9/17/2016 May 2003  artforum.com / in print

https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200305 1/2

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9/17/2016 Howard Singerman on Laura Owens  artforum.com / in print

https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200305&id=4659 1/2

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There are some very good paintings in MoCA’s Laura Owens survey—particularly the large decorativelandscapes painted between 1999 and 2002 that borrow from Chinese scroll and screen painting, therococo pastorals of Beauvais tapestries, and the peaceable critterdom of children’sbook illustration.Notable in their absence, though, are a couple of the artist’s very strong early works that take pluralism inthe museum and a modest and collaborative approach to painting as their relatively explicit subject. It’s away of working that continues to inform Owens’s output and that has been an especially important modelfor a number of younger painters.

In his catalogue essay, curator Paul Schimmel takes one of those missing paintings, dated 1995, as anemblem for Owens’s relationship to her sources and to painting’s history. In it, a sloping beige floor risesto a narrow strip of museum wall, where some sixty paintings hang. Rendered in shorthand, theycatalogue Owens’s interests and influences, and their salonstyle hanging suggests a refusal of both asingular history and an emplotted present for painting. Certain of the depicted canvases are doublyauthored; there are recognizable miniatures of Mondrian and Rothko, and even of this particular Owens.Others are multiply or anonymously so: Owens invited friends and family to paint their work into hers,opening up the painting and spreading its authorship still further.

The title of Schimmel’s catalogue essay, “Plays Well with Others,” points nicely to the stylistic andauthorial openness of Owens’s paintings and to the lightness with which they take their history. A phrasefrom gradeschool report cards, the title also speaks, perhaps paternalistically, to Owens’s youth; she is,at thirtytwo, by a number of years the youngest painter MoCA has surveyed in such depth. BothSchimmel’s essay and Thomas Lawson’s contribution seem written partially in defense of the museum’schoice. Lawson’s text is fashioned around a series of “beginnings” and “attempts,” both his and hers, andSchimmel proposes not only Owens’s early work but student work in general as a model for her continuingapproach, writing that her “reluctance to lay claim to a fixed position might at one time have beenattributed to youth (certainly it is characteristic of much student work) but is now an integral aspect ofOwens’s methodology.”

Owens’s work moves easily from representation to abstraction—or maybe hovers between them—butthen, so does most painting since the 1980s, and after Richter and Polke. Her work is marked neither byagon and the anxiety of influence nor by irony; nor does it lead back to a heightened subjectivity, eitheras selfassertion or lack. Owens’s use of Frankenthaler and Olitski, a couple of familiar foils, is not astrategy to mark the death of painting, but a tactical approach to actually making one. Among theexhibition’s strongest works is Untitled, 1998, in which nesting arcs of stained color lifted from early’60sOlitski are dotted with swatches of impasto that seem to take the arcs as structural or even narrativespace, reaching across them or hovering on their edges. Owens frequently plays the Olitskian trope oflayering crusts of impasto against flat areas of color, but here, as elsewhere, she pulls the impasto awayfrom the edge and toward a scene; it appears in the landscapes refigured as bits of botany or zoology.

Laura Owens, Untitled, 1998, acrylicand oil on canvas, 84 x 96".

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9/17/2016 Howard Singerman on Laura Owens  artforum.com / in print

https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=200305&id=4659 2/2

Despite Owens’s studied idiosyncrasy, her paintings are relatively detached and emotionally cool; that’spart of their openness. One of the ways they misstep is by offering protagonists in whom we might invest:the contemporary couple kissing, the girl on horseback under the stars. Her works function mosteffectively not as stories but as miseenscènes; the best are not built across a surface by juxtaposition orcollage, but composed as tableaux. The question isn’t one of abstraction versus representationnecessarily, though a few of the least successful works are in fact large abstractions suffering from toomuch space or too little paint. Instead, it’s closer to a choice between absorption and blankness, andabout the demeanor a painting might have.

Most of the criticism Owens has received, good or bad, has invoked a consistent list of attributes:lightness, openness, tenderness, innocence, vulnerability. These words describe by turns not only thepaintings but Owens’s attitude toward painting (and, perhaps, Owens herself, gendered and suggestive ofyouth as they are). The question of attitude has been a particularly important one for criticism and forpainting recently, and maybe a critic’s weak phenomenology is a way of getting at it. When it’s no longerclear how to link one painting practice to another or how to summon a history of painting, the attitude apainter takes toward his or her practice (as métier, tradition, compendium, or catalogue) and the attitude apainting takes toward its being seen have particular importance. The visual and temporal permeability thatOwens’s paintings propose, the collaborative openness of both painting and painter, seems appropriate tothe moment and to the question. And that very permeability raises a different question, a historical oneposed to the museum about criteria and necessity, its stockintrade: Why this painting, rather thananother?

“Laura Owens” will be on view at MoCA, Los Angeles, through June 22; travels to the Aspen Art Museum,Aug. 2–Sept. 28; Milwaukee Art Museum, Oct. 18–Jan. 18, 2004; Museum of Contemporary Art, NorthMiami, Mar. 4–May 9, 2004.

Howard Singerman is associate professor of art history at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

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