Let us take up the gauntlet thrown down by Susan Suleiman in the first pages of Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature and ask, with her, ‘What does it mean to “be” contemporary?’ The question implicitly evokes the structure of linear temporality, the grid of the past-present-future, or the before-now-after, that we tend to place on the objects we study. The pastness of the past and, as a corollary, the presentness of the present, have both come under considerable scrutiny in recent years. Critics such as Hal Foster, Fred Moten, Joseph Roach, and Rebecca Schneider have argued persuasively that the strict notion of temporal progression (that the now is new and the past is over) can no longer adequately describe the strange mixture of life and death, the ‘inter(in)animation,’ that characterizes our earthly existence. Like the objects we study, we (they say) are penetrated and shaped by temporalities beyond the scope of the present. Just as artworks do not divulge all their potential meanings at the moment of their first appearance and reception (Foster), so too our supposed temporal coincidence with ourselves may be an illusion (Moten, Roach, and Schneider). Such an undermining of our normative understanding of the ‘contemporary’ is also implied in Suleiman's mode of address to her reader throughout Risking Who One Is. When we read her words—‘I, after all, am your contemporary, if you are reading me in 1994, or later’—we are reanimating a voice that is no longer our contemporary. And yet, paradoxically, ‘contemporary’ will always be ‘later,’ something in the future of her written words.

The paradoxes of present-ness have long been a preoccupation of critical theory. Yet, when it comes to periodization, scholars and critics have in general been less willing to question the categories that divide works into discrete eras or temporal frames. Perhaps this is so because artworks produced within one geographic space and one short period of time do tend to share certain features, even if they differ with respect to the influences that haunt (and animate) them. In this essay I will be concerned with one such period categorization, that of the ‘conceptual,’ which for a long time was associated with the philosophically provocative artwork of the 1960s, the definition and theorization of which were provided primarily by Joseph Kosuth and Sol LeWitt.