.
Intra was blessed with entrepreneurial can-do—a kiwi DIY attitude. In 1992, with a circle of artist friends, he founded Teststrip in Vulcan Lane. It may not have been the country’s rst artist-run space, but it was new and dangerous. It proved the perfect platform for Intra’s subcultural inquiries and alternative activities. For the disorienting 1993 installationWaiting Room, Intra and Vicki Kerr surgically altered the space, curving walls, ceiling, and oor into one another, dousing them with antiseptic and cranking up the lights. Space evaporated in a hygienic white out, leaving nowhere for germs or shadows to hide. Visitors were asked to wear covers over their shoes.

Relocating to sleazy K Road the following year, tiny Teststrip would become the most talked-about gallery in the country—a treehut for the wannabe avantgarde. On the other side of the world, Artforum would publish an enthusiastic notice about the startup from supporter, collaborator, and publicist Stuart McKenzie: ‘Teststrip shows often tread a ne line between reporting and celebrating social dysfunction. There is a Nietzschean amorality here, and also a strenuous Romanticism in the style of Keats’ promise that til we are sick we understand not.’³

.
Linking punk, situationism, and surrealism, Intra’s art took diverse forms: a still-life arrangement of punk attire—Doc Martens, a studded cu , and a cut-throat razor—in a vitrine; a Blood Mobile of red glass drips—a nod to Hans Bellmer; drawings with arcane citations and gimmicky hand lettering; product photos of medical paraphernalia indexed to the stations of the cross; a rotating CT scan of a pelvis accessed through a peephole viewer; a lab rat scratching away behind a wall of pink breglass insulation; X-rays and installations of smashed cameras. There were always lots of medical references, reminding us that the surrealists André Breton and Jacques-André Boi ard had been a doctor and a medical photographer respectively. And there were endless drug references, which now seem sadly prophetic.

As a young artist, Intra was provocative but successful—a rising star. Despite the punk posturing, he had supportive dealers, including surprisingly classy ones, such as Wellington’s Brooker Gallery and Auckland’s Claybrook Gallery. His work was acquired by prominent collections (public and private) and included in important exhibitions (featuring on the cover of the catalogue for the Museum of New Zealand’s 1994 survey show Art Now). While Chris Kraus emphasises the Teststrippers’ fuck-you attitude in her intro later in this book, Intra could really work a room. He was a charmer.

.
Writing became important early on. Intra’s art needed words. Texts featured in his hand- lettered, collaged, and photocopied drawings, posters, handouts, and fanzines. And, in 1989, he started contributing to the bFM student-radio magazine Stamp, cutting his teeth reporting on art, bands, comics, even a comedian. Between 1989 and 1992, he wrote for most issues: twenty-seven pieces in all. In addition to reviews, there were creative-writing experiments, including an invented interview with Picasso and an account of an imaginary historical woman artist who had slept with Picasso. A real artist took umbrage at being the subject of an invented interview, worried that ction may pass for fact, requiring a disclaimer.

Stamp enabled Intra’s experimentalism and tolerated his in jokes. His writings there demonstrate his air  for parody. His piece ‘When You Sell Me’ was particularly scatterbrained:’At the opening I wore my tweed coat, my polka-dot tie, my green trousers, my armour plated knickers, and I painted my nose red. / The artist rejects symbolism and borrowing from indigenous cultures, rather he attempts through a process of reduction and distillation to penetrate a common level of collective consciousness. / We know our positions too well. There is enough measured contempt and praise to keep our frustrations and pleasures balanced for a lifetime. / I’ll do the mail-out, you do the mail-out, she got sent a mail-out, he’s on the mail-out list, let’s hope the mail gets lost in the mail. / I fuck you and spit at you, you ruin me, you sell me, and this is the best art there ever is. / Everything would be totally diffgerent if the opportunity to sell out actually existed.’⁴

By 1993, Intra had quit writing for Stamp and was head down, completing his MFA dissertation Subculture: Bataille, Big Toe, Dead Doll, becoming more disciplined as a writer and reader. His text mapped the web of concerns he was exploring in his art—subculture and the iconography of revolt—via the now-available writings of Georges Bataille and the new commentaries on surrealism by Rosalind Krauss and Co. that appeared in their wake.⁵

In writing Subculture, Intra hit his stride as writer. In 1994, he began contributing toMidwest, a magazine I co-edited. For us, he wrote on painter John Hurrell, on surrealism and skin disease, and on Ava Seymour’s rubberist collages. He was always precocious and opinionated. He wrote about art that intersected with and extended his interests as an artist, but, if subjects didn’t fit, he could make them fit. In his Hurrell piece, he rejected the older artist’s concerns—postmodernism and provincialism—preferring to discuss the work in terms of situationism. Midwest also profiled Intra’s own work. We took him on as an artist-writer package. In 1994, Intra also met LA-based Semiotext(e) publisher Sylvère Lotringer. He was visiting his partner, the writer and lmmaker Chris Kraus, who was in Auckland making a lm. Lotringer suggested Intra embark on a master’s degree in the edgling Critical Theory programme at ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, where he was teaching. Escape became Intra’s plan.

In 1995, Intra began writing for the Sydney-based magazine Art and Text, becoming their New Zealand reviewer and review wrangler. It would become an important relationship. After doing just one review, Intra got to write a pro le on fellow Teststripper Denise Kum. Art and Text had outgrown Australia and aspired to become a key international art journal. Looking for a bigger context, it too was plotting a move to LA. In 1996, it announced its arrival with its ‘Los Angeles’ issue. After frantic fundraising and securing a Fulbright Scholarship, Intra also landed there that year.

In LA, Intra stopped making art to focus on writing. At ArtCenter, he embarked on a thesis on Daniel Paul Schreber, the paranoid schizophrenic German judge who penned Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903).⁶ Intra quickly assimilated into the LA scene, but he kept exercising his New Zealand connections, and they him. He continued to write on New Zealand artists and for New Zealand publications, while taking on reviewing gigs for Artforum, Art.net, and Flash Art. For a while, his head was in both places. Oddly, it wouldn’t be until 2000 that he became a regular contributor for Art and Text, writing for them like clockwork.
.
In 1998, during a rave in the desert, Intra and ArtCenter friend Steve Hanson cooked up a plan to start a gallery. With some friends, they found a space in Chinatown, taking their name from the sign left by the previous tenant. Opening in January 1999, China Art Objects Galleries was instantly in uential, elevating a new cohort of LA artists, including Jon Pylypchuk and David Korty, and leading the transformation of Chung King Road into a gallery district. Early shows included Laura Owens and Scott Reeder, Jorge Pardo and Bob Weber, Sharon Lockhart and George Porcari. There was a Stephen Prina record release, a Mike Kelley poetry reading, and a Mia Doi Todd concert. Intra was a midwife to a moment. Like Teststrip, China Art Objects was a platform. But, even after the place became successful, Intra’s existence remained precarious, his clothes op shop, his apartment grubby, his car impounded. Intra was no trustifarian, but he was energised by the game, continuing to hustle, banging out essay after essay on his old laptop.

.
Intra remained New Zealand art’s go-to person—our base camp in LA. He was forever hosting New Zealanders, and sponging o them—quid pro quo. His ethos was ‘transactional’. Intra parlayed Slave Pianos and Teststrip co-conspirator Daniel Malone into the China Art Objects programme and wrote on them. He also accessed LA artists for New Zealand galleries. He curated Span, with Diana Thater and Jessica Bronson, for me when I ran Artspace, Auckland. He helped place Eric Wesley into the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s 2000 show Drive, and David Korty and Paul Seitsema into Allan Smith’s 2001 Auckland Triennial Bright Paradise. He also wrote essays for all three shows.

Intra wore many hats, sometimes simultaneously. His texts were often advocacy and promo, written to support artist friends, artists he represented, artists he loved. His 1996 preview of Ann Shelton’s photobook Redeye describes it as ‘a charismatic exposé of the hideous truths and self-conscious mythologies of unemployed psychopaths who frequent Verona cafe and actually believe in drag’.7 He neglected to mention that he and Ann had been an item, that he was the subject of many of her images, that he was no stranger to Verona, and that he had been photographed in drag. But, as Intra became established and earned the opportunity to write on heavy hitters, the stakes got higher, and he couldn’t take as many liberties. His last pieces included insightful but respectful essays on Julia Scher and Isa Genzken.

.
Intra’s writing was informed by his appetite for theory, but it was never dense or abstruse. His writing had wit and verve; his insights felt intuitive and immediate. He also enjoyed mimicry. He had an ear for the edgy, disruptive prose of dadaists, surrealists, situationists, and punks, but also for their pompous, conservative critics. He enjoyed the battlefield rhetoric of manifestos and takedowns, toggling between formality and informality, snottiness and spit. The piece that opens this collection, ‘Journalism’, sets the scene. Made for a photocopied ‘micrograph’ to accompany a Tony de Lautour show at Teststrip, it has little to say about its subject, offering instead an absurd, adolescent mash of art criticism and pulp fiction. The text incorporates a patronising rejection letter from the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, Louis Leroy: ‘Sure, De Lautour has shrewdly reclaimed the moral high ground—head and shoulders above the usual chic critiques. But, as much as he in ates his own fame with his grin-and-bear-it portraits of disease, his basic thickness repudiates what he has done so much to justify in painterly terms. It is largely for intellectual reasons that we would not consider publishing commentaries on this kind of work.’⁸ In reality, Louis Leroy was the nineteenth-century art critic who christened an art movement by satirising its practitioners as ‘impressionists’.

Fictocriticism returned in 1997’s ‘For Paranoid Critics’, which casts the art world as a theatre of cruelty and payback for the critic: ‘One by one, each of your victims takes their revenge: Walter de Maria pelts your earlobes with one-thousand brass rods! Daniel Buren peels stripe-width strips of skin from your naked body! The Nutty Professor, played by Eddie Murphy, lowers the full weight of his body onto your right arm! Colin McCahon tattoos unspeakable passages from Revelation on your forehead! Linda Benglis throws you into a vat of boiling foam rubber! And Donald Judd drops you into a steel cube and then welds it up personally!’⁹

Intra was always drawn to the idea of the world as a paranoid projection. In 1995’s ‘Discourse on the Paucity of Clinical Reality’, he had recalled Breton’s formative experience as a doctor in a World War I field hospital: ‘Cases of mental distress, even acute delirium. These psychic casualties of war were the kind of cases that passed through the centre. One in particular struck Breton’s attention. A well-educated man, straight from the front, who had an astounding confession: the war, he said, was a complete sham. This testimony, which he elaborated in the most literary terms, did nothing but utterly convince Breton of the paucity of our own reality. This unnamed patient insisted that the gruesome hack jobs of the battlefield were nothing but skilful applications of prosthetic makeup, the shells ying overhead were only make believe, and the battlefield itself was the false counterpane of a set dresser. Upon hearing this, the soon-to-be leader of surrealism jumped back in his seat. The movement followed soon after.’¹⁰

Schreber also suffered from hallucinations. The paranoid Judge believed God was turning him into a woman in order to impregnate him and repopulate the planet. Schreber constructed a vast, novel cosmology to support his fears. His Memoirs is disorienting, detailing his experiences and accusations with surprising lucidly, scrambling insight with insanity. Intra called it ‘a cross between Napoleonic battle strategy and the Starr Report’.¹¹ This mad, impossible book would become the basis of a case study by Freud that would prove foundational for psychoanalysis. After Freud had his way with Schreber, other theorists—including Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Elias Canetti—took turns making an example of him. As much as he wanted to rescue Schreber from their clutches, Intra would also make use of him, writing Schreber into essays on Slave Pianos and Julia Scher, as well as devoting two essays to him.

Schreber haunts other Intra pieces where he isn’t named: in Intra’s discussion of Salvador Dalí’s paranoid-critical method (where insights emerge in conflating inner and outer worlds), in his account of John McCracken’s minimalism (inspired by alien contact), and in his description of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s Sod and Sadie Sock (with its Salo-esque debauches).¹² Intra’s interest in Schreber was keyed to paranoia as the engine of the art world, underpinning the way artists build their own worlds in their work as well as the wider scene’s sado-masochistic machinations.

In his obituary for Intra in Frieze, Will Bradley describes Intra’s Schreber thesis as an attempt ‘to suggest ways that art writing might be reinvented’.¹³ Intra certainly saw art writing as an invention, a game. A ne example is the reviews and CV of Pat Scull, a ctional artist. Intra ghost wrote them for a 1997 Danius Kesminas solo show, which posed as a two-person show with Scull. Casually presented in the gallery as a set of xeroxed documents, they supported the art-nerdy hoax. Aping the bogus u of reviews, they say everything but nothing: ‘Content to deliver quietly powerful work which is highly ambiguous in content, Scull provides a new form of artistic thinking for those of us who remain in the gallery, and retain our belief in the gallery.’