Yale Panel:

Powerful
Art and
Power
Essays by
Jessica Stockholder
Ann Lauterbach
Rochelle Feinstein
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Jessica Stockholder
Powerful Art and Power
1 June 2006

What follows is a meandering through some clouds of thought explor-

ing how art can be understood as powerful, and how power can be
the subject of art. I hope to open up some room for discussion and to
be provocative.

Some of the more interesting contemporary art criticism has grown

from Marxist thought where attempts to articulate art’s meaning tie it
to a discussion of production, economy, and sociopolitical power
structure. Though this line of thinking is compelling, and strikes to the
core of something essential to art making, it was also a shadow that I
grew up under. It assumes that art’s value lies in its challenge to the
establishment, and that in this effort art is always co-opted by the
reigning political and economic powers. This was, and is, a very glum
vision of art’s function placing it in a position of constant failure.
Raised as a red diaper baby my eyes are wide open to the serious
flaws inherent in our capitalist structure. Our health, personal, eco-
nomic and political, depends on maintaining room for the expression
of dissension and eccentricity. I value the role that art plays creating
friction, agitating, questioning and challenging the systems we live
with. But, while it is true that art is always in the end complicit with the
various powers that support its infrastructure, and that this complic-
ity is part and parcel of its meaning, I don’t believe that it therefore
fails. Good art has power before and after it is co-opted — both as a
current lived activity and as history to be looked back at.
As so much art criticism has been tightly wrapped up with this
Marxist view, it has become taboo to express desire for, intense inter-
est in, and pleasure in power and its complex social expression. Power
understood as “bad” is commonly assumed to be in the hands of the
patrons and administrators of the art world, many of whom love and
nurture what we as artists do. I am sure it is possible to find more com-
plex ways to discuss the success and failure of art objects.
In addition to being ascribed to the different sides in an argument,
or to opposing poles of political and economic controversy, power is
pervasive and essential to living. One has to execute power to stay
alive and creative endeavors flow from that necessity.
All of the hustle and bustle, theater, posturing, reporting, frenzied
buying, socializing, and general exuberance attending art is testament
to its dynamic and ever changing functioning!
In addition to unseating the powers that be in order to make suc-
cessful art, it has also often been described as necessary for each artist
to unseat his or her historical precedents. The narrative of art history
describes success in terms of opposition and rejection. This way of
valuing success is ironically in line with capitalist economy that
demands constant change and newness. If we were to more highly
value today’s art, at this moment, as a vital part of the present, it might
be possible to generate a richer dialogue around our relation to history.
I am speaking from a position of power. Teaching at Yale and hav-
ing garnered some success, both I, and my work, are part and parcel of
a power structure. It would not be difficult to dismiss my arguments for
more space in the dialogue as a self-serving effort to make sense of my
own place in the edifice. But my involvement in the convoluted, twist-
ing and turning manifestations of the myriad different interests and
powers that meet in and are represented here in the art world, in addi-
tion to raising questions and ire, is also fertile, invigorating, and con-
stantly challenging.

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 In my own work I provide circumstances for powerful private expe-
rience and for spectacle. I am obsessed with how the self alone, and
the self understood as part of a group bump up against each other; and
how both experiences of self can be empowering. At different
moments my work can impress one with the power of the maker, the
power of the institution exhibiting the work, or the power of the collec-
tive of viewers that contribute meaning to the event of exhibition.
That visual art often engenders pleasure is significant. I am sure
that understanding the sources of, and reasons for pleasure are linked
to power, and I am happy to revel in exploring how this might be so. I
have found Dave Hicky and Carol Gilligan very useful as points of refer-
ence here.
I work with many students who as a result of their wish to be criti-
cal of, or unaligned with, the various power structures that support the
art world make work that is itself without visual, formal or affective
power. This seems a little painful to me though I can empathize. And I
watch others who having discovered buttons for creating spectacle
make work that is lapped up so quickly by the powers that grease the
machine that they seem to be swept off their feet. The present inten-
sity of focus on graduate student work can make it challenging to hold
onto rich and varied expressions of value and power.
Power, itself neither good nor bad, can be used to various ends. It is
not necessarily distributed fairly and it is not always earned. Perhaps
given our democratic ideals and mythology it is difficult for us to toler-
ate the inequities inherent in the distribution of power, and it is conse-
quently taboo to meander through the thicket of desire meeting power.
Nevertheless, that art objects can engender deep experience and
affect, and are perhaps even effective in the world must have some-
thing to do with how they tap into the complexity of power relations of
all sorts.
That we like artworks to have power over us and that it feels good to
be overcome might be related to religious experience or to twelve step
programs that urge us to accept and take comfort in our relative pow-
erlessness. Some art insists that there is a greater power. And some
insists that we have power over our circumstances.

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 The question of gender relations is laced with questions of power. It
is relatively uncomplicated to assert that men and women make art;
and many of us can agree that there are power inequities between
men and women. The relative difference in the success of men and
women in the art world is both an unfortunate fact and the subject of
much art. It is more complicated to try and understand any single indi-
viduals relationship to these facts, and how we are all party to this
power inequity. It is also important to say that there are, and have
been, many powerful women, and that there are many women who
make great and powerful art.
I would like to put my foot in it and explore this question a little in
terms of form — I pose two sets of formal qualities:
The first: stiff, upright, hard, industrial, geometric and big.
The second: soft, round, flexible, organic, earth bound, and small.
It is easy to tie the first set of qualities to men and the second to
women. That said, it is patently absurd to fix the meaning of any form
to either gender. Efforts in this direction quickly disintegrate. There
are, however, undeniable strands of meaning that weave through
these facts of our experience. Our shared forms of communication,
physical, visual, and verbal, use metaphor and grow from the facts of
our bodies. How these forms are assigned status and power socially,
economically, and politically is something that is constantly reinvented
alongside life’s givens. Art and design are party to this invention.
And there is the fact of war during which physical power is asserted
over others and power is attained through force and subjugation. And
economic power is achieved through increased means. Social power is
informed by these physical realities but also by style, attitude, psycho-
logical maneuvering, knowledge, wisdom, and perhaps enlighten-
ment. Art objects are situated within a power structure informed by all
of this.
And power can arise from passivity (Ghandi) and the exposure of
vulnerability. I’m thinking of Vito Acconci’s work where he is both vul-
nerable and aggressive, waving a stick at his audience blindfolded.
Masturbating under a floor, exposing his desire and his shame. And
Lynda Benglis’s work exposing its weakness in the face of gravity. And
perhaps the work of Mary Heillman whose geometry has “expression”

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and “character “ having given up some of its hardness. And Hannah
Wilkie, who presents her personal and mortal vulnerability up for our
consideration.
Success accrues power to the successful. Most of us want our work
and our persons to be successful. Money is power and most of us want
and need money. How artworks are understood within the money
economy intersects all these questions of power and presents an
opportunity. As artists selling our works to people or institutions with
money, we are at their service. We are in some respects in their power.
On the other hand, we invent and decide what it is that we want to make
and present the world with objects , ideas, and perhaps ideals to desire.
Information is power. How stories are told, how the facts of the
world are represented with images support and help to uphold power
structures. Map-making and history are often discussed from this
point of view. Wallid Raad stirs this particular pot.
In order for our work to be part of the larger culture, for it to have an
audience, it has to be inserted into existing power structures one way
or another. The infrastructure of galleries, museums, and patrons, are
powerful as is the work that we make.
I would like to end by asking: How do you understand and value
power in art? What do you want from your work in terms of power?
And, how do you negotiate the insertion of your work into existing
structures of power?

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Ann Lauterbach
Powerful Art and Power
11 Septmber 2006

I want to begin by noting the obvious irony of being invited to partake

in a discussion of power in relation to art. As a female American poet,
I come to this subject with a lifelong commitment to a practice that
accepts and even promulgates the positive value of powerlessness.
That this identification might be both self-deceptive and defen-
sively prideful is certainly possible.
Who would be the opposite figure from me? Well, take, for example,
the sculptor Richard Serra. It so happens that Richard Serra lives across
the street from me; we have been neighbors for almost thirty years; we
nod to each other. He owns his building; I rent my loft. This is all I want
to say for the moment about the economic inequities of art and power.
Serra’s most famous piece, The Tilted Arc, was reviled, contested and
finally removed from its place in City Hall Park, because it was deemed
too violently threatening for the pedestrians. This was not long before,
and only a few blocks away from, what we now call Ground Zero. When
Serra put his sculpture in a public place, the public did not want to feel
threatened. Now the public always feels threatened. Would the public
now feel more or less tolerant of the difficult vision of Serra’s Tilted Arc?
On this day five years ago, I was awakened by an immense roar
whose proximity to my bed could result only in annihilation. I crouched

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on the floor and covered my head; within moments, there was a sound
for which I have not found the words, since it was simultaneously
enormous and muted; I had no references, no likenesses with which to
compare it. A great swallowing, perhaps. It was the announcement of
Power at its most primal, erupting from exactly the pre-linguistic
ground of our most profound imaginings. Within minutes, it was clear
that an event was underway that would occupy the world stage for
years to come, shifting the ground of history and of our, America’s,
place in it. But one could not have anticipated the degree to which it
would also elicit years of destructive abuses: of language, of persons,
places, things, and that these abuses would place cultures, our own
and others, at risk.
They would, in turn, put immense pressure on artists to find ways to
be in conversation with this risk.

For some weeks, I have been rereading certain passages from some of
my favorite thinkers, writers who have, however obliquely, addressed
the issue or theme of power: Michel Foulcault, Gilles Deleuze, Edward
Said, Giorgio Agamben, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hannah Arendt, Judith
Butler. I read the Fragments of Heraclitus, the novel Plowing the Dark
by Richard Powers, and an unpublished talk by my friend the poet
Michael Palmer called “On the Sustaining of Culture in Dark Times.”
Palmer calls this time, our moment, “fraught and contentious and
corrupted.’
None of these thinkers focuses on art, although each writes in such
a way that an artist might feel, one way or another, implicated.
I think I want to believe that powerful art is a critique of power.
From Said, I have the idea of the amateur, and of the necessity to
find reconciliation between intractable opposition.
From Agamben, the notion of the gesture, that ideas and objects
find meaning through mobile constellations that rupture boundaries.
From Emerson, the idea of the present as the practice of active
thought.
From Heraclitus, the idea of mindfulness within change.
From Butler, the idea of precariousness in relation to violence and
mourning.

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 From Foulcault, the denial of universality and the consciousness of
structures.
From Arendt, the scruple of fearless skepticism.
From Deleuze: oppostion to vertical hierarchies.

Heraclitus Fragment 91
Since mindfulness, of all things,
Is the ground of being,
To speak one’s true mind,
And to keep things known
In common, serves all being,
Just as laws made clear
Uphold the city,
Yet with greater strength.
Of all pronouncements of the law
The one source is the Word
Whereby we choose what helps
True mindfulness prevail.

I spent some time this June in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Like all great
cities, Saint Petersburg has many disparate layers; unlike most cities I
have been in, these layers seem to be rubbing against each other,
causing an almost palpable friction. Nothing seems to be quite in align-
ment with the present, which courses through the streets like a reck-
less toxic current. In any case, I visited the Hermitage, the vast pale
green museum that was once an Imperial Palace. It would take days,
maybe weeks, to even begin to know what is there, in the immense
rooms and corridors with their gilt trim and poor lighting. I knew that
some of my favorite Matisse paintings were there, including The
Conversation, and Music, and The Dance. I did not, however, know that
there were several Rembrandts. Rembrandt has never particularly
captured my attention. But I was, that day, arrested by his painting of
the Deposition, of Jesus being lifted down from the Cross. It was poorly
lit, and needs cleaning. The figure of Jesus is deeply, impossibly human;
it has weight, dead weight; you can see the arms of those who are lift-
ing the body down strain; you feel the lifeless burden. There are fleshy

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folds around the figure’s mid-section. I do not recall if there is blood, or
any signs of the stigmata. But the painting registered inside me, and I
have tried to think about its power. I am not a religious person. Was it
powerful for me that day because I was in the difficult flux of a difficult
city, whose complex relation to faith was everywhere apparent? Was it
because there are so many images of the newly dead in my mind these
days, and somehow this portrayal spoke from a space of such pro-
found humanity that it seemed to redeem or remind me of the parts of
Western culture that seem all but erased in our excruciating exercise of
raw power. If I visited the painting again, would it again elicit such a
strong response?

I have been trying to think of what to say without stating the obvious
while wondering what the obvious might be; I have been wondering if
the obvious is what needs in fact to be stated. I have been thinking for
a while about the difference between knowledge in relation to power
and knowledge in relation to art. I have been wondering about the
necessary forms of knowing.
This wondering has taken the form of some questions:
Are knowledge and power inevitably reciprocal?
What kinds of knowledge do artists need, and is it more important
to think of how we know than what we know? The American philoso-
pher Alfred North Whitehead comments that, “in the real world, it is
more important for a thing to be interesting than for it be true.”
Duchamp is said to have commented that he never did anything unless
it amused him.
Is art, to invoke Wittgenstein’s great phrase, a form of life? If it is,
what does this imply about the form of an artist’s life?
Is there still any meaning to be found in the etymological connec-
tion between experience and experiment?
Is powerful art necessarily art that embraces technology?
The word “power” comes from the Latin potere: to be able. What
abilities does an artist need to make powerful art?
Is powerful art art that shifts our perceptions of reality or art that
confirms them; art that causes consternation or consolation? Are
these exclusive registers?

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Here is Richard Powers writing about his heroine Adie’s response to
being inside the machinery that will make a totally virtual world, which
she has been hired to help realize through her capacity to make per-
fectly mimetic drawings:

“Shame and amazement did a two-step inside her. This room

was this present’s widest accomplishment, its printing press, its
carrack and caravel, its haywain, hanging gardens, and basilica.
These demure, humming boxes contained the densest working
out, the highest tide of everything that collective ingenuity had
yet learned how to pull off. It housed the race’s deepest taboo
dream, the thing humanity was trying to turn itself into. Yet for all
that Adie had seen, art had fled headlong from it, in full retreat,
toward some safe aesthetic den of denial, where it could suck its
wounds in defeat.”
— Plowing the Dark p.30

A safe aesthetic den of denial, sucking its wounds in defeat. An image

of abject animal powerlessness.
Art of course does not have volition, only artists do.

Powers implies here a post-human world, in which our investment in

the humanity of the human, evidenced or symbolized in the act of art
making, is about to be surpassed. He implies that art cannot compete,
as it were, with the ravishing technologies of the post-Enlightenment,
and can only retreat into, be absorbed by, the exhausted afflictions of
bourgeoisie individuality.
If artists are not to slink off into an aesthetic den of denial, what are
we to do instead?

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Heracitus Fragment 101
What use are these people’s wits,
Who let themselves be led
By speechmakers, in crowds,
Without considering
How many fools and thieves
They are among, and how few
Choose the good?
The best choose progress
Toward one thing, a name
Forever honored by the gods,
While others eat their way
Toward sleep like nameless oxen.

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Rochelle Feinstein
Powerful Art and Power
11 Septmber 2006

“The frontiers of contemporary art are endless…. It’s exciting,” said a

collector who was sitting in Sotheby’s salesroom watching the bid-
ding during last spring’s China auctions.
I’ve never heard this kind of optimism from an artist. Ever. Amongst
the many things Jessica proposes, one is that the different interests
and participants that constitute the art world co-habitate in a fertile,
convoluted and constantly challenging environment. I agree. And add
that the art world is expanding with the speed and ingenuity equal to
that of global capitalism. The growth of power — as manifested
through art objects — has more force than I could have imagined even
a decade ago.
I initially had planned to address Power — the Good, the Bad, the
Ugly, until yesterday, but I’m now going to become the kind of artist
who says I thought I would speak about this but something happened
and I’m changing horses so to speak.
Becoming a citizen/artist instead of a commentator about power.
There seem to be infinite resources if you’re interested in commentary.
Last night, ABC aired a docudrama called 9.11.01. A disclaimer stated
that what we were about to see had been dramatized for sake of the
narrative, some events were fictionalized and some characters were

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composites. Alterations were made to this history, in other words, to
make better entertainment. To improve its form. It was unsettling
because, throughout the afternoon, helicopters were suspended over
my head as they observed Pres. Bush solemnizing @ Ground Zero, and
this morning, Air Force jets buzzed overhead since 7 am.

So my approach will be to take up something else Jessica addressed in

her remarks… with sympathy, she mentions those students who address
power structures in their work without visual, formal or affective power.
So I want to talk about Form. Recently, Roberta Smith reviewed
Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium. It’s
quite critical — and clear: she identifies a problem with much of the
work as sharing a single strategy — which she diagnoses as “fear of
form — of working with the hands in an overt way and of originality.
Most of all originality.” I’m not overly fond of the word “originality” as
it’s more symptom than a condition, but for lack of a better term, I
know what she means. Perhaps a familiar evenhandedness of no-brow
anti-materialism , or, a post-neo-pop-level of cool. Whatever it is,
there’s not a lot waywardness or difference or “difference” in a great
deal of work I see. Like Jessica, I’m not unsympathetic. Just curious.
I’m as compelled by Form (whatever and wherever that Form is), as
I am in the social and cultural contexts that fashion our understanding
of it. I’m interested in Authority as a corollary of Power. Authority sur-
faces within studio practices and outside of them. Or not. It is its own
form of Power.
Jessica asks “How do you understand and value power in art?” I
understand it as a constantly changing. Inconsistent. Without fidelity
while exerting a great deal of discretion. The phrase ‘i made a terrible
mistake’, used by Michael Jackson, Clinton, Britney, etc… offers no
apology, only admission, after which all is forgiven. This is also the
working title for a collection of works I’ve made over the last 2 years.
In my own practice I work in an unprogrammatic fashion, exploring
fallibility, knowledge of the limits of freedom, transience, sensuality,
nostalgia and grace.
I’ll show you some images… some not art, some art, most deal with
authority, power, form, absence of form and the real world.

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Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Art Can Have Power
11 Septmber 2006

Thank you Jessica. Your invitation to be on this panel provided me with

a challenge to re-examine my assumptions about power and pro-
voked me into seeing and speaking differently about my own work.
Looking where power resides among the various elements of my artis-
tic project I found it within myself as the cultural producer, in the
process as the means of production as well in the conditions and
economy of the sites where I work. Power is embedded, one way or
another, in everything I am and do.
The 10 minute time constraint of the panel provides another chal-
lenge; to choose specific details from no more than 6 of my site spe-
cific public artworks and one work from and another area of making
whose work inspires me to reach beyond my own conditions, inclina-
tions and intentions in regard to power and art-making.

The essential notion I have about power and its relationship to art and
artist is that there is no separation; power is an integral part of the
maker and the forms made. Integrally constructed in much the same
way Nick Rock’s poster for this panel embeds the declarative in the
interrogative and how Pedro Almodovar constructs Agrado in his film,
Todo Sobre mi Mama, not incidentally dedicated to all women and all

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those who want to be women. I simply will not accept or be undone by
the traditional abusive power and gender games and delight in
Amodovar’s power lighting up the screen. Superseding the ongoing
inequality and abuse in conventional gender stereotypes and power
relations, Almodovar displays an apparent ease and acceptance of a
much wider variety and combination of gendered relationships and
bodies in blazing color and pattern — and laughter.
Laughter occurs every time Agrado appears on the screen. The
audience laughs as she explains that she is called agreeable because
she tries to make everyone’s life more pleasant. Agrado’s responsive
and generous qualities are evident as she happily accepts the difficult
job of telling the audience that the show is cancelled, and asks those
who are interested to stay to hear her life story but if they want to
leave that too is fine with her. She proceeds to describe her surgeries,
how much each part of her body cost as she made female physical
attributes an integral part of her body.

My own cultural products are generally located in those parts of urban

environments which have been ignored and left to deteriorate until the
established powers — city redevelopment and transportation agen-
cies, educational institutions, commercial and corporate companies
— decide to improve a degraded place most often to make it more prof-
itable to those same powers. I go in and while seeming to comply with
their prevailing middle class ideas and values about people should live,
cities grow and property is to be made profitable integrate powers
complicity in the disrespect, destruction and physical improvements.
The most confrontational of my installations covering the largest
territory is currently being constructed as part of Boston’s Big Dig.
Fifteen of the s city block of the former West End neighborhood of
working poor were made into a wasteland by Harvard University’s
department ideas of urban planning, the complicity of the local
Catholic archdiocese, the expansion of Mass General Hospital and the
greed of a developer. Ironically this quote from a former resident of the
razed West End is a sentiment shared by the current residents –
including the developer who lives in the penthouse of one of the tow-

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ers that replaced the tenements, the greatest neighborhood this side
of heaven.

The handrails carry 16 more quotes from former West End residents
their lifestyle and enjoyment of what they had in these buildings dis-
missed and destroyed, The privileged greed is represented by dollar
sign scrolls integrated into the new light fixtures, the “takings” clause
of the US constitution at the top of the missile barrier into which
the handrails embedded carrying with Camilla Kaputchnik’s quote
about the smells of cooking. The new Big Dig highway crashes through
the tenements ghosted into the abutments and the smell is now that
of automobile fumes. Occasionally pedestrians will come across tan
ineffable name. These are the places where the city grid would have
crossed the current curving sidewalks.

Here in New Haven is another strategy of integration where traditional

celebrity power is inverted and extended to residents and workers who
made a contribution to this area and its people during the past 300
years. Although the 24 stars made with $25,000, are distributed
equally among men and women, shop owners and employees, and
the various trades practiced here over time, are the result of research
and meetings with people in each of the communities here in New
Haven, and there is a proposal for new stars to be chosen by those
who came to live in ninth square, ultimately the power to choose these
initial stars like the 16 quotes of the West End project I just showed
you is essentially mine. The limits of my power can be seen expressed
by my choice to place four sets of the 24 rose medallions chronologi-
cally ordered sets at four entrances into the ‘ninth square’ was foiled
by the Chapel street Businessmen owners who were afraid if of liabil-
ity issues. I simply moved two sets inside at the center of the square
moving out, and the others move into ninth square from Church and
State Streets. Similarly, while I tried to do this project as a citizen of
New Haven and an artist rather than be defined by my role as a profes-
sor at Yale, nonetheless this picture appeared in the Yale Alumni mag-
azine. The notion that power lies within each of these stars is
particularly embedded here. I am standing near Joseph McAlpine, the

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janitor at the Gas Company, who accrued the power through respect
by his community and his ability to get the attention of the head of the
company not to shut off the gas but to help people learn how to pay off
the bill.

In this, the most brightly colored of my pedestrian sidewalk interven-

tions, a six decade time line runs along the edge along the storefront the
oldest set of buildings on First street in downtown Los Angeles. Here too
the area had been left to deteriorate so badly that the structure
beneath the sidewalk had to be replaced before we could pour the new
sidewalk. In the five honey colored decades brass lists of the some of
the uses of the buildings during the heyday of this Japanese American
neighborhood. In the 40’s the culture of fear was spread by the FBI.
And when WWII expanded the powers of the Presidency, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt interned more than a hundred thousand innocent
Japanese-Americans. Currently the Roosevelt precedent has become
the model for extending the power of this presidency.
Among the nine images of wrapped things embedded in sidewalk
that alternates between terra-cotta and white along the property lines
is this Issei chest on Central Avenue, know to the initiated as what was
used by the first generation that came here in the 1880’s and like the
bundle on the San Pedro street portion of the sidewalk, the way the
residents belongings were carried to the camps.

At the northernmost tip of Manhattan, the Inwood stop on the A train

had been left to deteriorate, the population felt ignored by city hall, the
newest immigrant population, the Dominicans were blamed for the
drugs and violence in the neighborhood. The station has a low ceiling
and was indeed a dark and dismal place. Having lived for my first 20
years at the end of another NY Subway line I knew that this ‘end of the
line” as announced on the train, was the first stop for those who live
there. I was determined to take power through the reflecting the
neighborhood’s populations with all their ambiguities, contradiction
intact, making a place for lost of meaning.
Here power is taken and offered through seductive glittering mate-
rials — broken mirror and silver tessere and the use of the ellipse. At

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the exit/entrances and on the walls the ellipse makes a place for the
viewers interiority to take over. At the start… and At long last… invites
the pedestrian viewer to complete the phrase in whatever way or not
at all. The ellipse is powerful because it provides a concrete location for
lost meanings and lapsed connections … makes lack tangible without
falsifying it, makes a place for absence.

This past June, I went to Siberia for 5 days, invited to do a project in

concrete with a company whose owner saw this public art project as a
way to gain some publicity. Working here in Siberia the power was
evoked by the lack of sufficient time: to do the kind of in-depth
research I usually deem necessary, cut out all the letters of the words
created, for the concrete to fully set, While working to extend my
power to include others as the source of reflection and meaning, it
became clear to me in the middle of the night that there was not
enough time to cut all the letters of the contemporary Chatushki we
had written together with a translator and 7 students. In the morning
I suggested we just use the first letter of each work and the punctua-
tion. The lost letters imply a timeworn façade selectively effaced by
history; a seemingly incidental breakdown of type whose meaning is
nevertheless clear to the initiated. Most powerful of all, this new step
provides an invitation to anyone who comes here to enter the process
of of signification at the threshold of meaning and the threshold of the
tower.

Thank you for listening . I am as eager to hear from you in the audience
as I am the other speakers.

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