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Populär Culture Review
concepts, introducing new concepts, exploring the nature of concepts, and
demonstrating how our minds and the world with which they are engaged are a
living aesthetic experience. That we live this life and this art together is a
necessary implication of such truth—a realization of a responsibility, and if we
do it right, a joy, that has no Start, no center, no finish, and no exit.
DePaul University
H. Peter Steeves
Notes
ll created all of the individual installations discussed here for the 2008 “Site Unseen”
installation and conceptual art juried festival hosted annually by The Chicago Cultural
Center, Chicago, IL. Each was a part of my large exhibition entitled “You Are Here”
which spanned four halls/theatres in the Center. I am grateful to Dolores Wilber, Julie
Laffin, Claire Geall Sutton, Jess Mott, Clark Hayes, and everyone at the Chicago
Department of Cultural Affairs for their help in mounting the exhibits and their boundless
Support. Thanks also to Danielle Meijer, Maryse Meijer, Nileen Clark, Tommy Truong,
Brian Proffitt, Mae the Bellydancer, Marci Roesch, Christina Green, Laura Mahler, Pete
Parsons, Bill Martin, Matthew Girson, Jesus Pando, Lesandre Ayrey, Jim Brenner, Lynda
Garza, Dinah D'Antoni-Niedas, Jorge Niedas, Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Jeremy Bell, Ali
Abbas, Felicia Campbell, Salwa Abbas, Aziz Bawany, Adam Bawany, and Robert
Maldonado for “performing” the works. Also many thanks to photographers Monika
Lozinska-Lee and John W. Sisson, Jr. for their incredible photographs, some of which are
reproduced here.
2One thinks also of artists such as Henry Flynt, Yoko Ono, Robert Morris, Dan Graham,
Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler, etc
3One is reminded of the bumper Sticker that reads: “Think about what it’s like to honk if
you love conceptual art.”
4In fact, in Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953) it seems we know even
more about the truth of the being of the work of art when we dig into the story of how
Rauschenberg approached De Kooning and demanded that it be a major, excellent
drawing that he erased and not just a quick knock-off that De Kooning offered to draw
especially for “the stunt.”
5Mikel Dufrenne makes a similar appeal to “expression” in his aesthetics, though what I
am Suggestion is somewhat different in ways that I hope to make clear. Cf., e.g., Mikel
Dufrenne, Phenomenologie de l ' experience esthetique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1953).
6See my The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return to the Everyday
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2006): 107.
7This is true if one sees the painting on a museum wall, in a book, on a Computer screen,
etc. There is always a diegetic as well as physical space in which the following unfolds.
8For more on this point, see my The Things Themselves: Phenomenology and the Return
to the Everyday (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006): 99.
9Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, Tran. Graham Burchell and
High Tomlinson (NY: Columbia University Press, 1996).
10This is worked out throughout Derrida’s oeuvre, but one might