Been there, smashed that

Krafft strikes up conversations wherever he goes and seems to have a knack for running into off-kilter characters and then going off on adventures (or misadventures) with them. He's traveled widely and frequently throughout Europe and India and he inevitably returns with a raft of strange stories. During the day we spend together his conversation is punctuated with the phrase "Here's a good story," and it always is.

This one, for example: One day in Slovenia, Krafft tells me, he came across a college student named Eric who was playing bongos on the main street of Ljubljana. "He had a copy of Aleister Crowley's 'The Book of the Law' down on the sidewalk," Krafft recalls, "next to the hat that he collected money in, and I asked him why 'The Book of the Law' was on the pavement and he said because he was a practicing Thelemite."

(Thelemites follow the dictum "Do as thou wouldst," first put forth by the 15th century Catholic monk Francois Rabelais. Crowley, the occult British philosopher and devotee of the black arts whose notoriety peaked in the 1920s and '30s, had an affinity for Rabelaisian philosophy, which no doubt had something to do with the occultist being embraced anew in the 1960s and later celebrated by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page among many others. In the '20s, Crowley and some female followers moved to a house in Italy, which they called the Abbey of Thelema.)

"Then I asked Eric if he knew about the Abbey of Thelema in Cefalu, Sicily," Krafft continues. "Slovenia is right next to Italy. And he said, 'Yeah, I spent last summer there. If you buy the gas, I'll drive you there. I have a semester break coming up.' Once we'd made the deal, Eric said, 'Oh, by the way, I'm a junkie. I have a little addiction problem. I'm going to have to go see my doctor and get a week's worth of methadone.'

"We smuggled his methadone out of Slovenia in the hubcap of the car so he'd have enough medicine to be able to take the trip. Once we got to Cefalu, Eric took me to Crowley's house. It was abandoned, boarded up, but we went through a window and stayed inside for three nights and three days. I videotaped it and photographed the pornographic murals Crowley had painted, and Eric did a Thelemic ritual, the banishing ritual of the lesser pentagram, they call it. He recited all of these Crowleyian mantras that sound kind of exotic while he stomped around in a circle of candles. I tried to videotape it, but failed because I couldn't find the low-light button on the camera."

This is vintage Krafft: While discussing something entirely unrelated, he digresses briefly into 75-year-old porn murals and the strange rituals of a junkie occultist. If bent conversation ever becomes an Olympic event, Krafft's a shoe-in for the gold.

His trip to Slovenia (he's now been there several times) ended up having a major impact on the direction of his work and his life. But it also ignited a two-year battle between Krafft and the U.S. government, which the artist won handily. As if it weren't clear enough that his art is his life and vice versa, Krafft, the proud victor, has chosen to display part of the paper trail from that prolonged bureaucratic wrangle on the walls of the Grand Central Art Center.

Krafft vs. the feds all started when he became intrigued by the projects of the NSK collective, which, he says, tweaks totalitarianism by wryly emulating it. It's an approach that, like Krafft's own dark humor, is bound to ruffle the feathers of the irony-impaired.

"NSK's a collective," he explains, "that's declared itself a transglobal, borderless state in time. What that means is that they're what I call a 'state of mind' (they call themselves a 'virtual state'), and they issue passports to their state of mind. They're a parasitical state that needs a host state to manifest itself. They appear in a city, open an embassy, then disappear and will reappear -- like a traveling virus."

The grant that underwrote Krafft's visit to Slovenia called for him to make ceremonial dinnerware for the virtual state. While he was there, "They invited me to come with them to Sarajevo as Laibach's official tour photographer. They declared Sarajevo an NSK territory and they opened up an embassy in the opera house, hung banners and so forth. And they issued -- free -- 300 NSK passports in the afternoon to anyone who wanted them."

Krafft has his special NSK "diplomatic" passport hung on the wall in the Santa Ana gallery, and it does look real at first glance, although on closer scrutiny it's apparent that it's not. The fact that there's no country called "NSK" is the first tipoff. When he arrived back in the U.S. at Detroit airport, Krafft, naturally, was chosen from a 747 full of people for a random search. "I did not present the passport to Customs," he says. "I just had it in my pocket and they found it when they searched me in this little room where they'd taken me. And when the officer saw it, he said, 'What entitles you to carry a diplomatic passport, Mr. Krafft?'"

"I said, 'It's not a diplomatic passport at all, it's not even a passport, it's a limited edition art object and here's all the paperwork to prove it.' And then the officer got shitty with me. He said, 'You can file an appeal of seizure form or I can throw it away in front of you. What do want?'

Next Page: "I'll just make porcelain skateboards"

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