Vito Acconic, Theme Song, 1973 video, 33 minutes sample dialogue: Look right in here, right into me. Oh look how my body’s waiting for you. We don’t have to worry about tomorrow, we don’t have to worry about forever, it just has to be about now. We don’t need any illusions, we don’t want any illusions, right? Sure, you can be on stage, you can be on stage with me. I’ll put you in the spotlight! I’ll admire you, I’ll love you. I’ll watch every move you make. You’re gonna let me be all alone. You’re gonna leave me before we even had a chance to get started. I’ll remember the time when we could’ve been together. Oh wouldn’t you have wanted to be a memory for me? Wouldn’t you have wanted to be fixed in my mind?

Vito Acconci activates ‘the gaze’ in a most aggressive and frustrating manner. The artist lies on a carpet­ — his face seemingly crushed up against the inside of the monitor's screen — attempting to seduce the viewer to join him in the space that he inhabits. It is a prolonged monologue, conducted an unpleasant, bar-stool tone of seedy, hasty need. Yet at times, watching this video, I thought about succumbing, if only to stem Acconci’s relentless flow of sleaze. But of course, this creature addressing me is not a person, it’s an artwork, and I am categorically, ontologically unable to join Acconci in his representational space, even when I reluctantly agree to do so. As viewers, we are both tantalized and rebuked. We gaze and the artwork appears to gaze back. We are implicated by the representational gaze, but it remains remote. As with Lacan’s glittering sardine can (see comments), we are not seen by that which we behold. Seduced, and then rejected­ — by an artwork! It’s shameful but it’s also deeply funny. I walked away from Theme Song laughing and feeling that despite (or because of), the existential gaps and voids, I’d been given a weird little gift. see the video here (but it's better full screen on a tv monitor)

Lacan's sardine can...

It's a true story. I was in my early twenties or thereabouts — and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country, say, or at sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time, Brittany was not industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn't all danger and excitement — there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that's what we called him — like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class — this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were supposed to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me — You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!

He found this incident highly amusing — I less so.

Excerpt from Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a,” in J. A. Miller (ed.), A. Sheridan (trans.), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Norton: 1978), p.95

I love that story. Excellent book too.
- J@simpleposie (guest) 10-21-2007 4:02 am

I have only read part of book. Planning to read more.
- sally mckay 10-22-2007 3:39 pm

http://www.risahorowitz.com/vito_me/index.html

love that vito!
- RSH (guest) 10-25-2007 7:55 am

Love that photo.

- L.M. 10-25-2007 9:39 am