 So I gather I have two jobs tonight. One is to introduce this gathering and this event more broadly, and then the second is to introduce our students. So some of you may hear the first bit again tomorrow morning, but for those of you who, yeah, exactly. I wasn't aware that I was gonna do both tonight. In any case, a lot of you know the history of this event, or maybe I'll just do it unscripted the first bit so I don't repeat myself in the morning. Some number of you know the history of this event, which is a little more than two decades ago at the initiative of Ann Darnancourt, three of the departments in this area, Penn, Temple, and Bryn Maw, were asked to help her think and help the PMA think about how we might stage a graduate symposium that echoed what was done at the Frick and at the National Gallery, but was distinctive to Philadelphia. And so the model that emerged out of that was that, yes, there'd be a keynote speaker and then there'd be a run of excellent graduate student paper programs, but that as opposed to the keynote just delivering his or her masterful talk and then just receding into the audience, that the keynote speaker would actually play a more active role and engage and respond to the graduate student papers the following. In any case, tonight inaugurates a new phase in this, which is that, as you know, it's now at the Barnes. And so we're delighted by this new partnership and we're also delighted by a new twist that has been added as we reimagine what it might be going forward. That in addition to our keynote speaker engaging papers, we're gonna have curators from the Barnes engaging papers as well, so that it's a far more collaborative endeavor and we're excited about what that will be tomorrow. So I hope all of you will be back and I may say something like that again tomorrow morning if we have a fuller crowd, if it's the same people, none of that. In any case, it's my pleasure tonight to introduce our keynote speaker, Jane Blocker, who's a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. Although Jane and I had never met prior to about a half an hour ago, since reading her first book on Anna Mondietta nearly two decades ago, I've been in the process of getting to know a scholar of great integrity, intelligence, and imagination. And I've also learned a great deal about the artists and issues she takes as her subject. Blocker's scholarly contributions are organized not only by their theoretically sophisticated and exacting engagement with the field of contemporary art, but also by their explicit and abiding interest in the politics of art and everyday life. Deeply ethical in its concerns, Blocker's work has earned her a place as one of the leading scholars of her generation, particularly in the field of performance art and performance studies. Having in her first book, redefined and relocated the terms through which we understand the work of the Cuban emigre artist, Anna Mondietta, Blocker expanded that inquiry in her second book, What the Body Cost, Desire, History, and Performance. With a thoroughgoing examination of the disciplinary assumptions and concomitant subject positions constitutive of body or performance art. In turn, Blocker's next book, Seeing Witness, Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony, sought to reimagine the possibilities of witness as both artistic act and ethical position. In her recent book, Becoming Past, History in Contemporary Art, which I just recently had the pleasure of reading, Blocker conjures in close and patient to tail those works and individuals whose structuring techniques and topical concerns variously engage, enact, or embody the sorts of self-reflexive representational strategies she sees as crucial to historical practice in the present. Many theorists of history and memory, many theorists of history, memory, and performance animate her work, but no one is more aligned with her ambitions than the contemporary artist, or at least this is how I read her book, Dario Robletto. History is a prosthetic object and prosthetic project for Blocker, the thing we craft to stand in for all that we have lost. And if there is a touchstone or talisman in her book, it is a fragile little figure, an antique doll, created by a convalescing civil war soldier, self-portrait of an amputee. Robletto takes this ragged civil war relic and performs an act of repair, replacing its missing leg with one fashioned from femur, bone dust, and prosthetic polymer, and then patches its tattered moth-eating uniform with fabric from recent militant red. I've written a fuller account, but I think I shouldn't go on to, I mean, it's a beautiful account of this little doll. In any case, cutting to the end, displaced and replaced, the careful restitution, remediation, repair, and reconstruction of the doll and its surround is critical to the performative process through which past and present come together and distinctions between then and now come undone. It's material and acronyms essential to its historical operations. From this artifact, an emblem or an avatar of history and historical process is born. So I trust that's given you a little sense of the scholar we have before us, and nothing could make me more pleased as we join with the Barnes tonight to inaugurate a new era in Philadelphia's Graduate Symposium in the History of Art to have Jane Bockert here to deliver our keynote. So please join me in welcoming Jane to the Barnes and to Philadelphia. I should tell you that I've been awake since four o'clock this morning. So when people say nice things to me, I might burst into tears. So Lisa didn't know that, but thank you. That was really delightful. Since becoming department chair about a year and a half ago, I've learned one lesson which is that you need to celebrate gratitude. So I have a lot of gratitude here. I'm very, very grateful for Lisa suggesting that I might come. For Martha Lucy who has brought me here. Alia Pombo has made my life so easy and simple and taking good care of me. And there is a whole crew of people back there who are doing amazing things with technology. Evan, Timothy, and Steven. And I have to say that usually when I'm giving a talk, I'm behind something that looks like the cockpit of a 747, but this is one button, which is so great. So I appreciate that. You can repeat whatever I say. I mean, I will tell you exactly. So begins the film version of actress and playwright Anna Devere Smith's one woman show, Twilight Los Angeles, which premiered as a stage play in California in 1993. Keeping with a practice she developed years earlier, Devere Smith assembled the script from among transcribed tape-recorded interviews conducted with over 200 people who witnessed or directly participated in the race riots that took place in Los Angeles in late April of 1992. Both famous and unknown, the role she takes on include Korean shop owners, a talent agent, police officers, jurors, journalists, Senator Bill Bradley, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Cornell West, and former LA chief of police, Darrell Gates. Violence that spring, in which 55 people were killed, thousands injured, and scores of businesses looted and burned, erupted in answer to the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers who had been recorded on videotape beating African-American motorist Rodney King during an arrest in March 1991. Devere Smith memorized exactly the words, intonations, embolalia, and ellipses of 37 of her informants and performed the resulting monologues in a complex production of documentary theater. The actress, a light-skinned African-American woman, wears her dark, straight hair in a tight bun at the nape of her neck, the better to transition from the portrayal of one interviewee to the next. Dressed in a plain white shirt and black pants, which she augments with minimal costume elements, earrings, hats, glasses, jackets, aprons, shirts, ties, or scarves, as each scene in Persona requires, she does not so much attempt to look like her subjects but to sound like them, to capture what she calls their authentic voice and the rhythmic architecture of their speech. The first to testify is Elaine Young, a white real estate agent and victim of botch silicone implant surgery, who wears enormous gilded glasses and speaks through Devere Smith in a matter of fact and sometimes halting manner about her experiences of the riots. She starts by introducing the echoic nature of Devere Smith's practice. You can repeat whatever I say. Indeed, we watch the actress repeat Young's invitation to repeat. When Young's monologue comes to a close, Devere Smith transitions to her next subject, Chicano artist, Rudy Silas. Gone are the earrings and glasses. Devere Smith now wears a white Guaibara shirt and assumes a more masculine posture and angry tone. The actress, as Silas, describes being beaten by the police in 1942 during the Zoot Suit riots and explains with respect to the violence surrounding the riots in 1992. I had a lot of anxieties about my boys. Stephen was at Stanford, came home one weekend to sing with the band. Cop pulled him over, pulled a gun at his head. How do you think a father feels? Stuff that happened to me 50 years ago happening to my sons. Man, they didn't tell me because it would make me sick. It would make me sick. From the start of the performance via her portrayals of Young and Silas, Devere Smith catches the audience in the rhythm of the echo. The racially motivated brutality of 1942 reverberates in 1992 and the sonic force of Silas' words, which he, and in turn his portrayer, repeat for emphasis, hold the listener in a momentary, nauseous, temporal loop. It is the nature of that temporality, enhanced and preserved in recorded video and audio tape, or the specific recursive time of the echo, which is my focus here. So it might be useful to begin with a definition and a few propositions that develop from it. In his study of the appearance of the mythological figure of echo in English literature, John Hollander helpfully reports that echoes are the reflections of sounds from solid surfaces. They are distinguished in acoustical terminology from reverberations generally in reaching the listening ear at least one-fifteenth of a second after the originating sound. Reverberations attending closely upon the source affect us not as repetitions, but rather by prolonging the originating sound or alternating its apparent timbre. Hollander makes clear that, even in its most scientific definition, the echo is a device for measuring time, and thus beckons the wide-ranging metaphors that have sustained its appearance in Western literature for centuries. Merging from Hollander's observation, my first proposal is that the echo is a phenomenon of contemporaneity. One must hear a sound and its repetition in close succession to experience in echo. The sounds are not completely different. It is their sameness that draws our attention, nor are they merely the same, in which case they would be only reverberations, the prolonging or continuation of the original. They are the same and different, separated by enough time to be distinguishable, but not so much time that the original is entirely lost. It might be said that they occur around the same time, which is as good a definition of the contemporary as any other, and yet are sufficiently separated to cause a listener to marvel, to note that a very small amount of time has passed. The two sounds, original and echo, are temporally together, yet apart by at least one-fifteenth of a second. To recognize that an echo has occurred, one must have been on hand to receive the original sound and watch it, with one's ears, travel forward in time. My second proposal follows on the first. What we experience in the echo is the phenomenon of history, specifically contemporary history, the becoming-passness of the recent original sound. As I argued in my last book, and here I echo myself a bit, the contemporary as a category of historical investigation is ontologically in a state of becoming, but never really actually being the past. Contemporariness is, as Giorgio Agamben explains, a singular relationship with one's own time, which adheres to it and at the same time keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Like the echo, which by means of repetition opens up a small gap in time, contemporariness draws together and breaks apart. To recognize oneself in relation to the now, to see and name that now contemporary, we simultaneously make it present and push it into the observable past. We position ourselves in it while standing aloof from it. The contemporariness of the echo is evident in the odd relationship between the original sound and its repetition. The two are adhered in Agamben's terms by disjunction and that they must be heard in close succession, but they must also be heard as distinct. Like the category of the contemporary more broadly, the echo cannot see the events within its purview, the original from the position of its duplicate as past and thus is consigned to a strange twilight to borrow the title of Anadivir Smith's play that never yields tonight. Third, the echo is endemic to the tradition of documentary theater, most famously theorized by early 20th century German playwrights Erwin Piskator and Bertold Brecht, in whose footsteps De Beersmith follows. A form of theater that I argue is inherently contemporary. Piskator theorizes the political possibility for documentary theater, or what Brecht called epic theater, in his memoir, The Political Theater of History, 1914 to 1929. He describes his attempts to author and produce plays during and after the First World War, which would respond directly to revolution and the rise of fascism in Europe. Piskator's method involved having actors perform speeches, legislative sessions, or public debates by key political figures of the period, speeches, sessions, and debates that had been transcribed in newspapers, captured in meeting minutes, or fixed on wax records or film. In addition, like De Beersmith, he incorporated projections of documentary photographs and film clips in his avant-garde multimedia productions, thus assembling, as much as possible, the material realities of the moment. Piskator's play, in spite of everything, which premiered at the grossest Schauspielhaus in Berlin in 1925 and took its name from communist revolutionary Carl Liebneck's famous Manus Festo Trots Aledem, serves as an example of the contemporary native I am attempting to describe. He writes enthusiastically about the vivid, politicizing effects of the show on his audience. Sorry. Oh, yes. Every seat was taken. Steps, aisles, entrances were full to bursting. The living masses were filled from the outset with wild excitement at being there to watch, and you could feel an incredible willing receptivity out in the audience that you only get with the proletariat. But their inner willingness quickly turned into active participation. The masses took over the direction. The people who filled the house had, for the most part, been actively involved in the period, and what we were showing them was, in a true sense, their own fate, their own tragedy being acted out before their eyes. Theater had become reality, and soon it was not a case of the stage confronting the audience, but one big assembly, one big battlefield, one massive demonstration. It was this unity that proved that evening that political theater could be effective agitation. Fiscatory is astonished by the audience's wrapped engagement with the performance and explains that the actors presented the attendees with an echo of their own experiences, repeating for them the contemporary events in which they had been directly involved. In this process, theater had become reality because the members of the audience experienced both the original and its indexical copy, a copy that verifies it and holds it in the present. Although the audiences who attended the various productions of Devere Smith's play in Los Angeles, New York, and New Jersey seem not to have been as actively involved as those who attended Piscatours, the work was originally commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles where it premiered on May 3rd, 1993, specifically to engage audiences who had lived through the crisis. Devere Smith writes, I played Twilight in Los Angeles as a call to the community. I performed it at a time when the community had not yet resolved the problems. I wanted to be a part of their examination of the problems. Dan Bresslauer, in her review of the show for the Los Angeles Times, while critical of what she describes as an emotional distance between the actress and her audience, remarks that Smith's virtuoso performance in which the actress, quote, conveys a world of experience in a single gesture, creates drama in which, quote, we recognize ourselves in strangers' anecdotes. An anonymous theater critic for the Frankfurter Zeitung describes a similar form of recognition he experienced in the main scene of In spite of Everything, which staged a plenary session of the wartime Reichstag where the actors read text from the shorthand minutes of the Reichstag. I happened to have been in Berlin on holiday during that session, the critic explains, and had witnessed it all. The critic goes on to verify the place echoing of events that occurred some eight years prior. Biscuitor's play, he reports, staged the events exactly as they happened. German Chancellor, Beethoven Holweg, he says, was on his feet once more, thanking God for endowing our fields so fruitfully again that year. At the end of the session, the members fought over single bread coupons. The thousands in the theater laugh, shout in contempt, stamp their feet, wave threatening fists. Documentary theater does not present events from the distant past, but the events and experiences of the present. In this sense, it is echoic and contemporary. The audience's enthusiastic participation in Biscuitor's drama is an indication of the still presentness of the events it depicts, the people's experiences still fresh in their memories. Although Beethoven Holweg served as chancellor only until 1917, and despite his having died in 1921, four years before the play's premiere, he remains vivid, or as Biscuitor claims, real. The chancellor, the bread coupons, the political infighting, indeed the war itself, are not yet fully history. But notice also the slight contempt that the reviewer and Biscuitor expressed for the audience, the willing receptivity that you only get with the proletariat. The audience is, to borrow a phrase from contemporary performance artist Matthew Ghoulish, a rabble roused. Their wild excitement helps suspend the disbelief that might otherwise be produced by theater's inherent falsity, the wars having ended, the chancellor's being dead and buried. They are a bit too willing, too receptive, too enthusiastic, too gullible, and ill-mannered with their laughing, shouting, foot stomping, and fist waving. It is precisely this audience for whom Bertrand Brescht, Biscuitor's better-known colleague, invented the Verfremdungs-effect or Estrangement-effect, techniques designed to distance audiences from the absorbing and immersive qualities of theater. And this serves as a useful example of my fourth proposal with regard to the echo. To the degree that echoic temporalities are contemporary and to the extent that such temporalities are associated with particular audiences, those, like the proletariat, that appear in some way intellectually vulnerable, they can engender a suspicion or disdain. Biscuitor's time, that suspicion is symptomatic of commonly held views on the nature of political art and the artist's role in unmasking false ideologies for audiences presumed to be taken in by them. Although Anna Devere-Smith's goals are radically different from those of the epic theater, her project involves, as she describes it, a similar attempt to, quote, get below the surface to get real in a media-dominated world suffused with capitalist ideology that increasingly lacks authenticity. You might think about this in relationship to fake news. Acting, she asserts, is the most unfake thing there is. Acting is a search for the authentic. Certainly, as I have suggested elsewhere, the contemporary is a similarly suspect category within the field of art history. It is guilty by association with market trends and fashions seeming to lack rigor and seriousness and its practitioners, like the grinning knee-slapping masses at Biscuitor's play, are assumed not to be sufficiently distanced from their objects of study, cannot look at the events under their purview, as past, over, and done with. Thus, as a historical category, the contemporary comes to be synonymous with presentism and amnesia. This leads me to the remaining two proposals I want to make with regard to the echo, proposals that, at this stage, constitute not so much a fully formed thesis as a sinking suspicion. I think it would be fair to say that the contemporary is a Janus-faced category identified both with urgency, power, authenticity, and importance, while also being maligned for its supposed false urgency, weakness, superficiality, and banality. I suspect that not everyone has access to the former and that the latter adheres thickly to some subjects, the proletariat, women, queers, people of color, more than others. I want to think about how this might be so by taking a longer look at Anna Devere-Smith's performance and its relation to the videotape beating of Rodney King, the controversial inclusion of that video in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and the subsequent proliferation in contemporary culture of recorded images of black men being beaten, shot, and suffocated. In a contemporary America in which whites consider racism and artifact of the past and consistently express bewilderment at what they consider to be black's unwillingness to let go of it, and where blacks and other minorities such as Rudy Silas are again and again shocked by the repetition, the echoing or contemporaneity of the past in the present, it is clear that very different temporalities are at work. I'm sure that I'm not the first to suggest that the incommensurability of those temporalities is itself a form of racial violence. Therefore, my final proposal is that by virtue of its uncanny redoubling, ghostly lingering, and nauseous temporality, the echo is an acoustic beat or rhythm. There is a form of beating in its beat. In the autumn of 1993, the same year that Anna Devere Smith premiered Twilight, the journal October featured a recorded and transcribed conversation between art historians, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, and Benjamin Buchlo, doctoral candidate Mi-Wan Kwan, and artist Sylvia Kolbowski, about that year's Whitney Biennial. The now infamous exhibition featured an unprecedented number of women and GLBTQ artists and artists of color. It also rather scandalously included George Holiday's amateur videotape, what came to be called the King Tape, of four white policemen beating a black man. Prominent critics such as Arthur Danto, Edward Lucy Smith, Peter Plagians, Hilton Kramer, and Peter Sheldahl describe what they considered to be the shows avert politics and bad art. Plagians, for example, expresses a common complaint by objecting to its political correctness and quota system. But as the concern that viewers might be turned away by the lashes of guilt the show dishes out. Since we're on the subject of the echo, I wanna point out that such comments which express frustration at the shows directing too much attention to matters of race, gender, and class, and claim through ill-chosen metaphors that white audiences are the true victims of racial violence, those lashed with guilt, are very much in line not only with what was said in response to the Rodney King beating in 1991, but also in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Soon after, the New York Times reported on a Pew Research Center poll that showed that the majority of whites in the U.S. believe that there was too much media coverage on race with respect to Ferguson. Titled the Politics of the Signifier, the October article which appeared some months after Plagian's review and the close of the exhibition, identifies a problem within contemporary art as exemplified by the biennial in which artists, curators, and audiences reduce the meaning of artworks to their most obvious political content. The conversation is as argumentative as it is erudite with Benjamin Buchlow attempting to defend some of the work in the show and suggest that his interlocutors think critically about their own privilege in relation to its themes of racial, sexual, and gender discrimination. He is challenged throughout by a skeptical Krause who asserts that the exhibition curators, Thelma Golden and Elizabeth Sussman, do injustice to the work and to the artists by selecting specific pieces solely for their supposed political content and not their aesthetic, former, formal, and material merits. Foster frames the conversation by pointing to what he calls quote, a certain turn away from questions of representation to iconographies of content, a certain turn away from a politics of the signifier to the politics of the signified. Participants offer a variety of perspectives on the issue suggesting that this political tendency results in a neglect of artistic materials and forms, a reactionary privileging of the artist's intention, the wrong-headed assumption that such artists have a special access to the real and most importantly for my purposes that they exhibit a widespread amnesia with regard to the history of art. Another problem Buchlow remarks is political arts radical elimination of the historical dimension, this amnesiac condition in which much of the work operates for the sake of an activist intervention. Here Buchlow sets activist and historical consciousness in dichotomous relations, suggesting that the former brings about the oblivion of the latter. The show's artists in his estimation are unaware of the history of an art of art and have foregone as Quan puts it, art historical concerns. Moreover is their political agitation, their devotion to the problem of their own social, political, economic, and historical exclusion that causes them to forget. How can you claim to construct a historical discourse, he asks, if you do not even have the capacity to reflect on the historic specificity of the field in which you operate? These political artists with politicized identities by virtue of their politics and their identities in their attempts to question the historiographic biases that have excluded them neglect the history of art are oblivious to the traditions of the very field they occupy. Kraus concurs saying that the work, quote, is able to cut free from a competence in the history of the recent past. What she means by that is that the artist seemed to have forgotten that art has moved past the moment in which it served merely as an illustration subjugated to the word or message. I don't know that that historical dimension, which is to say a historiographic consciousness is really an issue for these artists. The fact that modernism fought a battle to liberate images from slavery to text, that is the signifier from the signified, to a totally instrumental illustrative task doesn't seem to occur to this generation. Deploying another unfortunate racialized metaphor, she asserts that young artists today, though they are presumably aware of the histories of gender and race discrimination against people, are oblivious to the arguably more important history of arts enslavement by and liberation from political instrumentalism. Now I should interject here and say that these metaphors are not unique to Kraus and Plagians. I see them as a symptom of white people's anxieties about the subject of race and I'm as prone to them as anyone else. Juan later interjects to explain the root of the problem and point out another of the exhibition's erroneous assumptions. If there is an amnesia, this is ironic because many artists want to rewrite histories to resurrect histories that have been erased. Perhaps the amnesia is specific to art history and perhaps this links up with what I think is a return to primitivist tendencies. Let's say that many of these artists have foregone art historical concerns, that they are more interested in social and political issues. Are we then to believe that their work is more connected to those realities? Here, Juan notes the interesting algebraic equation at work in assumptions about minoritarian artists. If political artworks are engaged in exposing contemporary realities, they exclude historical consciousness. Therefore, a lack of historical knowledge equals a set of discursive claims on the category of the contemporary real. Juan's concerns are twofold. First, that the disenfranchised artist and her politically minded art might wrongly be understood to have more immediate access to political realities than others. And second, that her presumed greater proximity to the real means that such an artist is thought to have more to say about the present, about contemporary experience and contemporary naity. She and I are in agreement about this, save for one niggling difference. She assumes that the political artist benefits from the presumption of his intimacy with the contemporary, whereas I worry that he is tarred and feathered with it. My view, despite the art market's obsession with the newness contemporariness of its products, in most other respects, the contemporary is a suspect category that attaches itself to subjects whose identities are marked a priori as political. My suspicions are confirmed by Krauss when she discusses what she considers to be the biennial curator's misinterpretation of a 1992 work by Lorna Simpson called Hypothetical, which consisted of a floor-to-ceiling wall-mounted grid of mouthpieces from various brass instruments. Facing the grid on the opposite wall was a rectangular black-and-white photograph, a close-up and tightly cropped image of the closed lips and chin of an African-American woman. Next to the piece was hung a small newspaper clipping from the New York Times under a plexiglass frame inscribed with the word hypothetical in red letters. The small piece of newsprint, imprecisely cut with scissors, included a now famous quote by Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, in response to the announcement of the police officer's acquittal. Asked whether he would now be afraid to be a black man in Los Angeles if he were not the mayor, Mr. Bradley paused, then said, No, I would not be scared. I would be angry. In addition, an audio recording of human breathing filled the space. With respect to the newspaper clipping, Krauss responds, I thought that was irrelevant to the piece and not particularly interesting. The beauty of the piece, the variety of the assembled objects, their minimalist geometric arrangement, the grid being a subject about which she has written a great deal, captivates Krauss. The bit of newspaper, the emblem of the contemporary, the new, the now, framed and hanging nearby is for her uninteresting and irrelevant. For Krauss, this bit of daily life on which Thelma Golden in her catalog essay for the exhibition focuses and upon which she bases her interpretation contaminates the work of art. How might we understand what Krauss calls a competence in the history of the past, a competence in the history of the contemporary? I've written elsewhere about the vexing problem that the contemporary presents for history, the ways in which it occupies an untenable temporal condition, never fully present, never fully past. The contemporary is always in the process of becoming. Yet the discussants talk about the history of the recent past as singular and monolithic, as over and done with, as though the facts of the history of minimalism, conceptualism, the grid and the monochrome were settled and as though the history of the recent past included only those forces. I'm interested in the October round table not only because of its ostensible subject, the 93 biennial, not only because of its illustrious participants, not only because one of those participants, Mi-Wan Kwan, was still a graduate school at the time, a fact that seems relevant in the context of a graduate student conference, but also because it is a conversation about the problem of the contemporary which was recorded on audio tape and then transcribed. It strikes me that the decision to assemble for and record a discussion on a topic of the day is inherently marked as contemporary in precisely the way that the newspaper clipping which records an exchange between a journalist and the mayor of Los Angeles attempted to mark Lorna Sips's work. Deploying the conversational mode where participants interrupt each other, respond and sentence fragments indicates the newness of the interaction, the immediacy of the topic, the realness of what is being said. As Foster remarks when introducing the discussion, the editors of October have decided to begin a series of round tables in order to explore some of the problems that appear to confront art, theory and politics with a special urgency in the country today. Here Foster names the discussion and his participants as contemporary and urgent. And the written transcription of their conversation attempts to convey that nowness with script-like format in which the speakers are identified by their surnames followed by a colon and what is presumably an accurate transcription of what they said, including direct questions to the other speakers, interruptions and ellipses. By studying what the participants say and the mechanical means by which they say it, we can see the contradictory deployments of the concept of the contemporary through which it is by turns a weakness and a self-evident strength. The politicized artists featured in the Whitney Biennial, an exhibition meant to survey current tendencies in the art world, attached themselves too readily to the urgent issues of the day, the king beating the trial in its verdict, abjuring their obligations to art's history. They succumb to the dangers of the contemporary, its amnesia, its passing fashions, political art, its misguided idealism, a biennial that attempts to represent true racial, sexual and gender diversity, its neglect of what endures in art and inclusion of elements that are, to quote Krauss, not particularly interesting. Presumably non-politicized or more correctly politicized panelists by contrast attempt to lay hold of the vexing and urgent politics of their day. It is they who speak authoritatively about and assert their competence in the history of the recent past. Both asset and liability, my question is why the Appalachian Contemporary impunes these artists in this exhibition while at the same time affirming the worth of the October group's conversation. It may simply be that they are just artists and this is just the Whitney Biennial, two objects of common ridicule in American life. But I argue that because these particular artists and this particular biennial were the object of special critique by critics and historians, there is something else at work here. I return to Agamben who, in his essay on the topic, interestingly enough asserts that there is a category of the true contemporary, suggesting that it is a status that individuals attain through special insight rather than something with which they are endowed simply by being alive in the most current moment. Those who are truly contemporary, he remarks, who truly belong to their time are not those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves with its demands. But precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time. He goes on, those who coincide too well with the epic, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it, they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it. So who are these people who coincide too well or who are bound to their own time? Those who cannot see it because they are too close to it. As those, I argue, who are caught in echoic temporalities, the nauseous loop that deprives African American subjects from gaining an appropriate distance on the past because by recurring, repeating, it refuses to stay past. Despite Pledgein's references to lashes and crosses to enslavement, the violence inherent in the contradictions of the contemporary is perhaps most startlingly revealed in Arthur Danto's review of the Biennial Exhibition. He focuses more directly than his October colleagues on the amateur videotape, the inclusion of which from his perspective serve the purpose of demonstrating that there are in fact limits to what had seemed to be the infinitely elastic category of contemporary art. Now, he says in a conversational gesture, the king tape certainly demonstrated the power of images and at the same time, the limits of art. For no work of art in recent times or perhaps anytime has had a fraction of the impact upon society that the king tape has had upon ours. The broken storefront, the burning city, the many dead, to paraphrase the eights, all unleashed not so much by an act of police violence as by the fact that it was recorded and shown. The images had the effect in part because they were not art, because they were the flat and uninflected effect of reality mechanically registered on videotape. It was the zero degree of visual and moral truth the world beheld. Were it to occur to someone that art might have something to do with it, the effect of the tape would be diminished. Indeed, nothing can or should make a work of art out of that tape. About the tape itself, there is nothing to say. Ganto accomplishes a couple of important things here. First, he dismisses the tape status as art by virtue of the fact that it was mechanically produced, simply registered on videotape rather than having been designed to be an artwork by the person holding the camera, George Holliday, a man who happened to live in an apartment complex right near where Rodney King and the police officers chasing him stopped. For Danto, the tape may have been disturbing and awful, but it was flat and uninflected reality and thus was decidedly not art. Second, he implies that the exhibition curators were in some way trying to assert art's urgent social and political influence by associating the works in the exhibition with this impactful tape and what it has unleashed. About the political importance of their own work, that is to say, the contemporaneity of their own work, the artists in the exhibition and by extension the curators are diluted. 12 years later, in a 2005 article for Art Journal that takes a retrospective look on the exhibition and the furor surrounding it, curator Elizabeth Sussman turns the tables using Peter Plagin's caustic review in Newsweek as an example of the ways in which it was the critics rather than the artists who failed to grasp the show's contemporaneity. Whatever his complaints were about the biennial, she remarks, it continues to interest me that Plagin's never imagined or connected that what was going on in the galleries of the Whitney or even the remotest relationship to the world reported in the pages of the magazine that precede his review. Just as Rosalind Krauss disregards the newspaper clipping in Lorna Simpson's work, hypothetical, so too Plagin's turns a blind eye to the very contemporaneity to which the magazine for which he writes is dedicated. Though he writes for Newsweek, Sussman suggests he fails to coincide with his own time, fails to have what Krauss calls competence in the history of the contemporary. Banto and Sussman, though representing opposite views on the 1993 Whitney Biennial, approached their critiques from the same direction employing a Gambin's category of the truly contemporary to cast doubt on those with whom they disagree. I would like to suggest that admission into the truly contemporary is prohibited to subjects who cannot gain distance. Those who are incapable of grasping their own time, despite being perfectly tied to it in every respect. Subjects I have in mind are those for whom the tether to the Rodney King beating cannot be broken. Those who cannot gain a distance from it because they are caught in its ongoing reverberations in subsequent police attacks on black men. Amadou Diallo, Manuel Loggins Jr., Ronald Madison, Sean Bell, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile. It is Arthur Danto who has, albeit inadvertently led me to this conclusion. Danto ends his review by saying that metaphorically at least he and all his friends have felt beaten by the show. As if we have been batoned by the art force caught up in a moralizing rampage. Setting aside to the degree that we're able, the breathtaking hyperbole of a white man comparing his experience of attending an art exhibition to the actual vicious beating of a black man, I want to pause for a moment and think about the repetition implied by those metaphorical and real blows. The way in which their sound echoes from the pages of Danto's text. Where it is the way that he and other commentators on the show position it within the terms of a repetitive temporality that pricks my ear. By deploying this metaphor, he creates a compelling image of the exhibition haranguing him, repeating again and again its critique of white privilege through works that are strident in advancing their messages and in form are noisy, disheveled, disordered, menacing and arrogant to the point that an injustice is done to many of the works whose originality, integrity and coherence are drowned out by the surrounding visual clatter. The arrangement of his own words, however, this litany of adjectives echoes from the page with a measured rhythm that strikes the ear forcefully. At the same time that he characterizes the art produced by minoritarian subjects as clattering and strident, like a reflexive crying out, his words methodically rationally beat. While clothing himself in the guise of victim, Danto meets out his own violence against artists whose works he characterizes, like the police portrayal of Rodney King himself as noisy, disordered, menacing, so loud that they drown out everything else. Such sonic metaphors are a bit startling in the context of the Rodney King case because the sound that Holiday recorded on the tape seems to have been adumbrated by the disturbing visual imagery. While virtually everyone in the United States saw the video of King being beaten, again and again on news reports, very few heard him. In the first trial of the four white police officers, the venue of which was changed to the predominantly white suburb of Seamy Valley, King was not called on to testify, nor were the two passengers who were in the car with him on the night of the confrontation. Both the prosecution and the defense showed Holiday's video in slow motion, analyzing it frame by frame and thus reduced the sonic record of the beating and made it mute. And literary scholar Houston Baker, noting the disjunction between seeing and hearing in this case, writes, we thus wait in vain for something which a hearing of Rodney King in all the reverberant energies and echolalic resonances of times and scenes of violence gone by will never produce. That something is, of course, a scene truly heard. It's quite the ways in which this incident echoes former episodes of violence, the zootsuit and Watts riots, for example, such reverberations fall on deaf ears. Baker's call for a true hearing aligns strongly with Devere Smith's theatrical project. When she remarks in her memoir that she decided to go around the country, quote, and listen, listen, listen to Americans, and that quote, in order to develop a voice she needed to develop an ear, she recalls the character of Echo from Avid's Metamorphosis, who was cursed so that she could only speak by hearing. This work of listening in her research interviews for Twilight, she hears two different stories about hearing Rodney King. When I interviewed Rodney King's aunt, she burst into tears as she recounted seeing the beating on television and hearing him holler. She heard King's cries the first time she saw the tape. Yet a juror in the Federal Civil Rights Trial against the officers who also heard King's reaction to the police blows told me that the rest of the jury had difficulty hearing what she and the King's aunt had heard, but when, during deliberations, they focused on the audio rather than the video image, their perspectives changed. The physical image of Rodney King had to be taken away for them to agree that he was in pain and responding to the beating. The visuality of the videotape with its images of a black man fills the viewer's consciousness so fully that the sound of his cries falls away, leaving only the visual rhythm of kicks and baton strikes. Devere Smith performs this in two segments of Twilight, one where she takes on the persona of Sergeant Charles Duke, who I showed you in the image a couple of slides ago, who was the defense's expert witness on police tactics at the first trial, and one where she portrays Angela King, Rodney's aunt. As the actress gives voice to the transcribed interview with Duke, she describes the upper body control hold and explains why the police needed to hit King 56 times in order to subdue him. Then she mimics Duke's visual demonstration of the use of the baton, a silent, dispassionate pantomime performance in which the weapon is all the more menacing because it does not sound. As a companion to Duke's stoic demonstration, Angela King describes the moment when she saw the video shown on the news and recognized the man being beaten as her nephew. Regardless, you can call it revenge or whatever, but what I saw in that video, on that TV, that was a mess, and I just turned him holler, that's what got me a while ago, and then they say, motorist, and then I look and saw that white car, and then I saw him out on the ground. Rodney King's aunt hears the cry of her nephew but seeks visual confirmation of the truth of his identity of the awful scene to which she listens in disbelief. The problem of our hearing or not hearing Rodney King, the widespread perception that a man's screaming and pain is silent, demonstrates the asymmetrical relation between that which succumbs to rationality and that which does not, that which we can narrate as having taken place in the past and that which seems never to end. Lorna Simpson's grid of mouthpieces reads to me as a commentary on that asymmetry and that infinitude. Rosalind Krauss singles out Simpson's hypothetical for special attention when in the round table she explains that in looking at the work, I didn't get to fear and anger, I was thinking about form, about why those mouthpieces were in a grid, why the body was deprived of its matrix, the lips excised. I was thinking about what I was being shown visually. Krauss objects to what she sees as Thelma Golden's reductive reading of the piece for the exhibition catalog in which, quote, she presents us with one meaning of the piece. It's the wall of Jericho. Black rage is going to well up and the wall will be shattered, unquote. While I agree with Krauss that this is one of the work's most obvious illusions, I should point out that nowhere in her essay does Golden mention the wall of Jericho. Instead, she remarks, filling the room is the sound of a modulating breath that links the lips to the mouthpieces, the indication of the sound before the fury. Rather than pursue either the biblical or Shakespearean readings of the work, I want to conclude by following Krauss's insistence on form and see where that takes us instead. In her important essay, the originality of the avant-garde, a post-modern repetition which was published more than a decade before the October roundtable, Krauss describes what she terms the structural properties of the grid. One of these, she explains, is the grid's imperviousness to language. The grid promotes this silence, expressing it moreover as a refusal of speech. This structure, impervious both to time and to incident, will not permit the projection of language into the domain of the visual and the result is silence. For Krauss, the grid is by its very nature silent and thus it is supremely visual, gloriously formal, liberated from the text. The closed lips, the mute horns of Simpson's grid seem to affirm that postulate and yet I would argue that they do resound precisely because they cannot narrate, cannot historicize what occurred in Los Angeles. To do so would be to place a false distance and erroneous passness on something that remains contemporary, something that by virtue of its loud, echoic repetition never ends. From this perspective, we can read Krauss's axiom as describing a form of racial violence. Structurally, logically, axiomatically, the grid can only be repeated. Thank you very much. Oh, I think I'm meant to. I'm happy to entertain questions. I was told beforehand though that there are microphones that you must speak in. Okay, it's a good thing I wasn't whispering to anyone during the talk. So I'm made to think of several things in listening to your, and just as a side note, the controversy that has just bubbled up over what it means for a white artist to have depicted. In thinking about Krauss and the grid, echo and in some sense recuperate junctiveness and found and echo. I'm made to think of Krauss and narcissism and what that kind of other echo from classical antiquity has given accounts of 20th century. So if in that moment that Piscator is writing and thinking about theater, so too is Joan Riviere thinking about masquerade and something about female identity and putting something at a kind of distance from oneself. And that gets picked up by feminist film theorists in the 70s, Marianne Done and others who are thinking about the problem of a kind of narcissistic too close and what it means to produce a kind of, the necessity of producing a kind of gap whether in relation to the image and what we see or in relation to self. So this is to ask a question about what it means in some sense to move from narcissists to echo. Now not echo as the literal echo, but echo as the classical echo. And if you can take on more of Krauss and if video was the aesthetics of narcissism and is there a way that taking on Krauss in October and in all of its silences, if you'd like to play a little more, not just with echo, but with narcissism or narcissism if that's a reasonable, your thought, your talk was really suggestive and wonderful and that's something of a question in response to it. Yeah, no, it's a brilliant suggestion and one that I hadn't really thought of that much. The work that I've been reading most about this is John Mowat's book. She has a, it's sort of a book about sound studies and Pistamont and in his chapter on echo he talks about that relation and so does Hollander discuss that as well. So I'm not prepared at this particular moment to speak very eloquently about Rosalind Krauss's take on narcissism and video art, but it strikes me that with John Riviere and the idea of womanliness as masquerade it's sort of a similar problem to the echo in that there is a repetition of the self, a kind of endless series of masquerades that are not the real, which is John Mowat's discussion about the echo in relationship to the original. So we have this idea that there's original true sound that gets replayed and that those are not the original, but he questions that idea and talks about the ways in which the echo dramatically alters our epistemological expectations about original and copy. So I think there's a similar thing in John Riviere too that the woman is weirdly, her identity is this copying. There is no other thing, there is no truth, there is no origin. And so I think that's an illustration of the ways in which certain subjects have a different relationship to the kind of temporalities that are involved both in narcissism and in the echo than others. There's sort of this assumption that the woman can't get distance on it in the same way that the artist in the show can't quite manage to see what's happening then as something that will become past for them. So, but I'm gonna go home immediately and look at this. So it tell me what you're thinking. Yeah. To the extent that you began with Devere Smith and have put that performance further into. Anyway, I think it would be really interesting and complicated because Anna Devere Smith does do things that are visual to sort of suggest that she's performing someone, but it really for her is all about sound and sounding like people. And I'm not quite sure what to do with that aspect of her work. She fervently believes that people reveal the truth of themselves in their speech, in their patterns of speech. In her memoir, she talks a lot about the idea of the troche, the sort of the reversal of the iambic foot. So where you put the emphasis on the wrong word and so she believes that she, so she's looking for trochees in speech because she feels like that's a place where the true self comes through. There's a funny story that she tells about telling this whole thing to Hayden White. And she says something like, he looked at me the way someone looks at a child who believes in Santa Claus. Like, you know, she really believes that there's some kind of true self that comes through in speech but doesn't really put a lot of emphasis in the visual and in fact, the visual aspects of her performances and certainly the filmed versions of the performances that she's done are the least interesting to me. But yes, I'm going home and doing that right now. This is a brilliant suggestion. But I think one of the chief, primarily visual, many respects arguing for an escape from the kind of this visual emphasis which I think is very compelling, particularly in terms of the Dana Schutz situation at the Whitney but also in terms of like Carrie Walker's really crazy show in Missouri and these moments of trying to kind of engage in the historic, engage in the contemporary by way of these historical appropriations that are themselves caught up in this echo. Your work, which I also your paper I thought was beautiful and important, also made me think of Stephen Reich's piece, Come Out. I don't know if you, do you know it? I don't, I don't know if you know it. So this is a piece that he did in 1965 and it was for a number of African American young men who had been arrested, I believe in New York and they had been beaten by the police and there was a benefit held for their legal fund and he took a transcript of one of the men who had been beaten where the guy is describing how they had to actually make their wounds worse in order to attract enough attention for them to get medical assistance when they were incarcerated and it was the phrase, poke it to make the bruise blood come out and he just took that statement and then looped it and then phased it so that it ends up becoming both an echo but then a rapid link. It does interesting things in terms of duration itself so that it's an echo but you kind of experiencing the echo through time in a way and I'm trying to figure out where that stands on the, is this useful, what is that a useful deployment of the echo or is that somehow complicit and I don't, now that you, now that I know that you don't know the work I think it's unfair to ask. I don't know but I'm going home right away with you. It lasts about 10 minutes and it's extraordinary but I'm just what are your thoughts about sort of evaluating, is this a criterion by which we judge works of art as successful or complicit or? Well, two things. First I want to say that what's interesting about the mythological story of echo is that echo is also a mirror for Narcissus so echo repeats what Narcissus says so just as you imagine sort of the ripples of the pool that he's staring into going outward, the echo is so in love with him but can only repeat what he says and from an Indra Smith perspective it is this reflection of him or this embodiment of him so I think there's a kind of sonic mirroring there that is maybe somewhat neglected in that story that try to position the visual and the sonic in opposition to each other and it may be just that I'm an art historian but I've been doing a lot of reading in sound studies which is really interesting but it seems like every book on sound studies and every scholar that works in it begins from the premise of we've just been succumbed to too much visuality and visuality is bad and that's not really, I think that they're not as opposed or dichotomous or separate as maybe we tend to think of them and then into your other question about Stephen Reichwerk, I don't know it but I am sort of interested in the question of time and temporalities and how it affects different people differently and different subjects have engagements with it that are just different so part of it has to do with his subjectivity in relationship to the testimony of other people and what he's doing with their testimony but it's also sort of how we come to it as listeners of it and whether it, how we see it temporally and I think that may be endemic to us as hearers of it in a way that's more interesting for me than Reich's relationship to it. Yeah, I'm not sure. That was a really long way to get to, I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah, no, but yes. I'm, that's second on my list after Lisa's. I'm a musician so I'm approaching this from a different perspective so I apologize for any lack of knowledge. I should tell you before you start that I I sort of align myself with Marge Simpson when she says music is none of my business. You may proceed with caution. Two questions. First, with regard to the Whitney Biennial and the Rodney King video, I can't help but think of Carl Hynes Stockhausen's reaction to 9-11 as calling it the greatest work of art ever made and the question is where does art history and history, where do you delineate that and is it only pulled in because you have someone who's signified as an artist participating in it? Second question, the piece with the mouthpieces. What struck me about that was not necessarily the matrix but the idea that you're triply, dimensionally removed from making any sound because you have a mouthpiece disassociated from an instrument, you have the space between the lips and the, which would normally make sound on the mouthpiece and then also the fact that it's an image of a pair of lips, not actually lips. So I would love to hear your thoughts about that too. Yes, there is definitely like a kind of deafening silence I would say about that work and I think looking, what's interesting is looking at it through Krause's writing on the grid and this idea of infinite repetition. I start hearing it more in a certain way than if I were just to approach it as it's a wall, it's the wall of Jericho or it's the sound of the fury depending on your metaphor. I think it was through her interpretation of the grid as silent that actually made it resound for me as a viewer in a way that other kinds of things hadn't. But there is a lot of tension in that space of the lips being absolutely dichotomously or related to the grid and in conversation and yet seems like a kind of sort of horrible constraint and the excising of the mouth. There seems to be a kind of violence there as well of cutting that out and it's unframed this photograph. So I think all of that is at work in the piece. The larger question of what constitutes art or not is more of a question for Arthur Danto I think than me. But I think it's interesting, I guess the places where I'm interested in that question are the same places where I'm interested in the question of contemporaneity, not so much to determine an answer to that, like is it art or isn't it? But to look at the politics that line up on either side of that and who gets to say what about it is more of an interesting question for me than determining whether it is or not. I mean, for the curators of the 93 biennial, the king tape sort of fit well with lots of other kind of guerrilla video that was being taken at the time and documenting various kinds of political events. So it wasn't, if you read the catalog and the sections that are on the video works that are also shown in that exhibition, there isn't a huge difference between, I don't know, the work of Julie Dash for example and George Holliday and they're not so concerned with intention and so I guess the point I'm trying to make slowly and very badly is that that is an interesting question for me solely in relationship to the question of who gets to say and the criteria that are deployed around it. I'm not really interested in saying it is or isn't or it belonged or it didn't belong. I think it's kind of an interesting thing that they put that in there and also the ways in which that show has been largely redeemed over time. Some of the most important contemporary artists were in that show and some of the most beautiful and interesting works were in that show and so many years on it looks completely different. So my suspicion about the contemporary, she can't really say much that will stay in place about it so that's kind of an evasive answer that's where I am, yeah. Well it's not about hearing, it's that they're recording you. So that's the other interesting thing is we're all being recorded right now so. Okay, thanks very much for an excellent and quite moving talk and I'm interested actually in this, the empathetically moving parts of it because as many people have brought up the issue of data shoots and the Whitney Biennial and you made reference to the concept of access to experience as being part of contemporary naity, I'm gonna ask you to be a little self-reflexive here in regard to the subjects that you address and do you feel that you have maybe potentially similar conflicts that have been directed against data shoots for addressing the subjects that she addresses? I'm not sure I get your, you're asking me to reflect on my own relationship. In other words, in regard to what's going on with the Whitney Biennial at this point people are challenging data shoots's ability to access these types of subjects in a genuinely empathetic way and I'm wondering whether you feel any personal feelings in regard to addressing certain types of subjects as the ones you addressed tonight? Sure, well I think I would describe it as a kind of schizophrenia that by virtue of being an art historian and having degrees after my name and things like that, there's a way in which I have the privilege of looking at art and talking about it and demonstrating my competence in the recent past but at the same time as a woman I'm always kind of concerned about the ways in which certain forms of contemporary art history are delegitimated or the ways in which different temporalities are not accounted for. In the book that Lisa was talking about one of the arguments I make there is that there's a common complaint that we can't really do contemporary art history and my argument there is well we can't really do it in the way that it has traditionally that history is done for other kinds of fields and we need to kind of imagine new approaches and new attitudes toward it. So I think I'm often in my writing trying to balance between sort of the empathetic, poetic kind of engagement with a thing which seems wrong in some ways and from some perspectives being too close, being too much a part of a thing and stepping too far back and acting as though it doesn't impact me and I don't think it's really a possibility to find a solution to that problem. I'm a white person living in a racist society and there's not a place for me to stand where it's safe really in terms of my not being implicated in things like that. The current controversy I don't really have a good answer for that either I think I'm persuaded in some ways by the ways in which some of the critics of that work are concerned about the ways in which the artist might profit by it, the ways in which it becomes a commodity within the global art market and that is I think concerning but it is a question like who gets to say, who gets to write about or say things about things that they don't experience and my first book was on a Latina artist and there were lots of people that I spoke to about her and when I was doing research she thought I should have nothing to say about this artist and that's a problem for me in a variety of ways like I don't wanna take a position that I really have no right to and yet at the time that I was working on her there just wasn't very much written and I felt like a tension needed to be paid and that she was a really interesting artist and that I was sort of interested in approaching her from the question of being a woman artist primarily so I don't know, to this day I don't know if that was a right thing for me to have done to have written a book about a Latina artist as my first thing but it was sort of like naive today or something but so I still haven't come down on an answer to that and I think as I said before there's not, my experience with contemporary art suggests there's not like a stable place to stand with any of these things so. Thank you for a wonderful talk. Well if it's incorrect for you as someone who's not a Latina to write about a Latina artist then everything that I've done my entire life as an art historian would be false and I think that the notion that only someone who's Chinese can know about Chinese art and speak about Chinese art knowledgeably I mean I just think it's absolutely ridiculous. Yeah, yeah I mean it is a concern because there's a sort of an essentializing thing there right it says well only a Chinese person can understand this work only a woman can understand this work only a Latina can understand this work so I'm not in support of that notion at all but at the same time I feel like I come to the works that I talk about with certain privileges and certain relationships to temporality that's another kind of writer another kind of voice wouldn't have and I think all I can try to do is to be conscious of that but when I look back on my writing you know there's certain things that I just cringe like oh man what were you thinking you know so part of it is like getting out of it and looking back to see the places where there's a presumption that shouldn't have happened but you know it's a. My question has to do with what I found really fascinating about your discussion about time, time duration and I guess part of what maybe you didn't address but was in the back of my head was also institutions and particularly the Whitney as an institution and the Biennial is a time-based phenomenon of periodicity and its own echoes and how that institution and the time that it's marking how that might factor into some of the and for me it came up in part in relation to this issue of authority and particularly the critics who were gathered around the round table that you were describing and their own relationship to the Biennial and that recurring right of time and their notion of history as you were speaking I was thinking of whether their notion of history is in some way a kind of echo that they're seeking that they want to hear this echo right and that the artist that you were discussing refused to echo or we're not part of an iteration so I hadn't you know no way of echoing it and if part of what the Whitney kind of and that its periodicity and its recurrence if part of what that allows us to kind of see is that a kind of moment of cacophony in a way multiple voices that are not in the same sequence that are not speaking with one kind of reverberating out and another just beginning its echo right and if it's possible then to see the Whitney is really playing an important role in your structuring of time and voices and maybe bringing those two different bringing those two different sets of voices into a true relationship in some way. Yeah the way I entered into this paper was really through the Annette Devere Smith thing but then it really you know I was reading all this stuff around the biennial because of the display of the holiday tape and so I didn't really incorporate it here any contemplation about the biennial itself as a temporal kind of occurrence and what's interesting to me about it is that it is contemporaneity personified right it's the whole idea of it is what we're taking the current temperature of American art and this is what it looks like this is a picture of what it looks like today and as a result of that the biennial is the show that everyone loves to hate right it's the thing that everyone wants to critique and say how bad it is and certainly the critics in this instance are looking at it as faulted precisely because it is about the contemporary and isn't really historically engaged in just you know taking whatever fashion happens to be in the winds at the moment and I think that's you know an interesting premise to have a show and yet there's a way in which the Whitney also is trying to historicize the contemporary and to put it into kind of see it and be truly contemporary because you can categorize it as such so it's sort of a fraught project I think from the outset but yeah I think that maybe there's more to expand on in that particular topic of the show itself as keeping time and just as a different illustration not a minoritarian necessarily illustration of different temporalities is you know as I age like it seems like there's always the Whitney like there's no gap between it it's just like whoa it's back you know it's just like oh it's always happening so my sense of time has really changed since I was all of your age maybe it will happen to you too I don't know.