Craig Owens

Brooke Marcy

 

Summery of From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After “The Death of the Author by Craig Owens

 

In Craig Owens’s essay, From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After “The Death of the Author,” he begins by looking at the work of Robert Smithson. Smithson examines how dealers and collectors, not the artist, determine the value of artwork. This division creates a distance between the artist and their work, and brings up questions of authorship.  For artists to reclaim their work, Smithson points out the need to examine the  “apparatus the artist is threaded through,” and ask how this apparatus affects both role of the artist and the production of work. 

 

Craig Owens then examines the work of Giulio Paolini and Gerhard Richter, both of whom explore, in different ways, the disappearance of the author/artist in their work.  Paolini sees the artist as a magician who vanishes at the end of the act.  He allows the work to acts as a mask, concealing the artist from the audience.  Richter deals with the disappearance of the author/artist by refusing to conform to stylistic unity.  Coherency of work becomes the signature of the artist, and Richter’s stylistic changes frustrate critics trying to label him and his work.

 

Similar to Richter, Cindy Sherman confuses issues by placing herself both in front of and behind the camera. Her constant shifts of identity blur the line between photographer and subject, distorting the concept of the author, or as Paolini terms “authorial identity.”

 

Barthes states that it is language and the reader who dictate the voice of a text and not the author. Owens believes that “The Death of the Author” acts as an important transition spot between the avant-garde of the 20s and the “institutional critique of the 70s.” He points out that to think the 70s are a rebirth of the 20s is to misunderstand contemporary practice. Modernist’s work contradicted Barthes theories by ignoring the audience and embracing the work and the artist. The Post-modernists, however, looked to the space created by the absence of the author by examining the “frame,” and asking questions about location and the “social nature” of production.  Craig Owens uses Broodthaer’s Musee d’Art Modern-Department des Aigles as an example of the shift of focus from art to “frame.”  Broodthaer created his own Museum space, and in the inaugural exhibition, filled it with shipping crates supposedly containing valuable art.  Here he is questioning the intrinsic value of art and how container influences the art it contains. In another piece, Conquest of Space, Broodthaer equates art and the military, looking at how both function within the “ boundaries of the nation-state.” 

 

 In his work, Déco, a Conquest, Broodthaer examines the history of the development of the avant-garde. He highlights their need for dominance and their rejection of bourgeois society. Owens points out that the avant-garde saw the “frame” as the enemy needing to be destroyed. They proclaimed that art needed to break free from the institution, but unfortunately for them, the institution they wished to destroy easily contained them.

 

 

Daniel Buren explores cultural confinement in his work by placing his art both inside and outside the container, thus bringing attention to the object and where it has been placed. Buren sees the Museum/Gallery as the “frame,” and he notes that often it is the job of the art to hide the realities of the “frame.”   In Buren’s own art, he looks to find ways around the “frame”, as well as, ways of working within the institution to bring attention to the containment it creates.  He states that the artist needs to step down from the pedestal and allow their work to speak.  By letting go of ownership the work becomes common property and not subject to appropriation. He believes that true artistic freedom is found by working outside of the “institutional frame.”

 

In Hans Haacke’s work, he examinees the power of the collector and exposes “ the anonymous, impersonal façade of corporate funding.”  He presents the viewer with the realities existing between the corporate donor and the exhibition they are sponsoring.  Michael Asher on the other hand, brings attention to the exhaled façade of the Museum. By displacing or removing objects and replacing them in a different setting, he allows the viewer to see the subject more objectively.  In one example of his work, he shows the audience, by removing a wall revealing an office space, where the value of art is created. In another work he removes the glass roof of a Museum and then slowly replaces it during the exhibition, bringing attention to the relationship between the artwork and the surrounding space.

 

Haacke points out that art is an industry run by many, thus counteracting the belief that art is an exalted entity.  Art is produced, bought and sold and Haacke brings attention to relationship between the “capital and the art world.”  This relationship separates the artist from the work but also ensures continued growth of the “art apparatus”, creating more opportunities work to be seen. Louie Lawler deals with this relationship by turning the tables on the art world. To bring attention to the role of the apparatus, she has placed herself within the industry in every aspect. In one exhibition, she hung photos of art industry workers assembling an exhibition next to a gallery containing artist work. By doing this, she is pointing out what goes on behind the scenes of an exhibition, “here by presenting, rather than being presented by, the institution.”

 

Jenny Holtzer believed that the time to examine the “apparatus the artist is threaded through” is over. Craig Owens’s on the other hand, through his essay, points out that this is not true, and he wants the reader to understand the importance of the artist understanding the existence of the apparatus. Only with this knowledge can we, in varying roles of the industry, “employ, rather than simply being employed by, the apparatus.