Lucy Lippard has kindly given permission for us to publish here the text of her keynote lecture given in Falmouth, Cornwall on 20 May 2010.

Imagine Being Here Now is a title I offer up for advance publication when I have no idea yet what I’ll talk about, but also because I enjoy the paradox.  Why would we have to imagine a place if we are right here now? Because we’re always doing it, because every day we imagine and then live a version of our new stories, our histories, which we then disseminate through friends and family.  “Imagine,” John Lennon exhorted us. And artist David Wojnarowicz said in the 1980s, “I’m beginning to think that one of the last frontiers left for radical gestures is the imagination.”

Visit artcornwall.org to read Rupert White’s interview with Lucy Lippard on place, places and conceptual art.

Six months on from The Falmouth Convention, Axis, the online resource for contemporary art, commissioned Lucy Lippard to reflect on the event. Lippard’s text is published here by kind permission of Axis.

In retrospect, the Falmouth Convention was a model of organisation and content.

The field trips, everyone has agreed, gave it a grounded, local flavour that suffered only from the fact that we couldn’t go on every one of them.

I came out of the Convention dubious about the necessity or perhaps even the possibility of taking part in an already formed, controlled, and conceptualized international Manifesta, and wildly enthusiastic about an independent, long-term project that would have time to learn from its own successes and failures.