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RS: The analysis of Duchamp? Well, at first it comes across almost like a parody, like a kind of construct, almost Borgesian in its construct. As far as it being a truth, I can't accept it as a truth. I can maybe accept it as a fiction. Q: I got a different feeling while I was watching the film about past, present, and future. [Can you speak to that?] RS: There's a sense of time that I hope the film evokes in some way that involves vast stretches of time. A major sense of the film is set in an area of prehistory, and then of course there's the recent situation that we're all involved in. So there was a kind of link up, a notion of parallel times. It's not so much futuristic. In fact, there's a comment by Nabokov that I usually like to quote. He says that the future is the obsolete in reverse, so that if you go back far enough that's probably what the future will be like. In a sense we can take our cues for the future from the extreme past. And this has to do with, in a sense, getting outside of what I would call modernist, or art history ideas that are really out of Europe, that have been developing since the Renaissance, and then in terms of what is known as modernist art history. There are different kinds of histories. These histories are made up of almost arbitrary classifications. If you think of the history of the Modern Museum of Art in New York, and then you think of the Museum of Natural History, there are two different kinds of ideas of history based on different kinds of classifications. So you have divergent histories going along. To an extent I guess the film attempts to show those clashing histories. It's more like a concatenation of histories than one history. [That's] because archaeology and geology are fairly new sciences, only about two hundred years [old]. If one thinks about a time when man wasn't on the face of the earth, well simply by thinking about that, you introduce man into that memory, you might say, a kind of collective, archetypal primordial memory, [that would] take you back to the age of rocks. A good deal of modern art is based on manufactured products that are cut off from their sources. Paint is essentially made from raw materials. So if you take, let's say, the color yellow, you might get back to sulfur, or take any medium and take it back it its most natural state. Since we're in a manufacturing society, there's a higher degree of abstraction built up right in the very medium that we use, so we tend to forget where the paints and things come from. Obviously a stretcher bar comes from a tree, so it might be interesting to get back to that, go to a sawmill and see how it's done. I know somebody who did that recently, and he was surprised at the effect that it had on his sensibilities. The lumber operation struck him as a kind of slaughterhouse. If you follow your medium back you'll get back to a kind of uneasy state of original awareness, you might say. But art is very hermetic. It's so much removed from primal sources, or what are called raw sources. It's just like if you're eating food, and you want to follow that back, you get to the same problem. You find out that there's an inherent...[pause]. [Interruption from audience]: You were once quoted as saying that an artist is forced through the interaction of the critic to create a work that was timeless in no time at all. RS: Yeah. Well, that's a mistake, because nothing is timeless, although the idea of timelessness exists. I think that I was making a case for the artist's time, his everyday time, as being valuable. It was really about economics more than aesthetic theory. In 8