“I always believed up to that point [1981] that there should be some radical separation between self and work—a separation that of course was theorized. I don’t totally understand this anymore. I don’t completely know why or how this was the case.

“I think my work now is involved in a continual self-questioning that isn’t a kind of existentialist ‘who am I’ questioning, but an inquiry into the self as constructed and positioned, which necessarily gives the work an air of intellectual intimacy… Many people think that the texts are in fact products of a falsely constructed authoritative voice. I hope that’s not the case…

“The mistake is always then that the idea of subjectivity becomes the dominant motif in the work.” — Craig Owens

 

CRAIG OWENS—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CRITIC

By Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield (who interviewed Owens for the book in 1984).

(New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018)

Also see:

BEYOND RECOGNITION, by Craig Owens

Edited by Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock 

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)

Above: Craig Owens and Joan Simon at South Street Seaport, New York City. Photograph by Elizabeth C. Baker.

Image credit below: Badlands Unlimited.