Vito Acconci Research Articles

Alternative histories: New York art spaces, 1960 to 2010

This groundbreaking book - part exhibition catalogue, part cultural history - chronicles alternative art spaces in New York City since the 1960s. Developed from an exhibition of the same name at Exit Art, Alternative Histories documents more than 140 alternative spaces, groups, and projects, and the significant contributions these have made to the aesthetic and social fabric of New York City. Alternative art spaces offer sites for experimentation for artists to innovate, perform, and exhibit outside the commercial gallery-and-museum circuit. In New York City, the development of alternative spaces was almost synonymous with the rise of the contemporary art scene. Beginning in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was within a network of alternative sites - including 112 Greene Street, The Kitchen, P.S.1, FOOD, and many others - that the work of young artists like Yvonne Rainer, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, David Wojnarowicz, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Martin Wong, Jimmie Durham, and dozens of other now familiar names first circulated. Through interviews, photographs, essays, and archival material, Alternative Histories tells the story of such famous venues as Judson Memorial Church, Anthology Film Archives, A.I.R. Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, Franklin Furnace, and Eyebeam, as well as many less well-known sites and organizations -- p. [4] of cover.

Look it up in Your Gut

Andre Breton points out that humor is rare in the history of Western art, with notable exceptions in the work of artists such as Goya, Hogarth, and the barely contained neurosis of Seurat. Yet these anomalies pale against the wave of absurd and forceful images in Dada and Surrealism. Rising from the tragic and unlikely context of the European World Wars, Breton writes that, In visual art we must consider the triumph of humor in its manifest state a much more recent phenomenon. Indeed since then humor has played a persistent but also evolving role. Today's artists must perhaps specifically negotiate the legacy of irony. This paper considers a selection of work by Dieter Roth, Hilja Keading, Vito Acconci, John Divola, and Kara Walker. Through their diverse images, we explore a kind of humor found nestled at the unlikely intersection of material reality and abstract thought. How does this humor operate? What are its concerns and intentions? And can it offer a release from the spent nihilism of postmodern practice?

Dancing to the Rhythm of a Geiger Counter: Modern(ist) Narcissism and the Anthropo(s)cenic Shock

In 2011, the biggest nuclear accident since Chernobyl took place at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. Soon after the nuclear accident, a video appeared on YouTube in which a rogue power plant worker walked towards one of the site’s CCTV cameras and pointed to its centre while watching his own image being streamed live on his smartphone. Despite it clearly being a reinterpretation of Centers, the 1971 performance by Vito Acconci, this essay argues that the Fukushima reenactment not only questioned the cultural paradigms that grounded Acconci’s original gesture, but also signaled the urgent need for humankind to reconsider its own ontological and epistemological grounds in the face of imminent extinction. By comparing Vito Acconci’s Centers with its Fukushima reenactment, the essay tells the history of Modernity and of its failure as a project of human emancipation, grounded on a fantasy of human mastery of ‘Nature.’
 Author(s): João Florêncio
 Title (English): Dancing to the Rhythm of a Geiger Counter: Modern(ist) Narcissism and the Anthropo(s)cenic Shock
 Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 2013)
 Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje 
 Page Range: 111-122
 Page Count: 12
 Citation (English): João Florêncio, “Dancing to the Rhythm of a Geiger Counter: Modern(ist) Narcissism and the Anthropo(s)cenic Shock,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 2013): 111-122.

The aesthetics of wandering in the Chinese literati garden

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The excerpt is a description of the tour of the Grand Vista Garden. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 327. 2. Tim Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 173–179. 3. Susan Bush, Early Chinese Texts on Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 151–152. 4. Victor H. Mair, ‘Wandering in and through the Chuang-tzu’, Journal of Chinese Religions (Boulder, CO) no. 11 (Fall 1983), p. 109. 5. Zhuangzi 莊子(369–286 bc), Zhuangzi jin zhu jin shi 莊子今注今譯 (annotated and translated by Chen Guying 陳鼓應) (Hong Kong: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), pp. 1–31. 6. See, for example, Zhao Xigu's 趙希鵠 (fl. 1180–1240) account of viewing a landscape painting by Li Cheng 李成 (919–967 ad); Bush (see note 3), p. 211. 7. Ji Cheng 計成 (1582–c. 1642), Yuan ye zhu shi 園冶注釋 (Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 1988), p. 38. 8. Zheng Yuanxun's 鄭元勳 (1603–1644 ad) preface to the Yuan ye; Ji Cheng (Alison Hardie, trans.), The Craft of Gardens (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 29. 9. Ji (see note 7), p. 51. 10. Confucius, Lun yu (The Analects), 7.6. 11. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 105. 12. Ibid., p. 106. 13. Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), p. 142. 14. Nelson Wu describes the Chinese garden as a negative space between architecture and landscape painting. I would like to add that the garden also is a negative space between nature and architecture. Nelson Ikon Wu, Chinese and Indian Architecture: The City of Man, the Mountain of God, and the Realm of the Immortals (New York: G. Braziller, 1963), pp. 45–46. 15. Geng Liutong 耿刘同. Zhongguo gu dai yuan lin 中国古代园林 (Beijing: Zhongguo guo ji guang bo chubanshe, 2009), p. 109. 16. The interrelation between personal and public spheres in art has also been explored by contemporary Western thinkers. Acconci describes it as ‘private space containing the seed of public space’, and Habermas, ‘the tendency toward a mutual infiltration of public and private spheres’. While both Acconci and Habermas focus on the body politics — both spheres intruding on each other — you tries to mediate the two spheres and in so doing creates a new aesthetic sphere. Vito Acconci, ‘Public sphere in a private time’, in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 162; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 141. 17. The zigzagging nine-bend bridge symbolizes the Nine Bends Stream on Mount Wuyi that is associated with Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200 ad). 18. Clunas (see note 13), p. 111. 19. Toshirō Inaji, The Garden as Architecture (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990), p. 132.

The Skin of Religion : Aesthetic Mediations of the Sacred

The Skin of Religion : Aesthetic Mediations of the Sacred S. Brent Plate “That which is most profound in the human being is the skin.” Paul Valéry “The body is the place where things happen.” Vito Acconci We begin with the skin. The liminal, semi‐porous boundary between inner and outer worlds, between self and world. Here is the edge of productive space: the ebb and flow of sight, scent, sound, touch, and taste. Herein, I articulate the beginnings of an approach to understanding religion in and through its skin, and through the sensually mediated experiences of religion. By religious “experience,” I don't mean the stories people tell of so‐called im‐mediate, mystical experience of the gods and goddesses, but rather of the sensual sacred experiences of the human in her/his physical spaces. By focusing on the vital role that the sensual body plays in human experiences of the world, we are able to investigate religious traditions in ways that complement and expand traditional approaches to religion. The study of religion has continued to focus heavily on the interpretation of sacred texts and intellectual exploration of philosophical doctrines. In contrast, experiencing religion through its sensual, material, and artistic practices challenges the student of religion to think through the seemingly mundane dimensions of religions: what religious people eat and taste and see in their sacred settings. What seems trivial and easily overlooked, in the end, becomes foundational for religious environments and traditions. This article builds on the ancient Greek roots of aesthetics, in which the term pertains to “sensory perception.” Aesthetics, as discussed here, is about the ways human bodies sense their religious worlds around them through sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, among other possible senses. Sometimes the sensual encounter enables humans to be touched and transformed by beautiful art in the space of a museum, but these aesthetic experiences more often occur within other spaces: in the incense smelled upon entering the temple, in the bitter herbs eaten at the Passover table, in the chanted call to prayer of the Muezzin, in the watercolor portrayal of the head of Jesus Christ, in the stroll through the Zen and Jodo inspired gardens of Kyoto (Fig. ). Aesthetics cannot be bound to a theory of art, and here I mine the term and its history for sacred‐sensual purposes. The fixed‐but‐still‐moving point of the religious skinscape is the permeable boundary at the edge of the body, constituted by what passes in and out via the sense organs. Religion itself is, in part, produced by the experiences formed in these mediated sites betwixt and between. Click for larger view View full resolution Oikeniwa Gardens at the Imperial Palace, Kyoto, Japan. Photograph by S. Brent Plate. To begin, I outline some of the meanings of a “skinscape” and the role of the sensual body in the production of sacred space. Then I turn to revive the understanding of aesthetics as sense perception, suggesting the senses as boundary markers that define the space of the body, which in turn defines social and sacred space. Following from this, a further investigation of the skin of religion suggests that it consists of two components: sense perception and the mediated, sensational forms that make meaning out of religious objects, sights, shapes, and sounds. In conclusion then, I'll offer some notes toward an aesthetic‐sensual construction of sacred space. Skinscapes The skin wraps the body, defines it, sets the self apart from the world. At the same time, the skin is the contact point, the connection with the world. The skin is media. Persons as subjects encounter each other at the site of the skin, and it is this fleshy screen that marks our identity. In modernity, as Claudia Benthien puts it in her book Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and World, the concept of the self is “understood rather as hidden on the inside of its body house, invisible and immaterial.” And thus we talk negatively about things only being “skin deep,” and suggest our “true self” is “deep down” below the surface. But this is a misrecognition of the active role that the skinscape plays in the construction...

Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity

OCTOBER 140, Spring 2012, pp. 91–112. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Let’s begin with a generalization: one of the most conspicuous manifestations of the “social turn” in contemporary art since the 1990s has been the hiring of nonprofessionals to do performances. This stands in sharp contrast to a tradition of performance from the late 1960s and early 1970s in which work is undertaken by the artists themselves; think of Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic, Chris Burden, and Gina Pane. If this tradition valorized live presence and immediacy via the artist’s own body, in the last two decades this presence is no longer attached to the single performer but instead to the collective body of a social group.1 Although this trend takes a number of forms, some of which I will describe below, all of this work maintains a comfortable relationship to the gallery, taking it either as the frame for a performance or as a space of exhibition for the photographic and video artifacts that result. I will refer to this tendency as “delegated performance”: the act of hiring nonprofessionals or specialists in other fields to undertake the job of being present and performing at a particular time and a particular place on behalf of the artist, and following his or her instructions. This strategy differs from a theatrical and cinematic tradition of employing people to act on the director’s behalf in the following crucial respect: the artists I discuss below tend to hire people to perform their own socioeconomic category, be this on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability, or (more rarely) profession. Much of this work has not been addressed or analyzed in depth by art historians or critics, so the position outlined below forms a response not so much to existent writing but to the reactions that this work repeatedly elicits—both from the general public and specialist art world—at conferences, panel discussions, and symposia. One of the aims of this essay is to argue against these dominant responses and for a more nuanced way to address delegated performance as an artistic practice engaging with the ethics and aesthetics of contemporary labor, and not simply as a micro-model of reification. I will begin by outlining three dif-

Acconci's Pied-à-terre

To kick the habit of conventional scholarship this article appeals to the affective draw of the archive via an imaginative pedestrian peregrination. It takes a walk through the uneasy spaces of Vito Acconci's 1972 work Anchors and listens to the dialogue of conflicting voices which still demand to be heard, forty years after their construction. It becomes unclear who is initiating the dialogue; the text is hard to read and perverse. The resulting disorientation of Anchors is matched by a later, larger, exhibition in Paris: Les Immatériaux, co-organised by French Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Here the labyrinthine confusion of spaces, sounds, smells and sights acts out an excess of information, echoing the affective intensity of Acconci's Anchors. However, the parallel between Acconci and Lyotard comes through a stumbling manner: eager to avoid the foot-fall that forms a well-trodden path the aim is to keep moving. We cannot dust off these archives whilst reclining in a recumbent posture; we must leap to our feet and become participants in their performance. Neither must we aim to decode the unarticulated voices which grunt and girn their way into our reading. Such bodily emissions were termed the ‘affect-phrase’ by Lyotard, not in order to decipher their meaning, but to acknowledge their effect in leaving conventions of communication provocatively unfulfilled. Let us proceed on foot.

L’objet de la performance. Pour une réévaluation du rôle des « accessoires » produits et exposés dans les centres artistiques italiens des années 1970

The Object of the Performance. Towards a Reassessment of the Role of “Accessories” Produced and Displayed in Italian Artistic Centers in the 1970s ; A large part of the historiography on performance art still tends to focus on the ephemeral nature of its actions, taking for granted the rejection of commercial structures on which the ideology of the dematerialization of art was founded. By reducing performance art to an attitude, such discussions overlook the existence of its display environment. In order to understand the material culture of the art of performance, the essay focuses on the Italian art world of the 1970s, which, as a space of creation and dissemination of international performances, constitutes a remarkable case study, given the variety of structures it provided artists and audiences. Vito Acconci’s Italian career is used as the central thread to express three ways of grasping objects (both works and documents) : the exhibition as enunciation, the object as performance and performance as exhibition.

Persons shaping architecture Interview with Vito Acconci

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Medialität, Materialität und Literarizität der Stimme in der Videokunst

Abstract This essay explores media-related aspects of literariness in video art and examines them on the basis of spoken language - in particular, voice, its mediality and physical nature. Based on new cultural-studies approaches to the category and phenomenality of >voice<, works by the artists Jochen Gerz, Vito Acconci, Gary Hill, Korpys/Loffler, and Tracey Emin are considered. The literariness of video art proves to be a distinct and complex transmedial field; its investigation necessitates philological and media studies parameters alike.

Furniture and Artwork as Paradoxical Counterparts in the Work of Donald Judd

In 1986, Donald Judd recalled that when he was commissioned to design a coffee table in the late 1960s he modified a piece of his artwork to produce the table; this approach did not result in a successful object, by Judd’s account.1 Explaining that this coffee table had taught him a bitter lesson—that his furniture should not mimic his artwork—Judd excluded the table from the chronology he prepared for the 1993 catalog of his furniture. This anecdote helps to illuminate his struggle to draw a strict line between his art and his furniture. The story of Judd’s first piece of commissioned furniture evinces an agenda concerning the formal and structural resemblance between Judd’s artwork and functional objects that formed an undercurrent in his output throughout his life. In this paper, I explore the interrelationship between Judd’s furniture and art with a view especially toward the practical aspects—the fabrication processes, the predominant formal configurations, his marketing strategy, and his installation schemes—while keeping in mind Judd’s own ideas and the critical receptions of his furniture design. The connections between art and design in modernist art movements had a critical influence on Judd’s artwork and furniture. Judd’s factory-produced art and functional objects had many historical precedents and parallels: the experimental products of the Bauhaus, some innovations of the De Stijl members and the Russian Constructivists, Duchamp’s ready-mades, and Pop Art’s consumer culture-oriented works, as epitomized by Claes Oldenburg and Richard Artschwager. In general, whether Judd acknowledged it or not, these practices had a major effect on the ways in which his artwork and furniture were created and configured. Further, while Judd’s industrial-looking art and design objects would seem to represent a counter to the tactile warmness of sculptures and functional objects by Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) and Isamu Noguchi (1904–88), all three artists were profoundly engaged with issues inherent in design and with the articulation of space. Although Judd’s artwork influenced the development of usable artworks and architectural installations created by succeeding generations of artists (e.g., Scott Burton, R. M. Fischer, Siah Armajani, Vito Acconci, and Robert Wilson), the discourse about the relationship between design and art was not extensive in the United

Mixed use, Manhattan: photography and related practices, 1970s to the present

When the real estate bust of the 1970s hit New York City, artists found their own mixed uses for the city's run-down lofts, abandoned piers, vacant lots, and deserted streets, and photographers and filmmakers documented their work. Gordon Matta-Clark turned a sanitation pier into the celebrated work Day's End, and Betsy Sussler filmed its making; Harry Shunk made a photographic series from Willoughby Sharp's Projects: Pier 18 (which included work by Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, and William Wegman, among others); Cindy Sherman staged some of her Untitled Film Stills on the same city streets. Mixed Use, Manhattan documents and illustrates the most significant of these projects as well as more recent works by artists who continue to engage with the city's public, underground, and improvised spaces. The book (which accompanies a major exhibition) focuses on several important photographic series: Peter Hujar's 1976 nighttime photographs of Manhattan's West Side; Alvin Baltrop's Hudson River pier photographs from 1975-1985, most of which have never before been shown or published; David Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), the first of Wojnarowicz's works to be published; and several of Zoe Leonard's photographic projects from the late 1990s on. The book includes 70 color and 130 black-and-white images; a special section on visual documentation of performances and related activities, arranged by artist Louise Lawler; Glenn Ligon's text piece, Housing in New York: A Brief History, 1960-2007 (2007); Losing the Form in Darkness, an autobiographical story by David Wojnarowicz; and essays by prominent art historians.

Thinking Photography in Film, or The Suspended Cinema of Agnès Varda and Jean Eustache

For years prior to what historians refer to as boom period of 1970s, photography had yet to come into its own as a bona fide object of inquiry. Though critical responses to medium first began to appear shortly after its inception in 1830s, and continued to develop throughout early part of twentieth century with a number of keen reflections on photographic modernism, some of most sophisticated and insightful writing about greater implications of photographic meaning only truly began to emerge in 1970s and 1980s. (2) A critical moment in history of our understanding of medium, this period was characterized not only by academy's recognition of history of photography as a legitimate scholarly discipline, but also by an ever more prominent wave of acceptance by museums. (3) It was also during 1980s that artists became once again comfortable exploring photography as an art form in and of itself, and not merely as a model for painterly process (think Francis Bacon or Andy Warhol) or as a tool used to document more conceptual or site-specific practices (Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci). (4) As collectors--with institutional affiliations or otherwise--explored potential for growth in this nascent sector of market, a number of critics, sparked by these developments, turned their own attentions to matter. (5) On heels of 1977 publication of Susan Sontag's pioneering collection of essays, On Photography, editors of journal October, in a special issue from 1978, responded to changing status of photograph both on market and in museum by advocating photography's newfound identity as a theoretical object. (6) In their introduction to that issue, editors proposed that only now could critical thinking about medium really begin to mature. Given dramatic rise of photographic image on cultural stage, as editors wrote over thirty years ago, finally could photography be rediscovered and redeemed from the cultural limbo to which for a century and a half it ha[d] been consigned. (7) Looking back on this period, one notes a sudden proliferation of writing that aims to do just that: from Roland Barthes' hauntingiy personal reflection on photography and death in La chambre claire (1980) and Herve Guibert's similarly autobiographical take on photography, memory, and desire in L'image fantome (1981), to Victor Burgin's seminal compilation on multiplicity of photographic codes (Thinking Photography, 1982), John Berger and Jay Mohr's self-reflexive photo-essay Another Way of Telling (also from 1982), and Philippe Dubois' consideration of singularity of photography and subjectivity of photographic process in Uacte photographique (1983), just to a name a few. (8) If we consider ever increasing cultural prominence of photography and discourse on photography during those years, it is perhaps not so curious to remark that at around same time in France--the veritable birthplace of medium--several of some of era's most innovative filmmakers were also engaging many of same issues. Among them, both Agnes Varda and Jean Eustache stand out for having produced two thought-provoking short films that, while remaining true to each director's artistic vision, dialogue with and contribute to new kind of photographic theory and criticism that was circulating on both sides of Atlantic at around same time. As art historian Linda Nochlin has written, Nothing, perhaps, is harder to write intelligently about than photography. (9) In what follows I would like to suggest how Varda's Ulysse (1982) and Eustache's Les photos d'Alix (1980) tap into motion picture's own privileged potential as a vehicle for thinking--and also, to a certain extent, writing--about medium from which it ultimately evolved. (10) As they create a filmic language capable of speaking for photographic image, films mobilize cinema as a way to theorize indexical ontology of photograph, link between photography, personal memory, and collective history, and perhaps most importantly, often strained, incestuous, but nevertheless vital relationship between photography and cinema. …

Nothing becomes Something

You I'm Nothing: Art and Its Audience Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago November 20, 2010-May 1, 2011 It is a well-worn cliche: the aloof artist, creating in solitude. purposefully ignoring the critics and the hoi polloi, seeking not accolades but. only the purest expression of his or her singular inner vision. This exaggerated stereotype may make for an entertaining Hollywood biopic, but, as most artists know, their work needs to engage an audience. British artist Liam Gillick puts it this way: Without people, it's not art--it's something else--stuff in a Art broadcasts ideas through visual and other sensory media. The work is completed when someone else absorbs the message. In this spirit, the artists of Without You I'm Nothing: Art and Its Audience, an exhibition now on view at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, casts the viewer as an active participant in an artwork's full meaning. Some works invite sensory engagement: enter, sit, touch, or listen. Others, despite being for a viewer's eyes only, are less effective at tweaking perception, intellect, or emotion. In both cases, the artworks become catalysts for a reassessment of preconceptions. The show spans two large galleries: one dedicated to engagement (no touching, please) and another that encourages viewers to activate the art. It is in the latter that visitors find a few Romper Room moments, as in Andrea Zittel's crawl-through-to-experience A-Z Cellular Compartment Units (2001). Have you ever wanted to lounge inside an enormous clamshell? Vito Acconci did, and now you can too, thanks to his fiberglass Convertible Clam Shelter (1990). Robert Heinecken's Man Dealing the Four Elements (1998) and Woman With Cats (1998)--life-sized cardboard cutouts of Pamela Anderson and Michael Richards as Seinfeld's Kramer used as vehicles for Heinccken's signature brand of cultural criticism--bring grins of recognition as visitors are invited to pose with the figures. Despite these and other dashes of levity, the somberness of Chris Burden's The Other Vietnam Memorial (1991) fills the room. Beautiful and massive, the symbolic monument resembles a Rolodex turned on its side; etched on the huge copper panels are three million names representing the citizens of Vietnam who perished during that conflict. In the engagement gallery, visitors touch with their eyes, not with their hands. The opening of Without You I'm Nothing coincides with Chicago's descent into another icy gray winter, so one can forgive the many visitors lingering before the radiant orange light of Olafur Eliasson's Eye see you (2006). Ringed with bulbs, the massive dish beams light throughout the gallery. The light is from the same mono frequency bulbs commonly used in street lamps bulbs designed to suppress our ability to see colors beyond yellow, black, and white. The sculpture's duplicity (I happily basked in light I found perceptually pleasing when, in fact, I was being stripped of perception) was a vibrant reminder that both emotion and sensory interpretation--the cornerstones of our individual reality--can be manipulated. Eliasson's sculpture is not the only work engaging viewers through light, optical perception, and reflections. …

Thoughts on Re-Performance, Experience, and Archivism

��� he term “re-performance” has a catchy refrain, a resonance with an implicit political if not seductive undercurrent, specifically in relation to art politics. To perform on some level is everyone’s dream. Yet to re-perform—what is that? Could it be that re-performance implies a fundamental need for artists to sustain the importance of their work as “live art” through some form of documentation? Hypothetically, this should include performances of some merit—whether by Joseph Beuys, Joan Jonas, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles, Ann Hamilton, or Carolee Schneemann—that are reproduced synthetically ad infinitum over a period time in places other than from where they originated. It is a virtual idea to place performance art in an institution—a modern art museum, for example—where various works may be represented both as archival software and as ephemeral artifacts, documents, or notices of one kind or another. Meanwhile, research coming from various institutions appears bent on mining the same sources while alternative publications and Websites from less predictable sources are being ignored. On one level, the topic of re-performance appears to hold the attention of some observers in denial of more pressing issues, such as the impact of global economy on the future of a deeply faulted art market, now involving “live art”—a topic that deserves serious attention. Instead of going this route, it would appear that the topic at hand has become typically self-indulgent as increasing numbers of mostly younger performance artists—and museum curators who support them—are scrambling for appointments with destiny, hoping their work will be placed on virtual call in the future. One might say that to contemplate the exigencies of performing a work of body art by an artist from another time at another youthful moment, based on extant documentation, archived to the teeth, is like transferring a four-by-five-inch photographic negative into a digital image or copying a reel-to-reel Portapak tape into a DVD format. As Philip Auslander correctly, though reticently suggests in his superlative essay published in PAJ 84 (September 2006), there is the question as to whether performances produced on the basis of archival documentation might lose some of the vitality of the performance, assuming the vitality was there in the first place. 1 Assuming it was there, the question might arise as to what future artist would want to do it. Would he or she appear like a performance clone functioning

Vito Acconci’s Mur Island: A Challenge to deterritorialization of Art and design

Vito Acconci’s Mur Island: A Challenge to deterritorialization of Art and design

New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950

Reviewed by: New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950 Joshua Shannon New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950. William Chapman Sharpe. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008. Pp. xxi + 402. $35.00 (cloth). Shot after dusk from the peak of an unfinished 1930s skyscraper, the gorgeous cover image of William Chapman Sharpe's New York Nocturne makes a rich promise to the reader: here is a city sparkling its way through modernity, saturating page and eye with a rhythm of glare and impenetrable black. It is a promise that the author keeps, delivering to the reader a panoramic view of hundreds of dense images of New York at night, drawn from over a century of photography, painting, poetry, and fiction. Sharpe demonstrates his command of this diverse material throughout, and readers are likely to find plenty to enjoy. I was reminded, for example, of the delicious Victorian paradoxes in Poe and O. Henry, and I discovered such oddball wonders as "Thrust at the Sky," a 1932 narrative poem on the erotics of skyscrapers by the improbably named Futurist writer MacKnight Black. The book delves into urban history only occasionally, recapitulating some milestones of street lighting, but offering little on the histories of crime, alcohol, transportation, or even demographics. But it bristles with the lively texture of James McNeill Whistler's libel suit against John Ruskin, for example, and of Jacob Riis's midnight photographic invasions of Lower East Side tenements. This varied and comprehensive treatment, clearly built on years of reading and looking, earned New York Nocturne the Modernist Studies Association's Book Prize in 2009. The Riis section is one of the best in the book. It debunks any simple notion of the muckraking photographer's moral purity with the story of his confusion—nursed on his own early destitution—between his true target, poverty, and the poor themselves. We see Riis manipulating his subjects, entering uninvited and blasting their homes with illuminating Magnesium powder shot from a gun. Sharpe also draws out the complicated sexuality of Edward Hopper's paintings, and he demonstrates throughout the book (if sometimes in a restrictively essentialist way) that gender has been fundamental to New Yorkers' love for and antipathy toward their city. [End Page 683] Such complications are relatively rare, however, and this is a fundamental weakness of the book. The author seems to want his material to be straightforward and lyrical rather than richly halting or uncertain. This disposition may explain Sharpe's decision to end his account, for the most part, around 1950—before Vito Acconci's conceptual-art experiments on Manhattan's darkened piers or Nan Goldin's snapshots of desperate hipsters—but it cannot justify the complete absence of Piet Mondrian's New York abstractions, or of any mention of Jackson Pollock. And while Sharpe does not shy from representations of solitude or murder, he makes regular analogies to Dante and ancient myth, betraying a desire to warmly suture his material into a long history of belles lettres. The postwar cases are selective: Yvonne Jacquette's lyrical paintings of skylines rather than David Wojnarowicz's photographs of gay alienation, George Segal's anodyne sculptures rather than Andy Warhol's diverse experiments at The Factory. The New York School Poets, Diane Arbus, and Hip Hop are likewise entirely sidelined. It is not more grit that I wish Sharpe had brought to the project (Weegee is well represented), but rather more interest in the problems of modernism, which is after all a putative subject of the book. (It does not help that his citations of primary criticism and of previous scholarship are relatively rare, even in the footnotes.) The author is so keen on cataloguing representations of night-time New York that he sometimes overlooks the fact that, in modern art, the crucial topic is often form or mode—not just what but rather how things are said. All the more so here, because the night and the city both present special opportunities and challenges to representation—the night because it changes the look of everything (hiding, revealing, denaturalizing), the city because it is...

Between Saying and Hearing

Page 17 January–February 2009 B O O K R E V I E W S Between Saying and Hearing Steve Tomasula The prose of Vacation is as pristine as its subplots are intricate. Vacation Deb Olin Unferth McSweeney’s http://www.mcsweeneys.net 216 pages; cloth, $22.00 In Deb Olin Unferth’s novel, a vacation isn’t something a person takes so much as the hole they leave behind. Claire’s mother leaves a “vacation” in her daughter’s life by dying, as did her biological father by leaving when she was an infant; Myers’s wife vacates her marriage by following a stranger to see where people go when they “leave”; Myers likewise leaves the marriage, first by following his wife following the stranger, whom he mistakes for an old college classmate, Gray, and then by pursuing Gray to Nicaragua. Except Gray is on “vacation” in Panama. The novel is dense with these types of vacations: one leaving, another following as though sucked along by the resulting undertow. Even chickens follow each other. Why? “No one wants to be alone and someone has to be in the lead.” If it’s not clear from this description, Vacation has the capacity for surprise and kinetic energy of a cartoon as Myers learns while on an unauthorized “vacation.” Before being caught in a Nicaraguan earthquake, he receives an email: “From: HR. Subject : Termination of Employment.” Say rather, it’s an existential comedy: Samuel Beckett applied to the contemporary world where instead of clowns waiting for Godot, a character might find himself penniless in a foreign country because his charge card was deactivated. By his wife back home. One passage opens with the Beckett-like line, “The day was invading through the windows and under the doors,” then follows Myers from his waking on the couch to being dropped off at the train station by his wife who is kicking him out. In the car, Myers reminisces about how he once waxed poetically to his wife, telling her how after a life spent together the day would eventually come when they would be laid to rest in the same cemetery. To which she replies: “Gross.” There are no happy reunions in this novel. Or reunions of any kind. Rather, there are missed connections , too-early departures, and too-late arrivals. There are virtual connections, as well as real connections that may as well not exist because no one sees them. Or as Myers’s wife puts it while looking at the stranger she’s been following: “I felt connected to him and who knows that I wasn’t? He could be related to me for all I know. He could be my brother. He could have once been my lover during my early crazy days. You never know. We could be married somehow….” Conceptual artist Vito Acconci once created a performance in which each day for a month he followed a random stranger. In each case, the artist ’s will was marginalized, his path determined by chance encounters. To get a sense of the worldview that develops throughout the course of Vacation, imagine each of its characters as Acconci. Now add to this chain of follow-the-leader the reader, turning pages to follow characters who are following clues that may or may not be clues, getting lost in a funhouse of mirrored identities. That is, rather than just describe the disconnects between children and parents, spouses and lovers, the novel involves readers as participants who must sort out mirror from mirror image, character from left-handed reflection. Everyone’s volition is marginalized by circumstance, accidents of birth or function (or reading), making individuals who they are and life what it is for them. Or as Claire learns by reading a note left for her by her dead mother, her biological father, a Mexican dolphin trainer whom she’d never met, and her step-father, the burnt-out, Willy Loman-eque,Anglo businessman who raised her, were for all practical purposes “nearly interchangeable. You could switch their clothes, their occupations, countries of origin, and you might confuse them.” Which is to say everything about them is different. Which is to...

Multi-Media: Video—Installation—Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Multi-Media: Video—Installation—Performance Jon Foley Sherman Multi-Media: Video—Installation —Performance. By Nick Kaye. New York: Routledge, 2007; pp. xxii + 254. $113.00 cloth, $34.00 paper. For the last fourteen years, Nick Kaye has engaged in a prolonged collaborative project with the artists he studies, and in important ways “his” books during this period have been co-authored with them. Having identified early on the difficulty of an author writing about forms that aggressively challenge the very concept of the single author, he has subsequently dedicated himself to finding a manner of authoring that foregrounds his “subjects” as collaborators. With his latest project, Multi-Media: Video—Installation—Performance, Kaye continues this work, opening the volume with a submission from Fiona Templeton, and closing it with one from Vito Acconci and the Mekons. Also included are documentations by Pipilotti Rist, John Jesurun, The Builder’s Association, motiroti, and Paolo Rosa of Studio Azzurro. In between, Kaye proposes his own interpretations of these and other artists’ tactics for blending and separating various media in representations and performances of time, space, and “presence.” Each of the book’s four main chapters offers an in-depth engagement with works of an artist or company, and shorter, though no less incisive analyses of other artists directly or indirectly connected to them. Kaye begins by using John Cage’s Variations V (1965) to demonstrate how technological mediation was employed to heighten rather than diminish a sense of the work’s “liveness.” The unpredictability of sound and video technology made accidents almost certain, and the determination of artists like Cage and Nam June Paik to distort transmissions in the moment of performance emphasized that the times of performance allowed mediated sounds and actions a place in the “live.” In this chapter and later, Kaye relies heavily on Samuel Weber’s Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (1996), in particular the chapter, “Television: Set and Screen.” Weber argues that the transmitted image “contains” the divisions of place and time inherent to the medium, with the result that we are not left adrift in absence or separation, but delivered to what Kaye calls “the presence of vision to events elsewhere” (16). The specifics of this alchemical process are the subject of Kaye’s next two chapters. The first of these primarily addresses Paik’s early film and video installations—provocations that in some ways followed Cage by siting the phenomenon of ephemerality in projection technologies. Kaye argues that Paik’s pieces proposed more than a unitary experience of time. This was possible because Paik manipulated their operation and so exposed attendants to the time of the equipment’s original state, that of its alteration, and that of the attendants’ own interactions with it during exhibition. Kaye’s analyses of Bruce Nauman’s Corridor Installation (1970) and Dan Graham’s Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974) highlight how these artists used delayed image transmission to engage attendants while causing them to just “miss” themselves projected as part of the installation. By forging multiple times for the attendants, Kaye argues, these works troubled traditional assumptions about the supposed immediacy of artwork that engages attendants with spatial relationships. Kaye’s second and strongest chapter, “Video Space/Performance Space,” begins by examining Vito Acconci’s work and proposing that selected pieces used various media to separate Acconci from attendants to his performances while simultaneously creating an increased sense of his presence. Kaye makes his argument by following the implications Weber and others have teased out from Walter Benjamin’s concept of “aura,” which Benjamin described as “a unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be,” that depends on a person’s or object’s singular location (quoted in Kaye, 111). If the experience of “aura” rests on an operation of difference between object and viewer, Kaye reasons, this distance provides the possibility that separations between performer and attendants may do less to victimize “presence” than to produce it. As examples, Kaye offers pieces such as Seedbed (1972), where Acconci placed himself under a ramp on which gallery-goers walked while he masturbated and spoke to them from below, and Claim (1971), where a monitor...

Tactical reading: the ideology of form in David Antin's ‘Novel Poem’

Postmodern procedural poetry has received quite a bit of attention in the last several years. In her book Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004), Marjorie Perloff devotes a chapter to the ...