"What I find interesting," muses a FAR board member, "is that this organization has been able to remain active and viable for over twenty years, and has continuously maintained a prominent place in LA's alternative art scene." Indeed, while so many other cultural venues and artist-run services have come and gone during this same stretch of time, FAR has not only prevailed, but grown arguably stronger and wiser. It might seem obvious (and somewhat Dave Hickey-ish) to point out that the main reason for this is flexibility, but to continue meeting the cultural needs and desires of this rapidly changing city, FAR has had to remain open and adaptable, and always several steps ahead of the reigning artworld trends. An ongoing shortage of free time and money has no doubt contributed as well to keeping the bureaucratic trappings of official institutionalization at bay; simply put, FAR's commitment to The New, whatever it might be at any given moment, has so far precluded any sort of self-interest. That this CD-Rom project in effect represents the first ever attempt on FAR's part to back-track and take stock of its own history is in itself revealing. This archive is culled from the haphazard stacks of papers and documentary materials that have accumulated in the corners and closets of various board members' homes, where they have languished, unconsulted, for over twenty years-continually topped on the list of priorities by some present or future project. A glance at the newly completed timeline confirms this impression of a relentless forward movement. For instance, long before the terms alternative and underground had become stylistic categories on a par with Country and M.O.R., FAR was exposing us to the aural onslaught of such New York No-Wave exponents as SWANS and Sonic Youth (Sound In General, 1985.) I mention this show because it was one that I saw, although at the time I was oblivious to the fact of FAR's sponsorship. Like probably most in attendance, I had come out of genuine interest rather than any sort of artworld solidarity. Some of the other events from those years that I happened to miss-like Mike Kelley's early performances "The Poltergeist" (with David Askevold, 1979) and "Three Valleys" (1980)-have since assumed a near-mythic status in contemporary West-Coast art scholarship. Alongside such works as Louise Lawler's "A Movie Will Be Shown Without The Picture Film" (1979) and Steven Prina's "An Evening of 19th and 20th Century Piano Music" (1985), they point to FAR's involvement in some of the most salient moments of so-called "eighties art." As an undergrad painting major at UCLA, this period was characterized for me by an intense ideological clash between the strong and silent keepers of art's mystical flame and the emerging forces of full theoretical disclosure. Structuralist and Post-Structuralist thought had begun to make significant inroads into our formerly text-free curriculae, and almost as if to help sort out the ensuing confusion, FAR chimed in with a program of lectures that embraced so many of the foremost voices of our dawning Post-Modern moment, from Michel Foucault himself to the range of his American interlocutors. If the talk gained a certain precedence at this point, it is probably because, as some have suggested, it was the most compelling work being made at that time. By the end of the decade, however, the expressive subject seemed to be poised for a resurgence; still partly determined by the "dominant ideologies" of sex, race and class, but steadily gaining in terms of autonomous identity. The concern for marginality in all its forms that marked those years was amply reflected as well in FAR's programming, in lectures with titles like "Radical Black Subjectivity" (Lyle Ashton Harris, 1992) and "The Museum of Lesbian Dreams" (Millie Wilson, 1992), as well as a general push toward a more engaged model of artistic production. At the same time, the open-call structure of the first FAR BAZZAR signalled yet another change of pace, almost a reaction to the more concerted curatorial practices of the past. Dispelling the charges of elitism and cliquishness that inevitably plague organizations of this sort, the series of entirely inclusive projects that followed evidenced a newfound concern for the community as a whole that FAR had previously attended only in part. These are admittedly reductive observations by which I mean only to point out how much FAR's own evolution is tied up with some of the most significant cultural developments of the past twenty or so years. Of course, none of the artists here mentioned can be so easily confined to any one aesthetic or conceptual position. Rather, one consistently finds that the qualities we responded to in the past have not been eroded so much by time, and a good number of the artists that FAR supported from the outset still appear to be at the prime of their game. If the organization has survived this long it is on the strength of such complex and forward-looking choices precisely. These are the product of an extremely fluid process, an ongoing debate, essentially, between new board members and old, different generations of artists meeting periodically and wherever. It is perhaps surprising that FAR remains basically homeless to this day, but it is probably also better that way. Its continued success points to an implicit understanding of Los Angeles as a supremely philosophical city, where ideas will always tend to outlive their material shell. Jan Tumlir is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Along with partner, Kevin Sullivan, Jan worked on the Paul Varnae project "The Workers of the Nation Agree," which FAR sponsored. This was a large-scale painting installed in the Rotunda of LA City Hall.