Nick Stillman: It seems like that was a work of yours that carried over to the work you’re doing now. So many young artists seem either in awe of, deferential to, unaware of, or uninterested in the historical significance of their predecessors. I get none of that from you. It was almost like you were working with performance-art history as a medium in that project.
Clifford Owens: Absolutely. Young artists have no sense of history.
NS: Why, Cliff? Not enough teaching?
CO: (laughter) Not enough good teaching, perhaps. But I’m not sure it even comes through academia. Something else is happening right now with younger artists and their sense of history. It’s as if what preceded them is of no value or never really happened. I’m always amazed when I talk to women artists in college who have no interest in feminist art. There seems to be this frightening, alarming return to the modernist notion of the self-contained, genius originator. Young artists in particular don’t want to acknowledge antecedents. I’m not really interested in recuperating history and I’m certainly not interested in romantic nostalgia for the past, but I’m very aware of the history of art that preceded me. Every artist works through history. I mean, painters are always painting against the history of painting. Performance art seems so new, but there’s been so much development in the past 40 or 50 years.
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Welcome to The Detonator, the official Tumblr site for BOMB Magazine and BOMBsite.com. Here you'll find all the bits of shrapnel that have embedded themselves across our cultural landscape since BOMB first launched as an independent art and literary quarterly in 1981.
