AR: You’re an art critic who also likes bad art. Why?

CK: Well, not all bad art — only some. I like things that are transparent, things that don’t take themselves too seriously and seem aware of how provisional everything really is. 

AR: A lot of the conversation about literature today seems wrapped up in memoir versus fiction, but you don’t really seem interested in that. While your works often cross between numerous genres, you seem more concerned with the movement between so-called “high” and “low” culture and how women can and can’t make that jump. What does that movement look like to you and why is it important?

CK: That’s really true. I worked for a while with Mike Kelley in the MFA program at Art Center College in the mid-to-late 1990s. It was stunning to see Mike’s persona there: in seminars and committees, everyone spoke the same language of high-philosophical discourse, some well and some not, but Mike could blast through that wall, using vernacular language to convey ideas that were often much more complex. It’s a revelation to watch someone give himself that kind of freedom. Very few working class people enter the high-culture industry, and most who do adapt very quickly to the master discourse. 

One of the great achievements of Semiotext(e), as begun by Sylvere Lotringer in the 1970s, was this incredible balance between high and low expression and art … the idea that the crazy theater artist Jack Smith and French theorists were expressing similar truths. 

I tried to continue that with the books I selected for Native Agents, the imprint I started and edited between 1990 and 2004. It was first-person fiction, mostly by women, but the point wasn’t disclosure, it was more about humor: the freedom that writers like Eileen Myles, Ann Rower, Cookie Mueller, Lynne Tillman, and Michelle Tea gave themselves to talk about very serious things in a less-than-serious way.