Thursday, October 21, 2004
Anti-Almanac: Critic on Critic Edition
From an essay I stopped reading somewhere over the state of Wisconsin:
In fact, an episode similar to [Douglas] Crimp’s transpired for Craig Owens, whose canonical essay “The Discourse of Others” recounts his initial blindness to sexual difference in Laurie Anderson’s 1979 Americans on the Move. . . . But why this blindness? Was Crimp’s queer eye eclipsed by the imperatives of institutional critique, and Owens’s feminism temporarily trumped by his role as poststructuralist? Were such critical identities not simultaneously habitable? Were considerations of identity and subjectivity seen as incompatible with more “rigorously” critical enterprises?
—Artforum, October 2004
