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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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This week's little image assignment for school is about "the gaze."
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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? |
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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) |
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