Martin Mugar considers recent critical attention to the work of Laura Owens whose mid-career retrospective was recently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Mugar writes: “The post-modern view implicates that we are always moving away from our origins, yet even in the continual distancing from the origins something of the source remains. Like Stella Owens says what you see is what you get. There is nothing beyond the work itself that the work might point to. Anything that might upset the applecart of her manufactured world is kept at bey. For me the disparities the mix and match of the real and the printed are already well covered by Rauschenberg.”