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Welcome. In retrospect (and, evidently, that's what I am supposed to be about here in your national gallery) as an artist, etc. of fluorescent light, etc., I have sometimes reluctantly sometimes quite gleefully acquired a reputation for arch performance both privately and publicly but for your sake and mine I wont try too hard tonight. But in recognition of several empirical evidences of lingering empire in nearby Ottawa, I might easily choose to dedicate this exposition to our own "queen", Richard Milhouse Nixon. (I hope that U.S.I.A. operatives of the current "care-taker government" can cooperate on that one.) A few months ago, a junior curator of a New York museum admonished that this extensive retrospective examination would be publicly damaging and boring about an artist as young as I am. That Brydon Smith and I came to agree to attempt the exposition may have been presumptuous and may be so mow in installation but we think not. We have deliberately elected not to play safe but to expose. As for your presumed antagonism from the attempt, only each one of you ought to know. (I don't care to recognize reports of mass opinion on personal art. I hope that you can concur.) 1956 is probably the year in which I began a consistent commitment to think and to issue art. But almost none of the material results