There is something intrinsically elegiac in videos showing gay men affected by the AIDS epidemic. In contrast to today’s abundance of moving images, many of the films that portray people who died at the apex of this crisis are the only recorded traces of their subjects. Think of the interview conducted in 1984 by Lyn Blumenthal of her friend the art critic Craig Owens as part of a series on women (and feminist) artists and art writers. For two hours, while smoking abundantly, Owens tells the story of a vocation—from drawing clothes and designing buildings as a child, to theater production as a young man, to his training with the fellow critic Rosalind Krauss and his brief affiliation with the journal October . More crucially perhaps, Owens insists several times on the ideal
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