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Recumbent, otiose, she appeared to those around her as if caught-up in some profound reverie, a palliative lore that drew her inextricably back to a previous nights passion, the sinister purity of its invidious, tropic still. This diversion, barely endurable, was saved at its last not by its virtue but by its neglect and, once again at one with the plenitude and mercurous expanse of the moment, she was swept away into a universe at once solicitous and serene.

Andrew Kelly is an artist and poet living and working in New York City

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Erasing Concepts in Time and Space
Jonathan Price
"Ever since we started this symposium, it's all I hear, everybody's saying, 'Time and Space' here, 'Time and Space' there. Duchamp must be laughing like hell." Jerry Herman is laughing. Herman produced three videotapes of the symposium, Concepts in Time and Space, held at Pleiades Gallery, New York, in 1977, hosted by musician/artist Marilyn Belford, moderated by critic/professor Dore Ashton, with composer/artist/poet John Cage, dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, writer/composer/artist/filmaker Richard Kostelanetz, and video artist Nam June Paik. The original event ran over two hours, so how did Herman trim it into three half-hour specials? 
"It must have taken me three days to do transcripts, a day to work out on the transcripts what was important to show on video, then twelve-fifteen hours editing, with extra time screening, going to MERC, going to Electronic Arts Intermix for extra titles-two weeks altogether." What did he cut out? "Oh, in-house jokes, double takes, searching for words, the business of swigging the bottle-it would have been more human to have that, but there wasn't much point to it. Paik standing up, chalking something on the board for five, ten minutes." (Paik wrote: "What is, is.") This is Herman's first video: it is simple, plain, and clear, a series of mainly verbal statements by major contemporary artists. 
Cage takes Suzuki's lectures at Columbia University as his text, then delivers a sermon on getting rid of words in your head. "I have no trouble with time, I have no trouble with space, I have trouble with the word concept... My notion, then, was: how to go out through the senses, and yet not have any concepts." To achieve this no-mindedness, he uses chance operations, asking questions of the I Ching, say, rather than making decisions. "So the work resembles more and more not the work of a person but something that might have happened if the person wasn't there."
Cunningham agrees, "I've always thought the dancing as movement in time and space. But a physicist object and said, 'You don't need the words time and space, movement takes care of it,...We have to separate it; I have to say to a dancer, you go to that space, and you do it in so many counts or you do it in so much time, but when you get rid of that idea, and you get rid of that thing in your head, having to deal with it that way, when you get your mind out of the way, which in my work I keep trying to do...you go so far that your mind doesn't have to function in that way, it opens it ups so no matter what you do, it's always true." 
But if everyone is striving to enter the eternal now, why make videotapes? Why freeze time? Paik explains, "The beauty of video produced now (will) be appreciated 2000. It's like antique-hunting." So are these tapes. Of course, unlike this magazine, or a book, videotape requires the viewer to sit through every minute of the discussion, or to fast-forward like mad, to find the artist he wants to watch. "And artists have already made videotape one century long, if you collect all videotapes made by every video artist, it take about one hundred years, so if you get PhD in video art, you have to go through all that." Lacking the random access of print, videotape seems backwards to Paik: "Book is most advanced technology." 
And what concepts grew in Herman's mind, as he sat immersed in this material for weeks in the dark? "I wonder why all things don't come at the same time, why I can't conjure up the past, present, and future simultaneously." You just did, Jerry. 

Jonathan Price is a video artist and critic
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