Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci (Writing Art) - Hardcover

Acconci, Vito

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262012243 ISBN 13: 9780262012249

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2006

Synopsis

Poems and other texts from the 1960s by a pioneering conceptual artist that show a continuity with his subsequent work in performance and video art.

Pioneering conceptual artist Vito Acconci began his career as a poet. In the 1960s, before beginning his work in performance and video art, Acconci studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop and published poems in journals and chapbooks. Almost all of this work remains unknown; much of it appeared in the self-produced magazines of the Lower East Side's mimeo revolution, and many other pieces were never published. Language to Cover a Page collects these writings for the first time and not only shows Acconci to be an important experimental writer of the period, but demonstrates the continuity of his early writing with his later work in film, video, and performance.

Language to Cover a Page documents a key moment in the unprecedented intersection of artists and poets in the late 1960s—as seen in the Dwan Gallery's series of "Language" shows (1967-1970) and in Acconci's own journal 0 to 9. Indeed, as Acconci moved from the poetry scene to the art world, his poetry became increasingly performative while his artwork was often structured and motivated by linguistic play.

Acconci's early writing recalls the work of Samuel Beckett, the deadpan voice of the nouveau roman, and the jump cuts and fraught permutations of the nouvelle vague. Poems in Language to Cover a Page explore the materiality of language ("language as matter and not ideas," as Robert Smithson put it), the physical space of the page, and the physicality of source texts (phonebooks, thesauruses, dictionaries). Other poems take the space of the page as an analogue to performance space or implicate the poem in a network of activity (as in his "Dial-a-Poem" pieces). Readers will find Acconci's inventive and accomplished poetry as edgy and provocative as anything published today.

About this title

About the Author

Conceptual artist Vito Acconci is known for his work in performance and video art.

Craig Dworkin, Professor in the English Department at the University of Utah, is the author of Reading the Illegible and the editor of Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci (MIT Press).

Reviews

Acconci has turned out to be one of the most stylistically diverse artists to come out of the 1960s conceptual movement, but his preoccupation with language has been a constant. As poet and scholar Dworkin's introduction notes, Acconci holds an Iowa Writer's Workshop M.F.A., and, with Bernadette Mayer in the late '60s, he edited the highly influential mimeographed journal 0 to 9. The pieces in this book, very few of which have been previously published and none of which has ever had wide distribution, do everything from reproducing the initial letter of every line of a page of Roget's Thesaurus to recounting his body's movements moment by moment—and then recounting the recounting. The works do what they're intended to do: represent artistic decision with an absolute minimum of content. They are often beautiful as orthographic arrangements, but they make for boring conventional reading. That boredom is part of the point, one that has been developed in different ways recently by Kenneth Goldsmith, Tan Lin and Brian Kim Stefans. It's an acquired taste for some (a problem exacerbated by the lack of notes here), but the strain of American art at work can be found in everything from Warhol to electronica. (Mar.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262012243
• ISBN 13: 9780262012249
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 428
• Editor: Dworkin Craig