Week Six: Craig Owens

Investigating the creative presence of the artist and writer in their works through the labor process

In the 1992 essay titled, “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After ‘The Death of the Author?’,” by author Craig Owens, the reader acknowledges the mystique behind artists who create artworks and decides whether their presence is truly rendered within the work. By understanding the crisis of artistic authorship,
Owens discusses how the artist is not necessarily in control of the value of their work.

Owens states that the artist “becomes estranged to their own production,” which is an interesting concept because previous art critics have studied artistic authorship as well as censorship. He mentions how author Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay titled, “The Death of the Author,” claims the notion that the meaning and possibly the value of art is no longer based on the artist’s assessment.

By stating this claim, Owens discusses how postmodernist art appears to answer questions throughout history and that the actual artist disappears from most works. In one example, Owens states that the “broad, gestural brushstrokes” are often the symbolism for an artist and his or her presence and even this has disappeared or become “camouflaged” in certain portraits of the artists depicting themselves.


With this innovative technique, Owens mentions that the artist removes themselves as a form of “practice,” which prepares them for the move outside of realism such as photographical methods seen in landscape depictions and still life. In doing so, this move transfers the practice towards abstraction, which allows more monochromatic and gestural movements, according to Owens.


Throughout his essay, Owens notes that artists and authors alike must manage their conscious and unconscious desires in order to resolve their own thoughts. In one example, Owens discusses how the tension between documenting events and images through photography contains a tension against painting, which reveals less of the artist and more of the critic’s hidden narrative.