“There is a contradiction at the heart of our idea of open dialogue: while it seems to depend on the idea of leaving open space for ambiguity, uncertainty, and the contingent, it is grounded in — and perhaps even depends upon — de facto limits of who can speak and what can be said.”
Aruna D’Souza, Whitewalling—Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited, 2018).
“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.
A newly edited and updated version of Craig Owens’ 1984 interview with Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield has been published by Badlands Unlimited.
Join Lynne Tillman, Thomas Beard, and Horsfield for CRAIG OWENS—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CRITIC, a book launch and panel discussion with Paul Chan and Johanna Burton at the New Museum.
Owens (1950–1990) was an associate editor at October and a senior editor at Art in America. His essays are collected in Beyond Recognition—Representation, Power, and Culture (1994).
In his memoir Before Pictures, Douglas Crimp describes the quality of Owen’s “unrestrained intellectual enthusiasm.”:
“In many of our late-night phone calls… [Owens] would say something like, ‘I’m writing a brilliant essay on…’—on whatever it was he was working on at the moment. I was at first taken aback by his apparent immodesty, but I grew to understand and appreciate his elation at the process of his own thinking, sparked by his voracious reading.” — Douglas Crimp*
CRAIG OWENS—PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG CRITIC
Launch and panel
Friday, March 2, at 7 pm.
New Museum
235 Bowery, New York City.
* Douglas Crimp, “Agon,” in Before Pictures (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 213.
From top: Craig Owens, 1982, from the series Art World, photograph © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders; Craig Owens photographed by Barbara Kruger in her loft, 1988, image credit New Museum.
