Le discours des autres

Craig Owens (1950-1990) turned art theory upside down in a decade of intense work.

In the late 1970s, in the United States, he embarked on the postmodern intellectual adventure, in search of alternatives to a modernist discourse clinging to formal problems. Owens looked at artistic practices conceived at the crossroads of mediums, such as those of Robert Smithson or Trisha Brown. A reader of poststructuralist philosophers, he argues that works are composed of signs open to interpretation.

Owens thus places the spectators in the foreground, while bringing a new theoretical inscription to the performances of Laurie Anderson and the post-conceptual works of Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine or Martha Rosler. Attentive to the gender of artists and inspired by reflections on the power of the male gaze, Owens then writes about feminism and domination.

His essays take on a social and political tone. They also touch on questions opened up by postcolonial studies. All these researches were interrupted by AIDS, from which Owens died in 1990.

This collection, compiled, introduced and translated by Gaëtan Thomas, allows us to follow the experiments of a work carried by an exceptional reflexivity.