trampoline. It blew my mind that the subject of the video really was 'gesture': How the jumpers held themselves in their relationship to each other. We are living in a place where young adults spend lazy afternoons jumping up and down like kindergartners. I thought it was a fragment of the Bennetton dream. Recently, I've fallen back in touch with Dan Asher, a former friend from the East village in the 1990s. For an extended time, Dan was living on the couch of the 400-square foot apartment I shared on Second Avenue with my friend, Tom Yemm. Tom was studying post-Frankfurt School philosophy at the New School and I was working several shifts a week at the Wild West Topless Bar. I met Dan in the street and he didn't have a place to stay so I invited him to more in. Dan had just gotten back from Paris where he'd been sleeping by the Seine and photographing the Maurice Bejart ballet. "I'd rather be with the bums, the clochards, they're more interesting than the jerk-offs who run the culture industry!" Dan would nasally proclaim, in a voice borrowed from W.C. Fields. It was one of those endless New York summers. Dan wore the baggy overcoat of a schizophrenic, which I assumed he was. He was a truly original person and we had the most amazing conversations, but then he

disappeared and for 15 years I never heard from him. Two months ago, I met him at a party in West Hollywood. He was in LA on art business. Things change. Dan Asher is now an artist and an independent investor on the stock market. I'm a columnist, not a whore. Several years ago, Dan underwent tests that resulted in a diagnosis of autism. It's a condition that is rarely diagnosed and often misperceived as schizophrenia or attention deficit disorder. Dan's favorite definition of autism is a heightened state of hypersanity. This definition also pretty much describes the experience of viewing his work, and his ideas about art-making. Since the early 1980s, Dan has traveled constantly, both by choice and by design. Traipsing all over the world in his overcoat with still and video cameras. Dan has been a participant at the margins of the New World Order. Wherever he travels, he's drawn to "the bums, the clochards," because these are his kind. Autistics are said to have savant abilities that may extend sometimes to art, sometimes to math, and his images function as seismographs of global culture. Anonymous and seemingly disinterred, his images catch the odd persistence of difference in nations where the speed of change has accelerated faster in a decade than 100 years. He is no Allen Sekula, and his images offer no uplift or poignancy. Rather, he is a genius at delineating the particularities of dereliction, the odd individual behaviors of those left behind. In Dan's video Budapest (1996), a fastidiously attired old man slowly and meticulously reads a newspaper at a crowded bus stop. Wearing a starched white shirt and a black suit that looks like a frock coat, the man sits up very straight. There is an enormous formality to his postures and gestures. At first glance, the man seems oblivious to time. But as he folds back the page of his newspaper, you see he's inhabiting an entirely different timescape than the other pedestrians:

A shard of the 19th Century surrounded by traffic and diesel fumes. In Dan's Barcelona (1996) video, a homeless woman squats in a similarly crowded city street, folding and unfolding a plastic bag. She does this as if her life depends upon it, with great concentration and calm. Unlike Chantal Akerman's rigorously interstitial movie D'Est (1993), Dan's videos are selectively interstitial. He's like an anthropologist, documenting personal rituals, small significant events from within the flow of detritus in changing urban centers, and even as I write this, I'm wondering to what extent D'Est's formal rigor shields us from its content. The endless tracking shots of huddled crowds in terminals in D'Est, punctuated with the offscreen strain of violins, makes the decenteredness of these newly 'liberated' countries into something existential and not circumstantial, and this (I think) is the dilemma surrounding everything our culture deems 'great art.' The seeming amateurishness of Asher's videos, his hand-held cameras hovering over arbitrary rituals of the mad that passersby don't want to see, brings us face-to-face with the reality of daily life within the backwaters of what was reputedly once a world, but is now a global marketplace. His work is indefensible, without the rationale of compositional strategy of cinematic reference to support it. Therefore it functions as direct current, forcing viewers to adopt the same perceptual modality as the hyper-sane. 'Shit' is a favorite word among the Yugoslavian expatriate community in Paris, favored by both Bosnians and Serbs. I spent several days in Paris trying to get a visa into Belgrade, but since the Serbian government has adopted a 'reciprocal sanctions' policy against America, these efforts were to no avail. Stepping through the doors of the Yugoslav Embassy in the crummy 9th arrondisement of Paris is a step back 50 years. Everyone's busy puffing Kents, doing their best to keep up with the three-pack-a-day national

quota. The war's about to start again, this time in the Albanian provinces. Zika Swirr, who is my host here, explains the Albanians see the ongoing balkanization of the region as their opportunity to expunge the Serbs. "More shit," Zika says, offering me a cigarette. "It will be shit." Zika is an importer of a rare strain of lingonberry found only in the forest regions of southern Serbia. Traditionally, these berries have been used as a flavoring ingredient in French jam. Berries, like every other fruit, are perishable. They're good for roughly 10 days after picking, and then they rot. Since cargo flights from Yugoslavia to Western Europe have been suspended, the berries must be transported by truck and van. Each shipment is an unpredictable race against the clock on rutted roads, past border guards with wildly fluctuating scales of bribes. Zika's constantly on the phone between the jam factories outside of Lille and Yugoslavia, whenever he can get a line. He does this from a tiny, deux-pieces apartment in Montmartre, and I see him as a kind of patriot: Nearly any low-paid immigrant job would be easier and more lucrative than trucking berries through a war zone, yet he persists in doing this. Zika on Yugoslavia: "It was the most Western country of the East. Ands now, it's not the West; it's not the East. It's not a country any more." Spending time with him, I start to get a sense of what it might be like living in a war. After our unsuccessful visit to the consulate, Zika takes me to the Yugoslav Cultural Center. The center looks and feels completely European. Zika's proud of its location, directly opposite the Pompidou. We wander through a multi-media exhibition by the artist Lana Vasiljevic. There is a photograph of Virginia Woolf placed under 23 sheets of glass. There is a book placed on a wax pedestal, encased in wax. Zika seems pleased by the international tenor of this exhibition, though the only piece he

responds to is the one called Bloody Letter. The catalogue essay waxes on about "inscribed representation" and the "fatal break with the imaginary ideal." The work is totally generic and the gap between it, and my experience with Zika makes me think about the genre, from Gerhard Richter's paintings to Uta Barth's photographs, to the work of all their eager imitators, busily rubbing and obscuring and rephotographing recognizable pictures into blur unto they're 'art.' Transmission by Romanian TV of the capture of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu during a public rally at the onset of the 1989 'revolution' was abruptly interrupted. The picture broke up into lines of dropout; the camera jerked, and offscreen voices rose above and underneath the muffle: It's impossible to know, ever, what went on. The ambient videos of Akerman and Asher plunge us directly into the blur that is Eastern European life, and it strikes me as hilariously perverse that Belgrade artists are now appropriating Western murk, where murk is used like Valium: A little something to take the edge off things and make them art. One of Dan Asher's most subversive images is a decontextualized news photo of a Bennetton-sponsored racing car bursting into flames. A Romanian artist who I'm interviewing asked me not to come at 6 p.m. but later, after dark, because, "I am not so good with the transition between day and night." We are trying to locate the particular anxiety that grips every visitor to Romania from the moment they arrive here. He says: "It is difficult to remember. It is also difficult to forget."