Transatlantica

Revue d’études américaines. American Studies Journal

2 | 2013
Jeux et enjeux du texte

Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play

Monica Manolescu

Édition électronique
URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/6612
DOI : 10.4000/transatlantica.6612
ISSN : 1765-2766

Éditeur
AFEA

Édition imprimée
Date de publication : 31 décembre 2013

Référence électronique
Monica Manolescu, « Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2013, mis en ligne le
30 avril 2014, consulté le 08 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/
6612 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.6612

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 septembre 2020.

Transatlantica – Revue d'études américaines est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence
Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International.
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 1

Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play

Monica Manolescu

Introduction
1 Vito Acconci’s career as a writer, artist and public architect is characterized by his
steady concern with the spaces of the printed page, the street/the city and the body.
The notion of play is central to the understanding of how Acconci invests these spaces,
importing and adapting the rules of one to the other. In the context of his poetic and
artistic work, games and play can be understood and elaborated upon at three levels,
often overlapping and engaging in close interaction: playing in the sense of
improvising; playing according to a set of existing or freshly invented rules, with an
element of parody involved; playing as performance. As such, these meanings of play
suggest a constant negotiation between constraint and freedom, convention and
reinvention, which are salient dimensions of Acconci’s constantly renewed creative
practice.
2 Vito Hannibal Acconci (born in 1940) studied literature at the Holy Cross College in
Worcester, MA and then graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He embarked
upon a literary career as a poet in New York City in the 1960s, but by the end of the
decade he left writing behind (or so it seems1) and moved into the realm of art,
becoming a performance and video artist, experimenting also with permanent
sculpture and installations. Another phase of his career began in 1988, when he
founded the prolific Acconci Studio (based in Brooklyn), devoted to landscape and
architecture design, still very active today.
3 When Acconci refers to his first forays in performance art in the 1960s, he considers the
art of the time to be a “non-field”. Open, indefinite, lacking clear specificity and still to
be invented, it felt welcoming and exciting to newcomers and innovators:
Art for my generation was a kind of non-field. It didn’t seem to have any inherent
characteristics of its own. Art was a field into which you could import from other
fields, so I felt free to come to it from the closed field of poetry, in which the
parameters were set. (Acconci quoted in Poggi, 255)

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 2

4 Poetry and the arts are designated as fields, open, closed, or running counter to the
very notion of “field”. While poetry is considered to be an already structured
intellectual domain with set rules and conventions, the arts in the context referred to
by Acconci (“art for my generation”) are seen as open to experiment, to new
parameters and forms. Although it is of course reductive to pit the “set parameters” of
the supposedly “closed” field of poetry against the “non-field” of art open to novelty
and fluid re-invention, an opposition constructed in these schematic terms reflects
Acconci’s passage from the practice of poetry he knew well to the practice of artistic
performance that he was among the first to invent and that he left behind for further
explorations in other fields.
5 A related but separate theoretical line of exploration that delves deeper into the
implications of Acconci’s use of the words “field” and “non-field” concerns the notions
of “medium”, “medium specificity” and “medium autonomy”. Starting with Lessing’s
Laocoon (1766), which professed the separateness of poetry and painting against
Horace’s belief in the contamination of the former by the latter (“ut pictura poesis”),
poetry and painting were considered to be inscribed in a specific medium with given
conventions and to evolve within the bounds of that medium. This separation between
the various arts along distinct media becomes central in modernist artistic practices
and theory (Clement Greenberg’s insistence on “medium specificity” 2) and is radically
dismantled by the arts of the 1960s and 1970s, with Fluxus, Situationism and video art.
The latter, according to Rosalind Krauss, heralded the era of the “post-medium
condition”, since it “occupied a kind of discursive chaos, a heterogeneity of activities
that could not be theorized as coherent or conceived of as having something like an
essence or unifying core” (Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 31). Acconci’s comments on
the “non-field” of art beckon to and depart from the theoretical tradition of “medium
specificity” and encapsulate the transformation, diffusion and hybridization of the
media of arts, including Acconci’s own experiments that combine freely poetry and
performance, voice and printed matter.
6 Although at first sight it might seem that Accconci is opposing the fixed rules of poetry
to the experimental practices that reinvent the “non-field” of art, he articulates a more
complex relationship between poetry and the arts in an interview where he expresses
his belief that poetry lies at the foundation of the arts and makes itself manifest in
different spaces and media, from film to architecture, from sentence to event:
I’d put poetry at the bottom of a hierarchy of the arts – not because it’s lesser, but
because it’s the base, the undercurrent, the sub-structure of the arts. But, as a base,
it’s only a beginning. Poetry has nothing to do with concentration of language, or
distillation of language; poetry is an attempt to get through language and arrive at
a state of pre-language – it’s a cry, a gasp, a screech. [...] Then, later, poetry throws
the voice into spaces, events; poetry grows up to become a novel, or a movie, or
music, or architecture. But: once a poet always a poet – or, at least, once a language-
user always a language-user. I don’t know how to think – more exactly, I don’t know
how to know I’m thinking – except by language. I start a project by naming the
conditions and playing with words, punning on those names. Or I start a project by
subject-verb-object: I parse a space, I use sentence-structure to plot possible
movements through that space. (Taylor et al., 9-10)
7 A primordial relationship to language lies at the origin of artistic thought and action,
informing self-awareness and epistemology as well. Playing with words, naming,
decomposing sentences, syntactic parsing constitute a point of departure and an
operational model (that is, a set of procedures) for artistic projects inscribed in space

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 3

(the museum, the street, the body). A correspondence is developed between syntactic
structures (“subject-verb-object”) and spatial movement (“plotting movement through
space”). The notion of “language-user” suggests a pragmatic approach to language, but
the question of how to reconcile this pragmatic linguistic view with the quasi-mystic
understanding of poetry as pre-language (“a screech, a cry”) is open to speculation and
deserves a separate discussion which goes beyond the scope of this paper.
8 One cannot help establishing a connection between Acconci’s activity of “naming the
conditions and playing with words” and Wittgenstein’s “language games”, discussed in
the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which stem from the latter’s critique of
Augustine’s description of language learning and language usage in the Confessions. The
builders’language game illustrates Augustine’s view of language and language use, with
the implicit assumptions that language is governed by rules and is activity-oriented. 3
Wittgenstein points to the limits of this view and to the vast array of language practices
that exist outside this model. Acconci seems however, at least in the quote above, to
stick to example of the builders’game. The connection between Acconci and
Wittgenstein has been made by Marjorie Perloff, who argues that Acconci “takes
ordinary, colloquial language and applies both formal constraints and Wittgensteinian
propositions to their articulation”4 (on the back cover of Language to Cover a Page).
9 The concepts of rule and play are recurrent in Acconci’s interviews and theoretical
writings that discuss his need to understand the way (his own) writing and art function,
as well as his motivations for fluctuating from one field to the other. When he mentions
the pieces of art criticism he wrote for Art News, he underlines his eagerness to learn
how this kind of conventional writing works: “I was feverish to know the rules of this
field, the rules of the game” (Acconci quoted in Poggi, 255). The implied point of this
comment is that once learnt, the rules of the game are quickly unlearnt, leading to the
elaboration of new games.

Games on the printed page

10 Stephen Melville is certainly right when he claims that “the central issues in Acconci’s
career are those of action and the ground for action (epistemological issues, we might
say); its decade-long progress is most simply one of finding its way off the page and
into the streets” (Melville, 79-80). However, one should add that before he took to the
streets and found his way off the page, Acconci was trying to find his way on the page,
experimenting with the distribution and configuration of words, and with the selective
transfer of words from existing texts to new ones he was creating in the process. The
mimeograph revolution facilitated the production of these texts, with their quaint, old-
fashioned aspect for today’s readers, familiar with word processing. Vito Acconci and
Bernadette Mayer’s journal 0 to 9, published from 1967 to 1969, 5 was among the many
series of texts made possible by the mimeograph. Craig Dworkin’s 2006 edition of
Acconci’s early writings preserves the typical layout and the appearance of
mimeographed texts, thus foregrounding their original context of production.
11 In his early writings, Acconci is laying bare “the gravity of linguistic material” in a way
that reminds Craig Dworkin of Robert Smithson’s A Heap of Language (Dworkin, 92),
which is a crossover between visual poetry and artwork, writing and (architectural)
drawing (1966; pencil drawing: http://www.robertsmithson.com/drawings/
heap_p104_300.htm). A Heap of Language is a stratified pyramid of words related to

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 4

language, which literally shows language as the result of a process of gradual

deposition and sedimentation: “Language/phraseology speech/tongue lingo
vernacular/mother tongue, King’s English/dialect brogue patois idiom slangy/
confusion of tongues, Babel universal language/Esperanto Ido pantomime dumb show
literature/letters belles – letters muses humanities republic of letters (…)”. Smithson
describes an exhibition organized by the Dwan Gallery in New York as “language to be
looked at and/or things to be read” in a brief 1967 press release where he also
expresses his belief that language “is matter and not ideas – i.e. printed matter”, and
stresses the “monumental” character of language, that is its gravity and availability as
material for graphic construction. Consequently, he expresses a vision of language
“built, not written”, a vision according to which the material characteristics of the
printed page influence significance: “the scale of a letter in a word changes one’s visual
meaning of the word”6 (Smithson, 61).
12 The analogy between Acconci and Smithson cannot be taken further, and their
divergence is visible in their distinct artistic trajectories and practices. To go back to A
Heap of Language, it is clear that while Smithson’s pencil drawing/handwriting of the
“heap of language” is consigned to paper by the artist’s hand without any mediation,
Acconci is foregrounding the constraints of mechanical presentation and reproduction
typical of the printed page, with its neat layered configuration of letters and words
embedded in the Western conventional framework of reading and writing (left-right,
up-down). Acconci stresses not only the “monumentality” of language, its status of
“printed matter”, but also the spatiality of the page and the situated or localized nature
of printed words. Moreover, he considers words to be “props for movement” (Acconci,
“Notes on Work. 1967-1970”, Moure, 350), that is landmarks in and catalysts of a
journey across the materiality of the page, a journey often regulated by constraints
imposed by the writer himself. In some of Acconci’s early texts, the choice of words is
dictated by the reliance on other printed texts, most of the time archival, encyclopedic
and systematic in nature – telephone directories, dictionaries, maps – whose order is
dominated by clear principles of listing, exhaustiveness and visual presentation.
Accepting the “set parameters” of writing does not prevent Acconci from inventing
other parameters. Thus, “Contacts/Contexts (Frame of reference): ten pages of reading
Roget’s Thesaurus” offers a selection of dictionary definitions, from “existence” to
“insanity” (Acconci, 2006a, 229-238). The page numbers of the chosen entries are
always indicated, pointing to the randomness of the selection. The final entry
(“insanity”) is truncated, ending lamely in “bereft of reason, de-” (238). The constraint
of only reproducing certain lines and not paying attention to the overall meaning and
to the continuity of semantic development leads Acconci to dismantle received notions
of completeness, just as he is literally dismantling the definition of the word “insanity”.
Again, a spatial kind of thought and action is at work, in an attempt at disorienting the
reader away from predictable patterns of reading and interpretation: “words have
charge, they develop an orientation in the reader. Therefore, it is the work of the art
situation to jolt the reader out of that orientation. That work cannot be accomplished
by playing up to that orientation, by repeating that ‘charge’” (Acconci in a 1969 letter
to Clayton Eshleman quoted in Acconci, 2006a, xiv).
13 Another line of playful action consists in focusing on specific parts of the page (right/
left/up/down). The “Transference” series (1969) also follows a principle of dictionary
selection, but instead of targeting individual entries, it focuses on individual letters
that can be found at the end of each line (Acconci, 2006a, 241-275). Concentrating on

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 5

the “left margin: from page 1, Roget’s Thesaurus (St. Martin’s Press, 1965) to page 241”,
this “installation” (as Acconci calls it) reproduces the vertical line of letters to the far
right of the chosen pages, leaving the rest of the page blank. The word “installation” is
of course significant of an artistic analogy at work, as Liz Kotz suggests: “An
‘installation’ of words on the physical space of the page analogous to an installation of
objects in the physical space of a room, his poems use words as objects to be
accumulated, arranged, stacked, dispersed, and moved” (Kotz, 156). Other Thesaurus
“installations” interact with different pages in the dictionary, in a long series that
draws attention to the horizontality and verticality of the lines on the page. This looks
like a variation on the conventional metaphor of textuality as a form of weaving, an
intertwining of the warp and weft. Here, rather than leading to the composition of a
text through layering and gradual, sequential addition, the process of selection
functions as a radical decomposition of an existing text which is stripped of the
majority of its words and lines. A single vertical line subsists, a minimal and
meaningless tower of Babel made of stranded letters that draw attention to the large
blank of the empty page it towers above. Although it seems to make tabula rasa of the
initial text that constitutes its raw material and point of departure, this left margin
installation points to the limitlessness of what lies beyond the vertical line, inside and
outside the book (especially outside, where Acconci will soon venture to play new
games). The left margin as elected survivor of a slashed text points to a form of un-
framing, since a single limit remains out of four. In a conversation with Shelley Jackson,
Acconci discusses these “installations” as resulting from a need to escape the linearity
of the page. Jackson shifts the discussion to the contemporary context of electronic
literature and contends that she attempts to do the same in electronic form, since the
hypertext is “more of a space than a path”, three-dimensional rather than bi-
dimensional (Acconci in conversation with Shelley Jackson). Jackson’s contemporary
perspective sheds light on the points of convergence between the experiments of a
writer/artist like Acconci, reflecting on how to evade linearity in the 1970s, and recent
hypertextual works.
14 Acconci’s transference piece that deals with “the right boundary of a road map, New
York” (Acconci, 2006a, 312) or his “Set/Reset” series list the place names that are
spatially on the edge of the chosen map and transports them on a different page, in a
different context, disengaging them from the visual and linguistic system of
cartographic representation. While notions of spatiality link the New York map and the
transference piece, their connections to the world outside and their reasons for being
on the page are utterly distinct: the map offers an abstract model of a given city and
purports to function as an instrument of orientation, but Acconci’s transfer of place
names in a distinct writing situation discards their referential function and makes
them utterly irrelevant, also creating an enclosed space of linguistic enumeration. In
his conversation with Shelley Jackson, Acconci claims that he never wanted to write
about something, but that he wanted to write something. He also famously stated that he
uses “language to cover a page rather than uncover meaning” (quoted in Kotz, 167, and
also used as a title of Craig Dworkin’s anthology of early texts by Acconci). These
selected place names are a case in point, since they are by definition referential, but are
here made to renounce their transitive “aboutness”.
15 The transference pieces that relocate selected words and letters from telephone
directories, maps and dictionaries into texts signed by Vito Acconci suggest a relational
practice in which existing texts are privileged interlocutors in the elaboration of an

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 6

experience of language, spatiality and materiality. In this practice Acconci includes not
only official listings and systems of representation, but also the texts of other poets, for
instance Ezra Pound’s “Alba” (included in Lustra, 1913): “As cool as the pale wet leaves/
of lily-of-the-valley/She lay beside me in the dawn”. The modernism of Pound and
Stein are certainly influential in Acconci’s poetics (especially Stein’s “concision and
attention to placement”, according to Kotz, 154), leading to a dialogue in Acconci’s “My
performance of Ezra Pound’s ‘Alba’”:
(For example,) As cool (and cooling)
(Furthermore,) as the pale (until paler)
(Well,) wet (, in fact ,) leaves
(in a manner of speaking, if you leave it to me)
of (live – no, ) lily-of-the-valley (They run down
from the hills)
(The reason is that) She lay (there, to the right)
(That is to say, ) beside me (, in addition)
(see) (knee) (plea)
(17.) in (18.) the (19.) dawn.
(She was ON the lawn OF the valley, all IN all)
(Acconci, 2006a, 130)
16 The omnipresence of parentheses is characteristic of many of Acconci’s poetic pieces of
the 1960s.7 Here, the parenthesis is the marker of recurrent interruption, addition and
annotation. Acconci initiates a dialogic game of poetic compositions running along
each other, with the primary discourse in italics and the parenthetical commentary
intervening as a parasitical, interstitial voice. The playfulness of his rereading and
rewriting of Pound’s “Alba” is ruled by certain constraints having to do with the
euphony of words that recall other words (“me”/”see”/”knee”/”plea”), the completion
of sentences that are modulated by more precise spatial remarks (“there, to the right”),
the numbering of words (in the final line), the desire to specify or rephrase (“For
example”, “Furthermore”). Moreover, as Dworkin points out, Acconci’s performance of
Pound’s “Alba” “loosens the joints of Pound’s tightly wrought imagistic lyric by
referencing larger rhetorical structures in which it might be embedded” (Dworkin,
“Fugitive Signs”, 103). This game of textual parsing with its inherent intrusiveness is
also present in 0 to 9, where Acconci’s long poem “ON” is spliced between works by
Guillaume Appolinaire, Aram Saroyan, John Giorno, and Clark Coolidge (Kotz, 160).
17 The parenthesis is not just a graphic device of segmentation and the sign of an
intervention. It also reflects a meandering logic suggesting the need to undermine
(again) the linearity of the sentence and to block its flow to completion. In his
conversation with Shelley Jackson, Acconci expresses his love of Faulkner, especially of
the latter’s extensive use of parentheses: “That’s why I loved Faulkner. There’s always a
parenthesis, there’s always something that stops that sentence from going to its goal
that is a period” (Acconci in conversation with Shelley Jackson).
18 Obstacles to syntactic fulfillment, the parentheses become emblematic of a textual
construction that is derivative, fragmentary and interested primarily in the visual and
material configurations of language on the page (what Smithson called the
“monumentality” of words). Parentheses are also symptomatic of Acconci’s reliance on
and play with existing conventions of writing. One of the models he acknowledges in
this respect is the art of Jasper Johns and his use of existing material (maps, targets,
numbers, alphabet letters): “I wanted to do writing like that. What jolted me about
Jasper Johns was how important it is to start with a convention, how important it is to

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 7

start with what everybody knows and everybody takes for granted, whether it’s a
number, an alphabet letter, a set of alphabet letters, a target...” (Acconci in
conversation with Shelley Jackson). Acconci’s games of transference, relocation and
intertextual intervention are restricted to the space of the page and its “set
parameters”, but the question of exploring similar concerns in other spaces is soon
formulated, leading the writer into the street.

"Following Piece"
19 Acconci describes his first evasions into the street as a way of “breaking the margins”
of the page and of the house, the same margins that he had strived to construct by
painstakingly transferring words from other texts into his own:
Before I did work in an art context, I was writing poetry. My first pieces, in an art-
context, were activities in the street: this excursion into the street could be seen as
an attempt to leave home, a home shaped by the contact of writing-person and
desk-top, through means of paper and pen and defined by the boundaries of light.
The sheet of paper, looked down at on the desk, was analogous to the plan-view of a
house; going out into the street was a way of literally breaking the margins,
breaking out of the house and leaving the paper behind. (Acconci, “Projections of
Home”, Moure, 388)
20 “Following Piece” is an activity – as Acconci chose to call it – performed for the exhibit
“Street Works IV” organized and sponsored by the Architectural League of New York in
1969.8 Located in New York City, the activity covered over three weeks in October 1969
and consisted in following strangers in the street according to a certain number of
constraints. These constraints are of a different order than those present in Acconci’s
poetic work discussed above, but they partake of the same principle of establishing
arbitrary conventions meant to be observed in repeated situations. The major
difference however consists in the fact that this “activity” and those that followed are
no longer purely literary in nature, but rather physically anchored in an urban
environment and embedded in the “non-field” of art, contributing to the
dematerialization of the work of art and to its translation into process and
performance:
Each day I pick out, at random, a person walking in the street. I follow a different
person everyday; I keep following until that person enters a private place (home,
office, etc.) where I can’t get in. (The terms of the exhibition, “Street Works IV”,
were: to do a piece, sometime during the month, that used a street in New York
City. “Following Piece”, potentially, could use all the time allotted and all the space
available: I might be following people, all day long, everyday, through all the streets
in New York City. In actuality, following episodes ranged from two or three minutes
– when someone got into a car and I couldn’t grab a taxi, I couldn’t follow – to seven
or eight hours – when a person went to a restaurant, a movie...). (Acconci quoted in
Moure, 78)
21 A consequence of this activity-oriented “following piece” is that only traces of the
event can subsist, especially artist’s notes and photographs, which were exhibited by
“Street Works”: http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/
190036953. Also, a precise and detailed logbook of following was produced, specifying
not only the time and place, but also certain characteristics of the person followed
(color of clothes and gender):

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 8

October 3
9:12AM, in front of door, 102 Christopher St, my home: Man in gray suit – he walks
W on Christopher, S side of street.
9:17AM: he gets into car parked outside post office, Christopher & Greenwich, and
drives away.
October 4
9:25AM, Christopher St & Bleecker, SW corner: Woman in black coat – she walks E
on Christopher, N side of street.
9:28AM: she walks into A&P, Christopher St & 7th Ave.
9:59AM: she leaves A&P and walks W on Christopher.
10:03AM: she enters building, 95 Christopher St.
(http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/acconci_followingtext.html)
22 The combination of constraint and invention (constraint-cum-repetition as a basic
principle of action and invention of a new form of art) is a salient feature of Acconci’s
performances. The very idea of “following” sets into motion the double, contradictory
dynamic of hommage and parody, involving rereading, appropriation and distortion of
existing models. In this respect, any comparison needs to be nuanced. “Following
Piece” certainly looks like a game reminiscent of Surrealist and Dadaists urban games, 9
but they develop within distinct conceptual frameworks. Whereas Surrealism and
Dadaism viewed the city and psychic life as mutually dependent, conflated entities
linked by what Rosalind Krauss calls a “double arrow” (“Nightwalkers”, 33-38), Acconci
does not include the psyche among the dimensions that are relevant in the elaboration
of his urban artistic practice. If the acts of following and wandering in the city lead to
observation, amazement, boredom, discovery or unexpected encounters that leave a
mark on the walking subject, these are left untold because they are not meant to shape
the performance and to play a role in its conception and transmission. Moreover, the
Surrealists and Dadaists chose the city as the privileged site of exploration and
articulation of a new artistic idiom because of its climactic and unsurpassed
embodiment of modernity (a status first theorized by Baudelaire in “The Painter of
Modern Life” in 1863). This is not the case here, where New York can only indirectly be
seen as a site of modernity (which is certainly true because of the huge and varied
amount of literary and artistic experimentation going on there in the 1960s). But urban
modernity is not the point and Acconci is not an avatar of Baudelaire’s flâneur that lets
the kaleidoscopic spectacle of the city sink in and experiences the intoxication it
induces. The disorientation and defamiliarization of the familiar sought by the dérive
are not at stake here either. The precise, neutral notations of time and place show that
the artist is moving across well-known territory and does not seek to get lost and
experience the city in novel, confrontational ways, in the way the Situationists did,
although a subversive dimension underlies the equivalence that is elaborated between
surveillance and following.10
23 Following Piece is only remotely connected to the writers and artists of the flânerie and
dérive. The connection begs to be made and repetition is certainly intrinsic to the act of
following a person in the street the way one would follow an artistic predecessor. Also,
Following Piece has no manifest link to earlier precursors like Poe’s tale “The Man of the
Crowd” (1840), which is the first text to present and make problematic the situation of
following a stranger in the street. Acconci never singles out Poe’s short story as a
source of inspiration or a model, but his piece and Poe’s text are often mentioned
together in discussions of artistic experiments investing urban space and generating
patterns of walking and following.11 Poe’s text appears as a relevant term of

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 9

comparison that is spontaneously associated with Acconci and others, but a

rapprochement in terms of sources is difficult to support. This is not a Borgesian case of
artists choosing their predecessors in a spirit of affinity, but rather a case of writers
(Poe) and artists (Acconci) creating works in different media and producing similar
external patterns (walking, following, urban setting) that have widely distinct
significances and are triggered by divergent concerns.
24 Acconci is looking for a reason to walk in the city and roam its streets (as stated in his
notes). He finds such a reason by submitting himself to the will of another in a
repetitive way that constitutes what he calls a “scheme” (Taylor et al., 39). In an essay
on Sophie Calle, whose shadowing performances and repetitive acts are reminiscent of
Acconci’s, Yve-Alain Bois discusses Calle’s “monomania”: “she fills up the emptiness of
daily life with the teleological overflow of her idée fixe; she blots out all disorder, or at
least tames it, in submitting to the absolute control of inalienable protocols” (49). Such
“inalienable protocols” are Acconci’s staple, and their immutability and teleology is
related to the modus operandi of games.
25 Despite fundamental dissimilarities, a particular feature of flânerie remains: Acconci is
exploring the limits between private and public space (following a person until he or
she entered a private space) and thus engaging in a potentially criminal pattern that is
one of the hallmarks of the traditional flâneur (especially in Poe’s short story, where the
“man of the crowd” is taken to represent the very figure of criminality, although the
narrator is of course also performing a criminal gesture in following him). In his
analysis of “Following Piece”, Tom McDonough brings into discussion Walter
Benjamin’s explicit connection between the flâneur and crime: “No matter what trace
the flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime” (Benjamin in
McDonough, 101).12
26 Acconci was particularly interested in sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on relations in
public, the territories of the self, the fashioning of the self in public, body language,
social regulations, acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Goffman’s book The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959. The social values of following
and its criminal undertones are Acconci’s focus in Following Piece. Similarly, in Proximity
Piece (1970) Acconci came closer and closer to visitors in an exhibition, invading their
privacy.
27 Some critics have pointed out the fundamental linguistic models of this game of
following and of Acconci’s performances in general, but it is difficult to agree with Liz
Kotz’s pronouncement that such performances are entirely nontheatrical:
Performance in Acconci’s work has no resemblance to a strategic resuscitation of
theater’s archaic roots in ritual. Instead, working from language, Acconci is among
the handful of artists who helped generate a new, entirely nontheatrical
performance of the human body as a material subjected to physical and durational
operations. [...] While many actions do not entail speech or talk, language is
preserved at another level, to generate conventions that structure actions: a subject
acts on an object, acts on itself, uses other subjects as surrogates to act, acts on
other subjects, and so on. (Kotz, 165)
28 Erving Goffman’s sociological analysis of relations in public uses the language of drama,
and so does Acconci’s activity. In his theoretical writings, Acconci does express a
distrust of the word “performance” on the grounds that it is implicitly associated with
the theater as a traditional space of representation that creates a separation between
performer and audience (Acconci, “Performance after the Fact”, Moure, 353). In this

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 10

sense, his performances are not a “resuscitation” of a canonical type of dramatic

production. However, Acconci’s “performances” or “activities” still retain a strong
performative, theatrical dimension that cannot be reduced to linguistic models and
that play with existing social conventions formalized through the language of theater
(performing movement, putting on a face...).
29 While in Following Piece the underlying linguistic structure is implied, other
performances Acconci created are hybrids between poetry and activity:
(Around 1968) my conception of poetry was starting to change just then, heading
more towards performance-type pieces. [...] The idea was to conceive of a situation,
to create all the conditions for a performance that wouldn’t be limited to the
printed page, but would use other means as well. For example: record a text on
tape, reading it as fast as possible. Or pick up a letter that had been left on a table at
a coffee shop by some unknown customer, and use it as the starting point for a new
idiom, a new phrase. In other words, it was no longer just about writing poetry, but
about situating it in real space. Transfer things so that it was no longer just a
question of reading poetry, but acting it out. (Acconci interviewed by Christopher
Wavelet, 26)
30 The page becomes a counterpart to artistic events taking place in the street: “the page
as a map (make reading time equivalent to the time required to perform an activity in
outside space)” (Moure, 350). The aim of disorienting the viewer/reader is combined
and overlapped in acts that stand at the crossroads of poetry reading and performance.
While Acconci’s performances that investigate urban space aim at disorienting the
viewer, they often play with very precise coordinates (especially in New York) that
allow one to generate an abstract map of the city and to situate the artist on the map.
Terry Fox recalls what may have been Acconci’s last poetry reading:
Vito walked from his apartment to the place where the reading was held and every
block that he walked he phoned in to the place and they put it on speakers and he
announced “now I am on 42nd street” and described the situation. And of course he
never made it in time to give an actual reading. (Acconci, 2006a, xii)
31 This acte manqué concerns the actual reading (the one that is expected by the audience).
The artist’s future presence is announced by telephone and his voice becomes the only
trace of his person, a harbinger of a presence to come. The very careful monitoring of
his trajectory through precise spatial indications is counterbalanced by that “jolting
out” act of disorienting the audience. This vocal mapping of New York is made up of a
series of announcements that function as locative specifications whose aim is to report
on his getting closer to the site of the poetry reading. The repeated announcements
offer information about an event that will never happen, transforming the reading into
a Beckettian Waiting for Acconci.

"The American Gift"

32 Acconci stopped performing in 1974, but his metamorphic quest for new forms in new
media continued in the same playful spirit of experimentation grounded in spatial and
linguistic concerns. From 1974 to 1979 he made a series of installations often using
video and sound, mainly in gallery spaces, frequently constructing rooms within the
rooms of exhibition spaces. While his first installations, like Memory Box III (1974),
focused on the self, subjectivity, and memory, his later installations give prominence to

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 11

cultural and ideological concerns, and rely on the extensive use of slide projections and
audiotapes with the artist’s voice.
33 One of the works representative of this new, ideologically-oriented phase, is The
American Gift (1976), an American gift to Europe and an installation containing a
minimalist sculpture at its center. The American Gift (commissioned and first exhibited
at the CAPC-Museum of contemporary art in Bordeaux in 1976, now in the permanent
collection of the Centre Pompidou) is a black box in a white cubicle with entrances at
the four corners, with benches or chairs placed along the walls. In the middle of the
cubicle, hanging from the ceiling, the black box (eight feet high, four feet square)
hovers one foot above the floor. A strip of blue light is glowing along the four sides of
the cube, at the bottom. A speaker is installed inside the box. Acconci’s voice utters
sentences in English and French addressing “the Europeans”: “You are the Europeans.
You wait and see. You don’t have to speak for yourselves. You have America at the back
of your minds Listen, listen. L’Amérique parle. America speaks. Écoutez: la, la, la, la.
Repeat. Répétez: la, la, la, la. You learn the language”. The “Europeans”, a French man
and woman with robot-like voices repeat his words, transforming the personal
pronouns from “you” into “we”: “Nous sommes les Européens. [...] Nous apprenons la
langue”. The tape also contains snippets of music (songs, classical music) introduced by
Acconci in the manner of a radio broadcast: “Quiet if you please. One minute of
America”.13 According to Acconci’s explanations, “the Europeans ‘learn’ the American
message” (Taylor et al., 31). The tape lasts forty-two minutes and reminds one of The
Voice of America, the American radio station that broadcast American values and culture
to the world during the Cold War (and not only). 1976 marks the celebration of the
bicentennial of the United States and The American Gift reflects ironically on the
linguistic and cultural “gifts” that the United States have disseminated to the world
ever since, and on their effects of repetition.
34 Such a work gives a new dimension to the discussion of games, playing and performing,
since it shows Acconci evolving in a new space, that of the museum, carrying a new set
of assumptions. "The American Gift" is a reflection on dominant discourses (American
in particular), both ideological and artistic, but also on the canon and the institutional
venues used to legitimize cultural models. Acconci’s previous performances and body-
oriented work had deliberately shunned the museum and had shifted the
interrogations that led to a new aesthetic paradigm away from it, into the street and
onto the human body. However, the extensive use of photography to document
conceptual art and performance art, as well as Land Art, in the 1960s still made the
museum relevant for the varied attempts to forge original artistic languages, which
insisted precisely on the break with the museum tradition. 14 Acconci acknowledges the
role of photography and the museum in the context of his performances:
I wonder if, in the back of my mind, there wasn’t the urge to prove myself as an
artist, prove myself a serious artist, make my place in the art-world: in order to do
this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery and museum was
meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that my work couldn’t,
shouldn’t, have the finished quality of a photograph, my work was an event and a
process that couldn’t, shouldn’t, be stilled by a camera and hung up on a gallery
wall – all the while I was claiming that my work was meant to subvert the enclosure
of museum and gallery). (Acconci, “Notes on My Photographs. 1969-1970”, Moure,
349)

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 12

35 In this complex quest for artistic legitimacy meant at the same time to subvert the
canonical channels and venues of legitimation, Acconci started outside the museum,
then moved inside, then left again to found Acconci Studio in 1988, with a focus on
public spaces.
36 Through the artworks exhibited in museums and galleries, Acconci passed to a new
stage, where what is exhibited in the museum is no longer the trace of a past event, but
rather an object anchored in the here and now, contemplated and experienced by a
viewer. One of the parameters in Acconci’s linguistic and performance games that still
needs to be discussed is the place and role of the reader/spectator/viewer. In the
textual games of his early writings, founded on repeated situations of constraint, the
reader is drawn into the closed space of the page and invited to move along with the
various shifts, transferences and relocations. In Following Piece, the performance blends
seamlessly into the texture of daily life and the urban environment, without any
distinctive sign drawing attention to it. The spectator is absent, implied as a potential
post factum presence through the contemplation of retrospective photographs and the
reading of detailed notes about schedules, movement and location. Allan Kaprow’s
happenings, on the contrary, drew attention to themselves as scripted events and
relied upon the spontaneous emergence of an audience. Acconci’s Proximity Piece, by
invading the privacy of the visitors in a museum gallery in an intrusive way,
embarrassed and harassed the viewer, forcing him to leave. No longer a passive
spectator, such a viewer is targeted in order to be an unwitting partner in the
performance itself, a vulnerable interlocutor in a game of undesired proximity that
tests the limits of socially acceptable behaviour. In other works, like The American Gift,
the museumgoer’s traditional stance is not reinvented or challenged. He or she is
thematized in the work itself, which triggers a process of identification staged in
cultural terms having to do with the relationship between Europe and the United
States.
37 The black box in American Gift, opaque and impenetrable, cannot be opened: its status of
gift remains doubtful since what is inside is invisible and inaccessible (perhaps better
so, since any such such box is potentially a Pandora’s box or a Trojan horse). Its
monolithic appearance, the darkness and the solemn voices emphasize its totemic and
oracular character, and the aura of blue light has connotations of epiphany. The black
box is akin to a minimalist sculpture, reminding one of Robert Morris’s monumental
slabs of stone – see for instance his Untitled (Slab) of 1962. Unlike the Statue of Liberty, a
gift from France to the United States, The American Gift is not a triumphant
acknowledgement of exceptionalism, but rather a performance in skepticism. The
viewer identifies with one or the other of the voices he hears (or both) while
contemplating the immobile massiveness of the black box hovering above the floor.
The audio performance pulls him or her in, inviting identification with the Europeans
and/or the Americans, but also suggesting a lucid distance towards the models and
authorities discussed. A game of irony is played, with the same dimensions of
constraint and freedom that we have seen at work previously: the constraint to admit
one’s involvement in this process of cultural circulation, but also the freedom to
criticize it.
38 The piece encapsulates the deep awareness of a specific cultural situation of exchange,
contact, transmission and circulation between Europe and the United States. As an
American artist, Acconci feels bound to foreground his Americanness, and also to

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 13

reflect on the prestige and resonance of the American cultural model. This grounding
in Americanism, although deeply parodic, is triggered in part by Acconci’s desire to
foreground his status of American artist with a foreign sounding name: “Call me
Ishmael, call me Vito Acconci. My obsession with Americanism comes, perhaps, from
my having a very un-American name. I have to prove myself an American...” (Acconci,
“Home-Bodies. An Introduction to My Work. 1984-1985”, Moure, 381). Paradoxically,
the artist who exposes the dominance of American models attempts precisely to be
recognized as an American artist, with all the implicit significance encoded in this
status, in a French museum context. “Call me Ishmael”, with its reference to Melville’s
Moby-Dick (1851) and to Charles Olson’s Call me Ishmael (1947), anchors Acconci in the
canon of American literature, but also suggests a process of reinvention based on this
canon.
39 ***
40 It is precisely in this playful appropriation of existing forms and in the multifarious
transformation Acconci submits them to that one finds a key to understanding his art,
characterized by a constant change of media, spaces and points of view, also by a
changing relationship to the reader or viewer. The various shifts in spaces (the printed
page, the street, the museum) always show a balance between freedom and constraint,
playfulness and dutiful exercise, premeditated performance and arbitrariness,
knowledge of existing models and pleasure in playfully dismantling them. An
exploration of play, games and performance at several levels and in several distinct art
situations, Acconci’s texts, activities and artworks represent gifts (“American gifts”)
that we can choose to open or not, but that challenge and disturb us even in not
opening them. His work does not represent an answer, but a series of questions and
questionings that embark us on the quest for novelty and renewal in the literature and
art of the 1960s and beyond.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Works Cited

ACCONCI, Vito, photographs of Following Piece (1969) : http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/

search-the-collections/190036953 (retrieved on May 2nd 2013)

---, Following Piece text (1969): http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/

acconci_followingtext.html (retrieved on May 2nd 2013)

---, video recording of The American Gift (1976) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=cm7HSugLqRs (retrieved on May 2nd 2013)

---, Audio CD of The American Gift (1976), Electronic Arts Intermix.

ACCONCI, Vito interviewed by Christopher Wavelet in Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio, Musée des
beaux-arts de Nantes/Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2005.

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 14

---, The Early Writings of Vito Acconci. Language to Cover a Page, ed. Craig Dworkin, Boston, MIT Press,
2006a.

---, and Bernadette Mayer (eds.), 0 to 9, New York, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006b.

---, in conversation with Shelley Jackson, The Believer Magazine, December 2006-January 2007:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200612/?read=interview_acconci (retrieved on May 2 nd
2013)

BOIS, Yve-Alain, “Paper Tigress”, October, vol. 116, Spring 2006, 35-54.

BROTCHIE, Alastair and Mel Gooding (eds.), A Book of Surrealist Games, Boston & London, Redstone,
1995.

COCKER, Emma, “Desiring to Be Led Astray”, Papers of Surrealism, Issue 6, Autumn 2007, 1-30.

DWORKIN, Craig, “Fugitive Signs”, October, vol. 95, Winter 2001, 90-113.

FOGLE, Douglas (ed.), The Last Picture Show. Artists Using Photography: 1960-1982, Minneapolis,
Walker Art Center, 2003.

GOFFMAN, Erving, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, Anchor, 1959.

GREENBERG, Clement, “Towards a New Laocoon”, Partisan Review, July-August 1940, 296-310.

HERTZBERG, Lars, “Language-games and private language”, in Kelly Dean Jolley, Wittgenstein. Key
Concepts, Durham, Acumen Publishing, 2010, 41-50.

KOTZ, Liz, Language to Be Looked at. Language in 1960s Art, Boston, MIT Press, 2007.

KRAUSS, Rosalind, “Nightwalkers”, Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, Spring 1981, 33-38.

KRAUSS, Rosalind, A Voyage on the North Sea. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London &
New York, Thames & Hudson, 2000.

MCDONOUGH, Tom, “The Crimes of the Flâneur”, October, vol. 102, Fall 2002, 101-22.

MELVILLE, Stephen, “How Should Acconci Count for Us? Notes on a Retrospect”, October, vol. 18,
Autumn 1981, 79-89.

MOURE, Gloria (ed.), Vito Acconci, Barcelona, Poligrafa, 2001.

OWENS, Craig, “Earthwords”, October, vol. 10, Autumn 1979, 120-30.

POGGI, Christine, “Following Acconci/Targeting Vision”, in Amelia Jones & Andrew Stephenson
(eds.), Performing the Body/Performing the Text, London, Routledge, 1999, 255-272.

SALZANI, Carlo, Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality, Bern, Peter Lang,
2008.

SHAPIRO, Gary, “Printed Matter: A Heap of Language”, in Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after
Babel, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, 153-190.

SMITHSON, Robert, “Language to be looked at and/or things to be read” (1967), in The Collected
Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996.

TAYLOR, Mark S., Frazer Ward, Mark C. Taylor, Jennifer Bloomer, Vito Acconci, New York,
Phaidon, 2002.

THOMAS, Levin Y., Ursula Frohne, Peter Weibel (eds.), CTR-L Space. Rhetorics of Surveillance from
Bentham to Big Brother, Boston, MIT Press, 2002.

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 15

NOTES
1. Some critics point out the continuities between his texts and performances and claim that
Acconci only gave up the page to explore similar concerns in different forms. See especially Craig
Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs”, October, vol. 95, Winter 2001, 90-113.
2. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a New Laocoon”, Partisan Review, July-August 1940, 296-310.
3. Lars Hertzberg, “Language-games and private language”, in Kelly Dean Jolley, Wittgenstein. Key
Concepts, Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2010, 41-50.
4. Conversely, Wittgenstein’s writing is both philosophical and literary. Marjorie Perloff quotes
Terry Eagleton: “What is it about this man, whose philosophy can be taxing and philosophical
enough, which so fascinates the artistic imagination?” (Perloff, 714). Marjorie Perloff, “Writing
Philosophy as Poetry: Literary Form in Wittgenstein”, in Oskari Kuusela & Marie McGinn (eds.),
The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, 714-728.
5. Reprinted as Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer (eds.), 0 to 9, New York: Ugly Duckling Presse,
2006.
6. A related work by Smithson is Strata. A Geophotographic Fiction (1970), in Smithson, The Collected
Writings, 75-77. Further analyses can be found in Gary Shapiro, “Printed Matter: A Heap of
Language”, in Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997, 153-190, and Craig Owens, “Earthwords”, October, vol. 10, Autumn 1979, 120-130. The
title of Liz Kotz’s study of the linguistic turn in the conceptual art of the 1960s in New York City is
inspired by Smithson: Words to Be Looked at. Language in 1960s Art.
7. Liz Kotz places the use of parentheses in the larger literary and artistic context of the 1950s
and 60s (Kotz, 154).
8. Other artists who participated include Arakawa, Bernadette Mayer, Les Levine, Scott Burton,
Eduardo Costa, Marjorie Strider, John Perrault.
9. See Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding (eds.), A Book of Surrealist Games, Redstone: Boston &
London, 1995.
10. The audiences to which preliminary versions of this paper were presented (at the School of
English of the University of Kent at Canterbury in February 2013, and on a panel dealing with
“Revisiting the art of walking” at the annual conference of the American Association of
Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto in April 2013) were extremely sensitive to
the surveillance component in Following Piece and connected it to the contemporary social and
political issue of urban surveillance. Acconci’s piece features in a well-documented exhibition
catalogue about the long relationship between art and surveillance: Levin Y. Thomas, Ursula
Frohne, Peter Weibel (eds.), CTR-L Space. Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother,
Boston: MIT Press, 2002.
11. See Tom McDonough, “The Crimes of the Flâneur”, October 102, fall 2002, 101-122. See also
Emma Cocker, “Desiring to Be Led Astray”, Papers of Surrealism, issue 6, autumn 2007, 1-30.
12. On Benjamin’s interest in detective fiction see Carlo Salzani, “The City as a Crime Scene.
Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective”, in Constellations of Reading. Walter Benjamin in
Figures of Actuality, Bern: Peter Lang, 2008, 92-112.
13. A video recording can be found on the internet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=cm7HSugLqRs. The audio CD is available from Electronic Arts Intermix.
14. Cf. Douglas Fogle (ed.), The Last Picture Show. Artists Using Photography: 1960-1982, Minneapolis,
Walker Art Center, 2003.

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013
 Vito Acconci. Spaces of Play 16

RÉSUMÉS
Cet article explore les écrits et l’art de Vito Acconci sous l’angle de la notion de jeu, au sens
ludique et théâtral. Plusieurs exemples sont analysés, choisis parmi ses œuvres littéraires et
artistiques (des textes écrits au début de sa carrière ; Following Piece – exemple inaugural de l’art
de la performance, ainsi que The American Gift, qui combine son et sculpture dans un contexte
muséal). Acconci trouve un équilibre entre liberté et contrainte. Il joue avec des modèles
existants selon des protocoles préétablis à la façon d’un jeu et réinvente continuellement sa
pratique artistique.

This article offers an investigation of Vito Acconci’s writings and art from the point of view of
play, understood as game and performance. Various examples are analyzed, both literary and
artistic (early texts, the emblematic Following Piece, which was one of the earliest examples of
performance art, and The American Gift, combining sound and sculpture in a museum space).
Acconci strikes a balance between freedom and constraint, playing with existing models
according to set protocols in game-like fashion and offering a constantly renewed artistic
practice.

INDEX
Mots-clés : Vito Acconci, art conceptuel, art de la performance, langage et matérialité, jeux, les
espaces de l’art
Keywords : Vito Acconci, conceptual art, performance art, language and materiality, games and
play, the spaces of art

AUTEUR
MONICA MANOLESCU
Université de Strabourg

Transatlantica, 2 | 2013