Outside the box: James Meyer unpacks Craig Owens's slide library - Writing the '80s - Critical Essay

ArtForum, March, 2003

For a critic, a slide collection is the most personal of artifacts. These are the images set aside to remember; here is the record, in miniature, of a life in art--slides acquired in the process of writing review after review or making ubiquitous visits to the galleries. A slide box is a seedbed of the imagination, a record of memory, a resource. Its contents beg to be arranged into so many narratives of art history--articles, books to be written one day. Most never come to pass. The idea doesn't test out. The art suddenly looks stale. Time is short.

The slide is a passe technology. The last vestige of the bulky, black-and-white lantern plates of the nineteenth century--still found in the grand art-history departments, which do not quite know what to do with them--the Ektachrome is rapidly being replaced by the thumbnail JPEG, the carousel projector by PowerPoint. Next to the digital image the slide is a delicately tactile thing, a ribbon of film pressed between glass slivers. It easily shatters. It fades. Already it seems of another time: the midcentury moment of art history's rise as an academic discipline, the era of Panofsky and Schapiro and Gombrich, of the Western survey and midday lecture (lights dimmed) once referred to as "Darkness at Noon."

I am sorting through the slide collection of Craig Owens, the remarkable art critic and teacher who died of complications from AIDS in 1990. One day, Owens's partner, the French-literature scholar Scott Bryson, presented me with a bulky sack. (A friend had brought me to visit.) "Craig's slides." I did not know what to say.

After all, I never met Owens. He was, during my student days, one of the few critics I read with avid attention. Along with his colleagues associated with October during the late '70s and '80s (when that journal was at the forefront in theorizing the various phenomena that came to be known as postmodernism in the visual arts), Owens raised art criticism, a practice Clement Greenberg once dismissed as a lesser form of literature, to a level of uncommon seriousness. Far more than mere reportage or promotion, his best essays are passionate expositions. In their intensity, their conviction, their self-awareness, his writings suggest a utopic belief in criticism as a redemptive form--as if one could write one's way to a more just existence. This notion of criticism as a life lived critically, of being a critic (a legacy of the Frankfurt School, of the New York Intellectuals) has been in retreat for some time. The nature of this withering is complex. It needs to be recognized, and addressed.

It was a long time before I dared peek at the metal containers and musty black cardboard boxes bearing Owens's name. If a critic's slides are indeed so personal, rifling through them would feel slightly indecent. My hesitation to do so had another source, however: the feeling of paralysis that hit me whenever I tried to contemplate the critic's death. There is no way to understand someone dying at thirty-nine. "There is no reason that explains AIDS," Gregg Bordowitz has written. "There are historical, material conditions that create a situation of crisis, but there is no reason why some people die, why some get sick." During the height of the AIDS epidemic in this country (the disease had by then become a global pandemic), one faced this conundrum daily. The deaths of many friends in their twenties and thirties remain, for me, impossible to comprehend. The sudden arrival of Owens's slides was disconcerting. And so I stored the little boxes in a drawer and, for a while, tried to forget about them.

EVENTUALLY CURIOSITY WON OUT--and my own scruples. To hide the archive away was not an option, for it meant consigning this small evidence of a keen critical mind to a quiet oblivion. I began to study the slides one by one. I pull out a good twenty images of Daniel Buren and Michael Asher's installation at the Haus Esters and Haus Lange at Krefeld in 1982. The slides are unbound, without glass, and unlabeled. It would appear they were shot by Owens himself. Clearly, he wanted to remember the show well: The slides record the installation from every angle. Here is another Asher: the artist's Van Abbemuseum project of 1977, which entailed removing the ceiling glass panels on one side of the museum before the show's opening and replacing them during the span of the exhibition. The other half of the museum contained selections from the permanent collection installed, according to Asher's conception, by the director.

Owens, writing on the Van Abbemuseum piece in "From Work to Frame," admired the way Asher "exposed to public view" "activity which is usually completed before an exhibition opens." He appreciated the manner in which the simple process of replacing the ceiling glass "contrasted ...the static quality of the more traditional installation that accompanied it." The two halves of the show revealed, through opposition, the museum's normative practices. As I examine the boxes I locate other works discussed in "From Work to Frame," Owens's most sustained exposition on institutional critique: Buren's Within and Beyond the Frame (John Weber Gallery, 1973), involving the suspension of the artist's striped canvas banners from SoHo's principal gallery address, the 420 building, across West Broadway; Louise Lawler's first show at Metro Pictures (1982), an arrangement of works by other gallery artists; and Hans Haacke's Visitors' Profile, 1972, from Documenta 5 (a statistical documentation of the audience of international art shows), Metro-Mobilitan, 1985, and Voici Alcan, 1983, which map the ties that bind cultural institutions to multinational sponsors and, at times, unsavory political regimes (here, apartheid South Africa).