The future of modernist risk

This article examines Chris Kraus’s work, especially her 2016 short story ‘Face’ and her 2006 novel Torpor, to argue that women’s engagement with modernism returns in global art as a risk, bound up with the material inequalities produced by globalisation. It shows how, in Kraus’s work, the legacies of modernism, the production of ‘backwardness’, and the exclusion of reproductive labour together generate an uneven temporality for the global, whereby futurity becomes anachronistic. It concludes by suggesting that ‘Face’ provides the outlines of an alternate global art, premised in the embrace of risky exchanges between women.