We need your dick out here Chris Kraus There was a time when was thinking LA might be something

like Paris. I had just gotten back to LA after spending the fall in East Hampton because I was writing a book, and I was thinking, to write it I would have to stop talking and be more alone. Except then I was lonely, and then I began having sex on the phone with someone whose voice got all mixed up with what I was writing. It was a book about chance. The voice was coming from Africa. It belonged to a famous producer who, years before he'd ever been famous, I'd maybe once met. Now he was making a film in Namibia. (This film, to my knowledge, was never released.) Africa called me at times I never knew how to expect, and I let his cues guide me. I was telling him stories about the different kinds of sex we would have, and where we would meet. Location was very important. In our real lives, Africa lived in a compound in Malibu; I lived in a suburb downtown. Because I didn't know him at all, I kept looking for places to mentally hook him: the parking lot of Musso and Frank's restaurant on Hollywood and Vine ... the entrance gate on Big Rock Road ... the Taj Mahal building erected by some English Hindus in the Hollywood Hills ... a condo rack on Whitley Terrace where the entry-level stars and moguls partied around the pool ... the Good Luck Wishing Well in Chinatown outside of Hop Louis. He never talked about himself and I thought that I could get a picture of him in my mind if I could locate his taste. What was romantic, and what would be tacky? Africa's film wrapped on December 14th, and then he left for Fiji. I returned to LA with my book. After being alone in the woods, LA made me feel dizzy and lost. The sites of our stories became my guide to the city. I wondered which one he'd choose for our meeting. I was reading and rereading Nadja by Andre Breton ...

Nadja's madness (maybe he invents it) leads him through the city like a bull by the nose. It is a book about Paris. The city becomes some kind of grid with melting edges: the taxicab outside the restaurant, the one-star hotel where Nadja lives, the lost glove discovered in the surrealist Boys' Club office. LA in the winter is uniformly golden and soft, a diasporic utopia. It occurs to me that sex can be used in the same way as madness, as a means of fixing some points on a landscape that is otherwise markerless, that is all interstice. I start imagining our cars: the routes they traverse towards these points, and the routes start to stand off the map, charged with a purpose -- can sex replace history? A week or two passes. But when Africa gets back to LA, he stops returning my phone calls and e-mails, and all I'm left with are the places. I can't let it go because Africa's presence suffuses the book, and the book is not finished. I buy a cheap Russian camera, rent an office in Hollywood and start to take pictures. There are no longer any coincidences. When I take a photo of the outside of Musso and Frank's, I notice a store diagonally across the street that says Africa Imports. I walk into a Hollywood memorabilia shop: on the top of the counter, there is one of Africa's scripts. I start to wonder if what I'm doing is anything like the projects of the artist Sophie Calle (I jokingly compared myself to Calle when I was writing I Love Dick -- I fell in love with someone named Dick and started writing him letters and everybody said that this was stalking -- although I didn't see it this way at all, any more than Shakespeare's sonnets written to his unnamed "mistress" were an act of stalking. A woman up in Canada was arrested once for sitting in her car outside of someone's house each night and writing something in her notebook -- what is it about women writing in their notebooks that is apparently so dangerous and scandalous?) -- but Calle's projects have an object, a purpose that's

outside herself, in which she's present mostly through her act of disappearance. She is investigating someone through their traces, and it is always someone who she's not particularly interested in, and so the topic really is the content and the nature of these traces, the presence or absence of aura, a ghosting. Whereas these photos that I'm taking say nothing about anyone but still they are intensely personal: they recollect (for me) the stunned bewilderment of missed connections. Unlike the woman writing in her notebook in her car, Calle is never considered offensive or objectionable. Calle's work is aloof and purposeful, deliberate, It is mysterious, intelligent, well-executed. It raises fascinating questions about privacy, identity, control, seduction, secrets and surveillance. Hack feminists like it because it offers another chance to ruminate on reversing the "male gaze." It is fascinating, stimulating and pleasurably unsettling because, as Amy Gerstler notes in Art week, Calle-the-narrator "keeps herself under wraps." She does not embarrass us because she doesn't speak to us directly. Therefore, we can assume that her intentions aren't branded by what, for women in the art world, is the kiss of death: to be in any way direct or psychological. There is a part in Nadja where Andre talks about the Place Dauphine as being something like the "sex" of a woman. This is really beautiful. A woman's sex is like a spicebox, mysterious in its many folds, rhapsodic and encircling. A woman's sex will wrap around you like a blanket. It isn't anything like a big fat cunt sitting outside your suburban house in her car and writing in a notebook. And I'm wondering if the differences between a woman's "sex" and a cunt might actually be analogous to the difference between photography and writing. Stalk though she might, the photographer is a very circumspect, acquisitive beast, whereas the woman writing in her

notebook is more like a dog who pees on the floor. Because photos are mysterious, elusive, even if they are notoriously "stolen," whereas writing is just one short step away from talking. To talk is to commit yourself, and nobody likes a talking cunt because it's so demanding. Presence is always accompanied by a demand for recognition -- do you see me? To talk or write is to explicitly assert one's presence. Disappearance never struck me as a very interesting subject. It's always so much harder to appear. In a film I made called How to Shoot a Crime, two dominatrixes are videotaped talking about themselves to Sylvere Lotringer, the interviewer, in his Front Street loft in New York City. The year is 1987 and the neighbourhood is soon to be reborn as the commercially developed Downtown Seaport. The two women speak rapturously to Sylvere about the "electric space" of killing. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a police videographer named Johnny Santiago travels between crime scenes to document the dead bodies of their victims. Anonymous and often decomposing corpses strewn around the city's interstitial zones: a railway yard, a parking lot, a rooftop. The crime scenes become to NYC what the Marche au Puce and Place Dauphine are to Nadja and Breton. The crime scenes are a means of marking. Halfway through the video, one of the women, Mile Victoire, picks up on her interviewers voyeuristic interest in sadomasochism : V: Bullshit, boy, you have to be in here with me. I'm out here alone. V: No ... It's one thing to trust these experiences up against things you share. But we're not going back and forth, this is not a conversation. S: I'm here. S: That's why I have a camera. I'm here.

V: No, we need your DICK OUT HERE. This is HALF a conversation. Circling round the interviewer's own suicidal will to disappear within the interviews, the film chronicles the larger disappearance of the neighbourhood during New York's first massive wave of gentrification. The crime scene becomes the only place in which time stops: the police investigation, the barricades, the cameras, become the city's only ritual act of mourning. "When a death occurs," the interviewer finally surmises, "there must be a reason. We just have to find the reason." Calle's work, of course, opposes this. There isn't any special reason why she follows Henri B., much less any meaning. This kind of ghosting is an effect she pushes later on in works like Color Blind and Ghosts, in which the shapes and colours and emotional affects of famous artworks are recalled in writing in their absence. Her projects are all conceived within a game plan -- games that reference randomness and chance. But unlike certain late modernists who devised chance events, like the writers of the Oulipo Group, or William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Calle has no particular belief that "chance" can break the code of randomness and reveal a hidden meaning. Despite its enigmatic surface, Calle's work is vastly less romantic. She reveals the empty space of chance to be just what it is, just empty. Except for the anger vented at her by the owner of the famous French address book, Calle's work elicits very little condemnation in the art world. And surely, in her calculated witty absence, Calle is as mysterious as Breton's Place Dauphine. She is not a smelly cunt. She's flawless. Annie Sprinkle became famous in the art world for inviting audiences to view the inside of her vagina through a speculum. Sprinkle's friendcompetitor Penny Arcade was dubious

about the nature of this success. Creator of the notorious performance, Bitch Dyke Faghag Whore, Penny liked to talk. She talked directly to her audiences and encouraged them to talk to her, and when they did, she answered. She invoked her audiences to get up and dance with her company of seven girl-boy strippers. They did, and often people took their clothes off. "Hmmm," Arcade surmised, "now if she could get the audiences to stick the speculum up themselves, I think she'd have something."