Laura Owens
b. 1970
Lives and works in Los Angeles
Education
1992
What is necessary to provoke a painting practice? I saw Laura Owens talk recently and she intimated that an installation of a series of paintings is at once one painting and installation art.
How do artists take the pressure off, just a bit to allow the creative process to happen. Owens states that she is “never not aware of the pressure”. It is always there, but how does one invite play and questions into the work so that a painter can concentrate on the "how".
Owens stated that for her painting is not about the "what" but the "how". If it is about the "how", then how much does the "what" matter. How much does the content matter to the artist’s or market’s concerns. For that matter, is market concern the same as cultural concern.
Artists may need to have a “wake up” moment. For Laura Owens it was the destruction of Cal Arts campus. At that point all of the graduate students had to ask themselves, “Are you in or out?”
How much of art life is just the act of fully engaging in the selfish yet manipulated art world.
If you make a painting and no one sees it is it still art? What if I said there was a painting but covered it up (like that artist that put his shit in a can, and like Owens created the nesting doll painting for the Whitney Biennial). Is Owens' collaboration with family a conceptual act or an act in materiality?
