ABSTRACT
The question of where art is necessitates a concomitant question of when art is, in that (contemporary) space is reciprocally tied up with (historical) time. To be contemporary, then, entails thinking historically. Core to this chapter’s discussion is a revived form of hermeneutic thought—one negotiating the horizon line between historical events and contemporary interpretation—that beats at the heart of today’s critical aesthetics. In this type of artistic practice and theoretical writing, historical interpretation is embodied by two impulses—one to commune, the other to disrupt—both of which contingently hinge an untethered past onto our present. This process, and frame of mind, evokes one of Hannah Arendt’s last observations, made in Responsibility and Judgement, 1975:
I rather believe with Faulkner, “The past is never dead, it’s not even past,” and this is for the simple reason that the world we live in at any moment is the world of the past; it consists of the monuments and the relics of what has been done by men for better or worse; its facts are always what has become.
