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Embodiments of passing: Vito Acconci's poetics of frequency and Ta(g) A(c)t

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Embodiments of passing: Vito Acconci's poetics of frequency and Ta(g) A(c)t

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Content EMBODIMENTS OF PASSING: VITO ACCONCI’S POETICS OF FREQUENCY & TA(G) A(C)T by Richard Anthony Reid A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING) December 2007 Copyright 2007 Richard Anthony Reid ii Epigraph Artists are, above all, men who wish to become inhuman. — Guillaume Apollinaire iii Acknowledgements This work would not be possible without the insight and support of David St. John, Susan McCabe, Peggy Kamuf, Tony Kemp, Jim Kincaid and Marjorie Perloff; nor without the love and inspiration of Tupelo Hassman and Patricia and Robert Reid. Thank you. iv Table of Contents Epigraph ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures v Abstracts vi Part I: Critical Introduction: Frame 1 Introduction Endnotes 19 Chapter 1: Image 21 Chapter 1 Endnotes 45 Chapter 2: Embodiment 47 Chapter 2 Endnotes 72 Chapter 3: Frequency 74 Chapter 3 Endnotes 98 Conclusion: Lapse 100 Conclusion Endnotes 108 Part II: Creative Ta(g) A(c)t 109 References 168 v List of Figures Figure 1: Kasimir Malevich, Black Square (1915) 5 Figure 2: Bruce Nauman, Walking Around the Perimeter of a Square in an Exaggerated Manner (1967-68) 10 Figure 3: Vito Acconci, Middle of the World (1976) 12 Figure 4: Jasper Johns, 0 through 9 (1961) 22 Figure 5: Jasper Johns, 0 through 9 (1960) 22 Figure 6: Still from Videodrome (1983) 27 Figure 7: Lawrence Weiner, Various Manners with Various Things (1976) 27 Figure 8: Marcel Broodthaers, La Pense Bête (1964) 31 Figure 9: Vito Acconci, Where We are Now, Who are We Anyway? (1976) 35 Figure 10: Vito Acconci, Where We are Now, Who are We Anyway? (1976) 35 Figure 11: Vito Acconci, Centers (1971) 49 Figure 12: Richard Serra, Boomerang (1974) 50 Figure 13: Vito Acconci, Throw (1969) 61 Figure 14: Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, 0 to 9 (1969) 64 Figure 15: “Streetworks” Addendum (1969) 64 Figure 16: Vito Acconci, Following Piece (1969) 66 Figure 17: Pinot Gallizio, Cavern of Anti-Matter (1959) 76 Figure 18: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965) 82 Figure 19: Eadward Muybridge, Nude Descending Stairs (1887) 89 vi Figure 20: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) 89 Figure 21: Vito Acconci, Step Piece (1970) 89 Figure 22: Vito Acconci, “DROP (ON THE SIDE / OVER THE SIDE” (1969) 103 vii Abstracts Part I: EMBODIMENTS OF PASSING: VITO ACCONCI’S POETICS OF FREQUENCY In a 2003 interview, Vito Acconci points to the crucial moment of his artistic career as when he asked himself a “very obvious” question: “If I was so interested in movement why was I moving over an 8 ½ x 11 piece of paper? There’s a floor out there, there’s a ground, there’s a street, there’s a whole city.” While this statement reveals Acconci’s transition into, for lack of a better term, the visual art world, it also illuminates the relationship he has to his materials and media as one that thinks and moves beyond their limits. For Acconci, it his poetic process itself that “led [him] off the page” and into the fields of body and performance art, conceptual installation and, most recently, architecture. This text explores how Acconci’s technique of enacting the frame disrupts practical and conventional relationships to reading and writing as they re-articulate notions of reflexivity and image in the poetic ‘avant- garde.’ It is by closely examining the inter-relationships of specific textual, installation, video and performance works of Acconci that concerns of embodiment in the contemporary digital age are recast. Acconci shows us that the techniques of radical artistic production are less the undiscovered possibilities of the ‘new,’ as viii much as they are our ability to re-read and re-make the text through an enactment of the frame as movement. At the same time, a poetics of frequency is necessary for the possibility of future radical textual production so often lamented since the dawn of the digital age. Part II: TA(G) A(C)T “Ta(g) A(c)t” is a procedural text developed through an interpretive DNA shotgun sequencing of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. All of the words beginning with an ‘a,’ ‘t,’ ‘c,’ and ‘g’ of Stein’s original text are paired as the coding of nucleotides demand in DNA sequencing: (A)denine to (T)hymine and (C)ytosine to (G)uanine. The resultant text is then interspersed with the announcement of the completion of the Human Genome Project from the February, 16 th issue of Science magazine. The selection included here is an excerpt of a larger work. 1 Part I Introduction: Frame How does your mind function when you read? This question begins Vito Acconci’s “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME),” a ready- made poem built by appropriating and reframing 32 lines of Harry Shefter’s book, Faster Reading Self-Taught (1958). This question, however, also begins—as the heading to the poem explains—the time it takes for Acconci to walk a single city block of New York’s Chelsea district on a summer night: MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME) : the time taken for me to walk from 7 th Ave. & 17 th St. NE to 6 th Ave. & 17 th St. NW, June 30, 1969, beginning at 9PM Similar to many of the directives of Acconci’s early writing, the heading of “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME)” frames the work in a way that extends it 2 beyond the boundaries of the page and text. The ‘double move’ or ‘double time’ of Acconci’s poem is the duration it takes him to walk a Manhattan city block as it is mapped within the duration of the re-typed sentences of a book about teaching oneself how to speed-read. Acconci’s doubling of the frame, however, is neither the repetition of a similar act in different contexts, nor a re-interpretation of a static time frame, but a doubling of the viewer’s orientation to the work itself—a double exposure of reading and viewing in variable time frames. The multiple movements and possible times of “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME)” spark a productive relationship to textuality by insisting upon the reader’s ability to frame the work in multiple ways: to embody the text step by step down a Manhattan city block, or to embody the text word by word as we read. The opening question of Acconci’s poem is therefore apt, as “MOVE/ MOVES (DOUBLE TIME)” interrogates a singular conception and singular time of reading as a contemplative and stable transaction—or movement—between reader and text. The question, “How does your mind function when you read?,” of course, is originally Harry Shefter’s, that is now re-articulated in the new frame of Acconci’s poem and re-articulated again in Acconci’s physical act of walking a Chelsea District city block. The frame, therefore, becomes the vehicle for a double exposure—or triple exposure—of reading, the body and the world. However, while the opening question immediately guides us into a reflexivity toward both our reading process and the function of our mind, the interrogation of framing as inherent to both the subject and the possibility of a world and body is important to distinguish from a 3 mere modernist meta-poetic self-consciousness of the text that calls attention to its own making and limits as a poem. Acconci’s reflexivity is developed through a multiplying of the reading frame which illuminates an effective distinction in the world of radical writing that I would like to examine in detail; distinctions that too often get subsumed under the rubric of a ‘modernist’, or even, ‘contemporary avant-garde.’ As Dick Hebdige argues in his discussion of the heuristic importance of the space of improvisation in radical artistic production, the conflation of self-consciousness with reflexivity is now institutionalized in those versions of intellectual modernism favored in higher education and the contemporary arts that manage to support with equal equanimity the banal repetitions of a ‘transgressive’ aesthetic and the litigious excesses of the politically correct. 1 The point being that we miss the point. Too often we overlook the striations, rends, manifolds and linkages that radical writing introduces to poetics either in honor of traditional works or in our analysis of works that propose to “make it new.” As we will see, this tendency toward gloss—what could be seen as a totalization—becomes important not only in considering the radical work of Vito Acconci, but in reconsidering notions of embodiment in relation to poetics and the image of language in our contemporary age. I take heed of Hebdige for what I see as less a critique or attack, but as a call to discover the details and displacements of our history of radical writing; to approach radical writing, as Craig Dworkin states in his introduction to the early writings of Acconci, not for its “filiations or affinities 4 among works but by the extremity of their deviations… [for] the permission, or provocation, precisely to ‘do something else.’” 2 I will argue through Acconci’s writing that not only do we frame in order to produce our own bodies, but that the intervals—the spaces within framing itself—is where embodiment actually occurs. Juxtaposing the processes of Acconci’s written work with that of his visual work helps to emphasize the interplay—in fact the intervals—of framing that allow for a process of embodiment. Acconci’s work, therefore, serves as a reserve for poetic techniques that enact what Melanie Marino calls a “commutability between body and place,” ultimately asking “not only what does the space of the subject look like but what if the subject and space looked alike?” 3 To begin, let’s re-focus the frame. ♦ In a recent review of the 2007 art show “Black Square: Hommage à Malevich” at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, scholar and curator Margarita Tupitsyn argues that the show continues a ‘will to mysticism’ with regards to Kasimir Malevich’s painting Black Square (1915). Tupitsyn concludes that the show reveals how a “reluctance to accept Black Square on a strictly formal basis has endured,” 4 pointing out an unfortunate continuity to this day of Malevich’s fellow ‘avant-gardist’ Varvara Stepanova’s early critical question of the painting’s reception in 1919: “if we look at the square without any mystical faith, as if it were a real earthy fact, then what is it?” Tupitsyn’s point is well taken, as in order to develop the formal basis of 5 the frame as a lens through which to return to the radical poetics of Vito Acconci, we will have to abandon all mystical faith and re-position ourselves in relation to the frame itself. Fig. 1: Kasimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915. Oil on canvas, 53.3 x 53.3 cm. Photo: © State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Looking closer at Malevich’s Black Square, we begin to see a kind of negative exposure or figure ground reversal of a framed painting in its move to apparently black out the ‘painting’ and leave a white canvas ‘frame.’ Malevich’s square demands our attention elsewhere, thrusting the energy of the work away from the importance of the painting itself and beyond its edges. 5 As Tupitsyn argues, the Black Square is the culmination of a move Malevich had formulated in 1914 to make a complete break from the realm of representation in his work. Indeed, after its first showing in 1915 at “The Last Futurist Exhibition ‘0.10” in Petrograd (Saint 6 Petersburg), one could sense that the Black Square gave Malevich license to proclaim, as he did just a year later, that he had “destroyed the ring of the horizon, and escaped from the circle of things, from the horizon-ring which confines the artist and the forms of nature.” 6 Tupitsyn’s concern about the mystical mistranslation of Malevich’s move to abstraction gets right at what I would like to call the work’s move toward enaction—which is not merely an emphasis on the frame or exteriority of that which surrounds the artwork—but the very act of framing as a perceptual process that repositions the body across the borders of image, language and world. To clarify how I mean to use enaction, it is best we turn to what prevents the Black Square from bearing out what it insists. Again, as Tupitsyn states, all hope of releasing Malevich’s painting from the “charges of mysticism” in the Hamburg Kunsthalle’s show were “dispelled” from the start by curator Hubertus Gassner’s press release description of the painting as a “passage into another, spiritual world,” equating it with “the traditional conception of the icon as a visual representation of the next in this world.” 7 Gassner’s reflection upon the Black Square clings to the world of both mysticism and representation, overlooking even the basic formal inversion we discussed above, and reconciling the painting with a notion of representation as an apparent door or window to be entered—or, even, as an icon that represents the ‘next’ in this world. The difficulty of such a ‘mystified’ take on the work is that it maintains, not only a clear separation between work and world (the very crux of representation), but a clear separation between the work and viewer. To be fair, we have furthered the problem ourselves in our initial analysis of Black 7 Square. We too have regarded the painting as the inverse of a painting, thus identifying a clear differentiation and separation between ourselves and the painting, as well as between frame and painted surface. In the same way that Gassner, in his brief description, positions himself in line (notice “next” implying a chronological separation) to pass through the door of Malevich’s painting into the next world, we too have reconciled Black Square as a representation, albeit the representation painting’s reversal. Such a response of artistic upheaval is one that subtends a ‘shock’ value of the ‘avant-garde,’ serving to erase the complexity and diversity of its strategies. We must move on from here. So what is found there?—or, better, is this the right question with which to begin? Looking closer again, we realize that Malevich’s white frame is not a frame at all, but untreated canvas that enacts the frame as the painting and the painting as the frame. Malevich’s Black Square is not a frame waiting for our passage through it—a ‘horizon-ring’ which confines the viewer and painting to their positions—but, as he says, a victory over that horizon. Malevich enacts the frame beyond representation and renders the distinct separations of painting and viewer—as well as painting and world—into an infinite relation. In turn, Malevich’s frame establishes a reflexivity of the fact that we must frame, not just within our perception of his painting, but within every perception we make in order to separate and perceive our worlds. As the philosophy of Henri Bergson will help us establish, “to perceive is to immobilize” such that the “most apparent operation of the perceiving mind” is that it “marks out divisions in the continuity of the extended, simply following the 8 suggestions of our requirement and the needs of practical life.” 8 The enaction of the frame that I would like to see in Malevich’s Black Square, and ultimately in the early writings of Vito Acconci, is perhaps what leads to an impractical life; in fact, requires it of us. What we find in Black Square, therefore, over and over again—and due to the fact that we must find it over and over again—is that the structure of our perception in an act of framing is indistinguishable from the structure of our bodies and worlds. It is here that Gassner’s mention of “passage” in his description of Black Square becomes instructive toward what we want to describe as enaction. In his discussion of embodiment in the essay “The Reenchantment of the Concrete,” cognitive scientist Francisco Varela states that the overall concern of an enactive approach to perception is not to determine how some perceiver-independent world is to be recovered; it is, rather to determine which common principles or lawful linkages between sensory and motor systems will explain how actions can be perceptually guided in a perceiver-dependent world. 9 Developed from the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Varela’s enactive approach to knowledge sets up a connection between the structure of perception and the structure of our world. It is this link, in turn, which produces embodiment and thereby determines how we are modulated by the events of our world only through the transfer and disturbances of the lawful linkage structure of our minds. Thus, how we frame our world inevitably alters the structure of our world—we are what we see—at the same time that it allows us to be 9 embodied in such alterations and transitions. Therefore, an artwork or poem must enact embodiment in order to ‘move’ its viewer or reader. It is through a process of framing that we experience Malevich’s Black Square and the perpetuation of that process that allows us the possibility of experiencing it anew. Malevich’s Black Square becomes very similar to what Hebdige describes, with a Malevichean-type image no less, as the space of improvisation: anything is sayable within the improvisational space—anything at all— because that space is absolutely empty. It is empty of absolutes because its a black-box space, an infinitely generative grammatical machine; its only obligation is to rigorously, ferociously play with the permutations that happen at any given moment to fall within its range. And it goes without saying, its range is utterly boundless. 10 Taken in hand with Varela, Hebdige allows us to glimpse what will be the crucial effects of approaching Acconci’s work through the lens of enaction and embodiment: a new understanding of the physical- and textual-basis of materiality and image, as well as a movement of the frame whose permutations are transferences of states within intervals of time rather than a trajectory across divisible points of space. Ultimately, movements of the frame—what Acconci calls a “shifting of the shift”— doesn’t just enact the process of the artwork, but are the very permutations of our bodies as well. It is here that perception and the sensory world—the body and the work—pass into each other. It is no wonder, then, that Tupitsyn felt that the strongest connection to Malevich’s process at the Hamburg Kunstallhe—which included more than one hundred works, “half by Malevich and his contemporaries and half by postwar 10 Western artists influenced by or responding” to Black Square—“involved performance.” 11 Specifically, Bruce Nauman’s Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68), whose “interaction with the eidetic shape,” resonates most profoundly for Tupitsyn with Malevich in its attempt to implement art within daily life. However, with a view to embodiment, I would argue Nauman’s resonance goes further by perpetually staging the bodily enactment of the frame that passes the work between representation and enaction. In his performance, Nauman’s body re-draws the square whose outline has been taped to his studio’s floor to not only continually recreate his body in relation to that frame, but in passing along its perimeter, his studio itself begins to outline a frame that surrounds the artist. From this perspective, Nauman’s work emphasizes, both the body’s ability to frame as well as how embodiment itself is embedded in the structural frame we refer to as our exterior world. In other words, while Nauman frames his studio floor, he is Fig 2: Bruce Nauman, Walking around the Perimeter of a Square in an Exaggerated Manner, 1967-68. 10 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film. Image: © Electronic Arts Intermix. 11 framed as well, not just by the studio, but by the video camera that captures his performance, and, lest we forget, our own framing of Nauman in viewing the video. Juxtaposing Nauman’s performance with that of Vito Acconci’s bodily texts and installations, it becomes essential here to note the slightest movements and shifts—permutations—as indicators of continual adjustments of the body. Nauman doesn’t just walk the perimeter of the square (there are two squares actually taped to the floor, one smaller square taped inside another that references more clearly our idea of the frame), but walks the perimeter in an ‘exaggerated manner’—almost comically teetering on the precarious tight-rope line of the frame as if to continually smear its clear edges with each step. Nauman, therefore, exaggerates the fact that we can’t walk around a square without affecting a continual modulation of the frame within each step. 12 Echoing Acconci’s shifting durations of enacting and embodying language and the poem in “MOVE/MOVES,” Nauman produces his own ‘double move’ by making himself the subject of a double exposure: not only does he enact and inhabit the frames of his studio, but he is, at the same time, perpetually re- framing and re-framed by them in his exaggerated attempts to follow their framing lines. The effect of such embodied permutations take on their full weight when turning to Acconci’s installation Middle of the World (1976). Installed in the art gallery space of Wright State University, Middle of the World suspends its own frame within the frame of the studio such that we get a direct visualization—or 12 framing—of how we simultaneously frame and inhabit frames themselves. Similarly, in order to access Acconci’s Middle of the World—whose appearance we should not neglect as a blank page suspended in the gallery itself (a strategically placed frame within a frame as Acconci’s installation notes for the work show)—one has to negotiate an unsteady rope ladder from positions below or above the frame that, once engaged, inevitably shakes and disturbs the frame itself. Not only is the viewer who approaches the frame shook out of a normal balance of body, but any inhabitant of the page-frame is also subject to these permutations. It is therefore no accident that access to the frame—the ability to frame—is the very supporting and structural possibility of that frame, as well as its ability to shift and be active. Fig. 3 & 4: Vito Acconci, Middle of the World, 1976. Installation at Wright State University. Photo: © Wright State University Galleries. 13 The lesson in these works isn’t the edge of the frame per se, nor extending beyond the frame to an out there (one wonders where?) or ‘next world,’ but that enactment shifts us to a position where the very possibility of embodiment is continually linked to the possibility of shifting the frame, and vice versa. Representational and contemplative orientations to the artwork dissolve as the distinction between ourselves and the work, as well as the distinction between the ‘real’ world out there and the ‘false’ world of art, are rendered indistinguishable. In turn, these works as enaction disturb and smear the clear distinctions of body and world that we tend to maintain in our own perception according to our practical needs. As Varela tells us, in the enaction of embodiment, “[r]eality is not cast as a given: it is perceiver dependent, not because the perceiver ‘constructs’ at whim, but because what counts as a relevant world is inseparable from the structure of perceiver.” 13 Thus, in a process of perpetual embodiment, where our practical needs are displaced again and again, the space of perception is warped, such that we are both lost in space as space is lost in us; instead of representing our bodies in a stable relation to viewing the artwork, we become the continual figurations of our bodily movements. Tupitsyn’s description of Nauman’s work as an ‘eidetic’ performance is precise in the sense of the viewer, and Nauman himself, experiencing conventional shapes and processes—frames—anew at each moment of their enactment. This continual reframing, that subjects the viewer, the artist in process, and the structures 14 of the world, is further emphasized in the text THINK/LEAP/RE-THINK/FALL (1976) that is the published ‘working notebook’ for Acconci’s installation Middle of the World. In the text itself, Acconci describes the motivation of the work as a perpetual repositioning of the frame that conflates space/place with the structure and position of the viewer: give us a title to where we are – where are we? (Dayton: a place of touch, off the mainstream)—but this is our (your) world: this is where ‘I’ starts from—where I am is center of my world—make my world: use it as spring- board to outside, loosen world: so, title ‘middle of the world Acconci’s springboard brings us to the importance of movement as a shift of the frame, both within the viewer and as the mode of his artistic process: so where am I? (when I do a piece, I’m automatically re-doing, un-doing past pieces) so where do I come from? (think / simplify- / consider / re-consider- produce / re-produce- / look back so I don’t fall back) It is this infinite oscillation of binding and unbinding that occurs within framing that will give us a new conception of movement as that which isn’t a crossing through space, but a resonance of the intervals of framing itself—a frequency. As such, enacting embodiment isn’t a measure of the abstract quality of a work—an approach that leads to the ‘mystical,’ ‘upheaval,’ and ‘representational’ views we wish to move beyond—but a measure of the recurrent shifting of the frame. As Varela points out, marking moments of embodiment is less an identification of a specific place or site, but the variable time or frequency of framing itself; that “the point is not to catalogue them but to address their recurrence… [how] we embody a stream 15 of recurrent microworld transitions.” 14 Middle of the World, therefore, provides a vivid depiction of what I will analyze as a poetics of frequency in Vito Acconci: that we can’t help shift the frame when every one of our movements comprises the possibility of embodiment. It is here that Vito Acconci hopes we lose the edge, at least, the clearly defined edge such that we shift across multiple frames of embodiment. His poetics of frequency, therefore, sheds light on the possibility of radical poetic production so often lamented today since the dawn of Language Poetics and long after the victory over the sun of the historical avant-gardes. Such a recurring rearticulation and enactment of the frame as an infinite relation across destabilized time frames—what I call embodiments of passing—is hardly the clear field that separates us from the work itself, but a blind site where a ‘provisional subject’ emerges to recast concerns of embodiment in the contemporary digital age. An age which has represented, not only the apotheosis of the image, but of radical art and writing as well; as Paul Mann argues in his Theory Death of the Avant-Garde: Imagine artists for whom every hope for the future of art has been purged in the apotheosis of the economy; artists sick of the constant parade of recuperations, of being caught in all the double binds of opposition (the anti is mandatory, the anti is impossible); artists who know that the death of the avant-garde was the terminus toward which they were always driven. For them this death is absolutely in effect. Without exception art that calls itself art, that is registered as art, that circulates within art contexts can never again pose as anything but systems-maintenance. The only critical art would be that which is neither critical nor art: the dada impasse, a point beyond which there is precisely nothing. What is somehow irreducible in the is figure of what once were artists is that even at this null point, even in the crisis of a delegitimation that was for them the only legitimation of art, they must still 16 paint, write, compose, construct, and must still follow the movement of the anti. How will they proceed if there is nowhere left to go? 15 However, as we will see, the possibility of radical writing is found in the very movement of the “point beyond which there is precisely nothing”—that is, in a movement of the frame. What the apocalypse of the digital age indicates is the need to recognize the image as a shifting of the frame itself; an image increasingly vulnerable and dependent upon framing that radical writing addresses for its cracking foundation as a stable predicate for the immobilized body. 16 As we will see in Acconci’s writing, movement changes face, and allows us to re-think and smear poetics beyond the edges that rigidly maintain its borders. ♦ When asked in a 2003 interview if he “wanted to be a writer,” Vito Acconci states that he did but that at a certain point in his writing process he asked himself a “very obvious” question: “If I was so interested in movement why was I moving over an 8½ x 11 piece of paper? There’s a floor out there, there’s a ground, there’s a street, there’s a whole city.” 17 While this statement reveals Acconci’s transition into, for lack of a better term, the visual art world, it also illuminates the relationship he has to his writing as one that thinks and attempts to enact the spatial and temporal frame— and thereby the frame of the reader—as shift. That is, Acconci’s technique is one that is always displacing the plain matter at hand. His own writings seem to already 17 have one foot out the door and his career of exploring the worlds of writing, visual art, conceptual and performance art, video and installation and architecture exemplifies his limit-out approach to his materials. Therefore, while it is his poetic process itself that eventually “led [him] off the page,” I would rather not view the arc of Vito Acconci’s artistic career as one of upstaging one medium for the other or as developing a stronger efficacy in his goals as an artist, but re-visit his later work in video, performance, architecture and installation as that which happens inside the cracks of his earlier poems. 18 At the same time, while media theorist Friedrich Kittler proclaims that “media determine our situation” just as Rosalind Krauss terms our age as the “post-medium condition,” it is Acconci’s writing that provides powerful insights about the importance of framing to experimentation rather than a need to engage in state of the art technologies to ‘make it new.’ Which is to say that radical writing still matters when it addresses the source and foundation of what all media—digital or not, and even in a world without medial differentiation—seem to belie: the infinite relation of the frame. Similar to a great deal of ‘avant-garde’ artwork, therefore, Acconci’s writing cycles with “a belated prolepsis,” whereby, despite being produced on a manual typewriter nearly forty years go, the writing conceptually still seems a ‘step ahead’ of the majority of poetry today. What’s more, as writers attempt to experiment beyond the specter of poetry’s last avant-garde of Language Poetics, it is the work of Acconci and his contemporaries—with over a thousand pages of their writing published in two impressive collections in 2006 alone, not to mention a 400 page 18 archive of Acconci’s performance and conceptual work—that seems to have anticipated and continues to address the urgencies and possibilities of writing in the 19 digital age at the same time that they have laid the groundwork for recent developments in Cyber and Conceptual Poetics. One cannot resist but to look closer for the license, precisely, to do something else. 19 Introduction Endnotes 1 Hebdige 348. 2 Dworkin “Introduction” xiv. 3 Marino 66. 4 Tupitsyn 465. 5 It should be noted, as Tupitsyn does, that Malevich produced four Black Squares that need to each be regarded for their intricacies and their mutual appropriation (465). 6 Quoted in Compton 578. 7 Tupitsyn 465. 8 Bergson 209-10. 9 Varela 330. 10 Hebdige 337-38. 11 Tupitsyn 465. 12 Nauman includes a mirror leaned up against the back wall of his studio in the video frame of this piece in order to, as he has it, “to expose what might otherwise be concealed from the viewer.” Obviously the inclusion of the mirror extends my point that Nauman is interested in multiplying the perspective of the viewer through the modulation of frames; the mirror itself being its own multiple- enacting frame in shape and reflection. 13 Varela 330. 14 Varela 328. 15 Mann 143. 16 By image, here, I am not to referring to a traditional conception of ‘poetic imagery’ or solely to the visual or cinematic image alone, but a phenomena which I would like to consider as both textual and visual, that is, an image instead born of what the hybrid fragility of the linguistic-based digital images expresses today as they correspond to the tension of framing. 17 Acconci, “0 to 9 and Back Again” 2. It should be noted that prior to his explorations of conceptual, performance and video art and his current explorations of architecture, Acconci was a student of the Iowa Writers Workshop in the 1960s, publishing poems and journals in chapbooks and later co- developing his own mimeograph magazine with Bernadette Mayer entitled 0 to 9 to which I will refer later. 20 18 Comment made by Acconci himself during a poetry reading with Bernadette Mayer, October 25, 2006. 21 Chapter 1: Image To start with what everybody takes for granted. Not long after returning from Iowa to New York with an MFA from the Writer’s Workshop, Vito Acconci took his first and essential insight about developing a poetics of frequency from viewing, as he says, in “real life, in real space,” Jasper Johns’ 0 through 9 series of paintings. Johns’ sculptural and painted layering of the numerals zero through nine upon each other within a single canvas, affecting a tension between the sign and its collapse into an abstract design, gave Acconci the ‘jolting’ experience he would take as provocation for the most productive writing years of his life between 1964 and 1969. Acconci describes the moment in an interview of 2006: “what jolted me about Jasper Johns was how important it is to 22 start with a convention, how important it is to start with what everybody knows and everybody takes for granted.” 1 The continual reframing and stenciling of numbers over themselves in Johns’ work combined with the inclusion of words and letters into the act of painting, provided the precise disorienting immediacy Acconci would now seek in his own poetics: Maybe I was thinking something so simple as, if Jasper Johns has a painting that you can see in one look, well, most poems are one page, so maybe you could do something like he’s doing in painting on something that’s a page long. 2 In the beginning, therefore, it wasn’t the word, but a disorienting image of the word that sent Acconci on his way. Fig. 4: Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1961. Oil on canvas, Fig. 5: Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1960. Lithograph, 1401x 1078 x 48 mm. Image: Tate Online. 30 x 22 Image: Craig F. Starr Associates, New York. 23 I say disorienting because John’s 0 through 9 paintings affect a continual double exposure of not just the sign and its abstraction, but the textual and the concrete. Johns’ layering process enacts a perpetual shift upon the viewing and painted frame in its creation of representative signs out of their simultaneous dissolution; a continual and immediate appropriation, or, de- and reframing of the sign. Talking to the same influential experience in a separate interview with Thurston Moore in 2003, Acconci states that “the kind of… concreteness of Jasper Johns’ painting was the fact that, yeah, you could have an abstract brushstroke but you have to put a conventional sign there first.” 3 While it is clear that Acconci is referring to the conventions of numbers and letters Johns uses as the primary subjects of his paintings—a reference to the textual matter of images—it is Johns himself who, in describing the ‘conventional’ subjects of his paintings, emphasizes them as actions, or, as the enaction of framing itself: In my work, I have tended to take an action or to do something and then to see that it could be done differently and then to try to do it differently. And I have simply gone about experimenting with alterations of my ideas, I think, rather than settling for any particular idea as useful. I’ve more taken as useful the idea that the mind could adjust itself in different ways to anything. 4 Taking both Johns’ and Acconci’s accounts of the 0 through 9 series, then, we arrive at the contradictory concept of a concreteness of adjustment, or, a materiality of the alteration of the mind. Though one could say that the concreteness that Acconci speaks to in Johns’ work is that of the painted and sculpted signs themselves, it is crucial to note how it is the tension between the ‘abstract brushstroke’ and the 24 conventional sign as that which generates a materiality in the work. Or, to take up Johns’ description, concreteness is not simply born in the painting itself—in the “settling for any particular idea as useful” as convention would have it—but out of the continual alteration and adjustment of the mind in tension with such conventions. This brings us to the heart of the matter for Acconci’s poetics as he describes it to writer Shelly Jackson: Jackson: Those paintings of Johns’s almost collapse the gap between representation and the thing represented, because a painting of a number is also a number— Acconci: Yeah, because a number is something that doesn’t exist until it’s drawn. And now, he’s drawn it. Jackson: —and it seems to me that in a lot of your early work you were trying to do the same thing with language. Acconci: Exactly. I wanted it to be matter. 5 In turn, I will examine how Acconci’s poetics concretizes the experience of embodiment as continual transition by utilizing poetic convention against itself—or through a continual de- and re-framing of reader and text—thereby enacting a destabilization of the viewing frame through perpetual acts of adjustment and modulation within an immediate image of text. As they did for Acconci, Johns’ paintings provide us the opening glimpse of the differential relationships to time, matter and the subject that a poetics of frequency enacts—a poetics, in itself, born out of new relationships to materiality and image as they are rearticulated by a new theory of mind and body in the digital age. 25 ♦ It is the book and the body that die out in our contemporary digital fallout. What Rosalind Krauss has termed the “post-medium” condition, ours is the world of fiber- optics and digital matrices where “any medium can be translated into any other;” where the limits of time and space are rendered almost infinitely null. 6 As seeming unending possibilities of electronic and digital transformation evacuate the authority and physicality of a text, it is often argued that our bodies themselves become mere inscription surfaces for the generalized chatter of spectacular information and appearance. It is a fate sensed early on by Friedrich Nietzsche, supposedly the first philosopher to use a typewriter, who claimed that “[o]ur writing tools are working on our thoughts.” 7 Thus, as “writing…is no longer a natural extension of humans who bring forth their voice, soul, individuality through their handwriting… humans change their position—they turn from the agency of writing to become an inscription surface.” 8 This arc of thought implies that as our individual contact with media increases, the agency of our bodies is increasingly lost to the technology we use to express ourselves. In short, as Friedrich Kittler states, “[m]edia determine our situation.” 9 The interest for poetic production is that the shift of position the human undergoes in the digital—though often analyzed in terms of the ‘visual image’—is, at its core, a problem of the incorporation of language, or, in the digital age, code. And, once the media themselves are lost and our images become nothing more than 26 variations of incessant code, our bodies must go too. However, while Acconci’s written work was produced prior to an age of digitization, it acts as an invaluable reserve for techniques of addressing the apparently disembodied and frameless context of the digital age. 10 I maintain that such disruptions are not only still possible in the digital, but essential to our active engagement with textuality despite the ever-accumulating evidence of the posthuman. To say that writing today has to find an afterlife of the book, that writers have to ‘make it new’ through a resistance toward the illusive autonomy of the spatial and temporal frames of media or digitization, might be to say something that radical writing has always already lived. Walter Benjamin, who perhaps somewhat prophetically made the most famous diagnosis of art’s current ‘digital condition’ with the loss of aura in his “Work of Art” essay, gives us the ability to consider that the process of framing—and not media themselves—is the path of a radical attention toward artistic possibility. In his work “The Author as Producer,” he concerns himself “directly with the literary technique of works,” insisting that the writer ask not what is the “attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time,” but what “is its position in them?” 11 In turn, while there is a good deal of attention paid to Benjamin’s identification of cinema as a vehicle for a propaganda of the masses— a kind of all-consuming distraction—at the same time he understood the value of examining the relationships between technique and mediation themselves that is the act of framing. Therefore, the techniques of reestablishing embodiment through a 27 shifting of the frame—are less the undiscovered possibilities of the ‘new’ as much as they are our ability to re-read the textuality of our past. Fig. 6: Still from Videodrome (dir. David Cronenberg, 1983). Fig 7: Lawrence Weiner, Various Manners with Various Things, 1976. ♦ In his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), Friedrich Kittler presents the darkest post-humanist vision to date, stating that “[w]ith numbers, everything goes;” “[s]ense and senses turn into eyewash” with the “complete virtualization of optics.” 12 As is the trend in media theory, Kittler connects disembodiment with ocularcentrism, where with the loss of our ability to frame our endless surroundings goes our ability to fix ourselves in space and time. Where once images were adapted to the spatial and temporal perceptive possibilities of human perception, the computer image 28 deceives the eye as “the illusion or image of an image.” 13 As Mark Hansen clarifies in his New Philosophy for New Media (2004), with digitization, “the image can no longer be understood as a fixed and objective viewpoint on ‘reality’…since it is now defined precisely through its almost complete flexibility and addressibility, its numerical basis, and its constitutive ‘virtuality.’” 14 In other words, the digital age marks the moment when information (the image) achieves an autonomous existence beyond the scope of the human. Thus, despite his own realization of the positional power of artworks, this extensive separation of the viewer from the image—and thereby of the human from the world—was perhaps best articulated by Benjamin himself in his analysis of photography. For Benjamin, photography “prepares the salutary movement by which man and his surrounding world become strangers to each other… opening up the clear field where all intimacy yields to the clarification of details.” 15 As Paul Virilio notes in his book The Vision Machine, this “clear field is the primary promotional field of propaganda and marketing, of the technological syncretism within which the witness’s least resistance to the phatic image is developed.” 16 As our very brief history has shown, the image is exacts an understanding of the mind and subject, at the same time it determines the possibility of our bodies. This point is clear as we consider the frequent interchangeability of the two in such phrases as ‘picture of thought,’ ‘mental image,’ ‘self-image,’ ‘body image’ and ‘the brain is the screen.’ Thus, the image’s propensity for determination is a correlate for our own propensity to perceive it as such from either a wholly idealist or realist 29 perspective. As Henri Bergson argues at the outset of his Matter and Memory, “realism and idealism both go too far” in their views of the image, such that we need a new understanding of the image as “a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing—an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation.’” 17 Instead, Bergson states, we should understand the image as matter itself: This conception of matter is simply that of common sense. It would greatly astonish a man unaware of the speculations of philosophy if we told him that the object before him, which he sees and touches, exists only in his mind for his mind or even, more generally, exists only for mind, as Berkeley held. Such a man would always maintain that the object exists independently of the consciousness which perceives it. But, on the other hand, we should astonish him quite as much by telling him that the object is entirely different from that which is perceived in it, that it has neither the color ascribed to it by the eye nor the resistance found in it by the hand. The color, the resistance, are, for him, in the object: they are not states of our mind; they are part and parcel of an existence really independent of our own. For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: image it is, but a self-existing image. 18 Therefore, taking Bergson’s view of the image as an existence between a thing and a representation, we identify a link between the so-called media-based ‘classical image’ of photography and film and the contemporary indifferentiated ‘digital image’ of code whose bodies make up the matter of both our worlds and selves— namely the frame itself as a possible existence between an object, its representation, and the matter of our physical bodies. Without a movement of the frame, however, it is too often that we totalize images either solely within or beyond us. 30 Despite their stark compositional and medial differences, the ‘classical’ and ‘digital’ image have in common the capability of mental determination within the clear field of separation between viewer and viewed. As Gilles Deleuze points out in his analysis of the images of ‘classical cinema,’ the so-called classical image had to be considered on two axes… the co- ordinates of the brain: on the one hand, the images were linked or extending according to the laws of association, of continuity, resemblance, contrast, or opposition: on the other hand, associated images were internalized in a whole as concept (integration), which was in turn continually externalized in associable or extendable images (differentiation). This is why the whole remained open and changing, at the same time as a set of images was always taken from a larger set. 19 Notice that what remains intact here in the ‘classical image’ is the totalization (or internalization) of the whole despite possible contrasts and oppositions between frames as found in the relationships of cinematic images. Delueze’s insight, thus, is that this determined perspective of the image, even within the movement of ‘motion- pictures,’ is the stillness of the image, and thereby the stillness of cinema itself. The difficulty is that it isn’t the job of the image, even the cinematic image, to move—no matter how moved we feel by a particular painting or film. Nor is it the habit of our conventional—that is, practical—perception, to move them. Rather, cinematic images tend to move for us. The image’s apparent immobilization of the brain—it’s essential role in determining the possibility of movement is, therefore, our propensity to represent our bodies to ourselves (in its image) as divisible against a larger totalization, like scenes or frames culled from the larger plot of a film. As Bergson puts it, “herein, precisely, lies [our] error:” 31 In this confusion Zeno was encouraged by common sense, which usually carries over to the movement the properties of its trajectory, and also by language, which always translates movement and duration in terms of space. But common sense and language have a right to do so and are even bound to do so, for, since they always regard the becoming a thing to be made use of, they have no more concern with the interior organization of movement than a workman has with the molecular structure of his tools. In holding movement to be divisible, as its trajectory is, common sense merely expresses the two facts which alone are of importance in practical life: first, that every movement describes a space; second, that at every point of this space the moving body might stop. 20 The image as we practically perceive it—digital or classical—and as it perceives us, is the clear field of a still life of the mind and, as Bergson alludes, the very freezing process of the body in the practice of reading. The image of text, then, is something quite other than what we thought it was—or, what we see it as. Fig. 8: Marcel Broodthaers, La Pense Bête, 1964. Image: © Remue.net. 32 It is at such a crossroads that, after a twenty-year writing career, artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers was inspired to place a parcel of his unsold poems in a crib of plaster, blocking access to the reading process itself and transforming the book into a sculpture, or an image of itself. As a kind of companion piece to Malevich’s Black Square, Broodthaers Pense-Bête (1964) enacts the text—that is the frame of the text, the book—as its own horizon to be moved continually instead of taken for granted. “I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life” wrote Broodthaers jokingly, at least partly, in the invitation to the first exhibition of this work at the galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels in 1964; “[f]or some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway… What is it? In fact objects.” 21 Similar to Malevich’s own falsification of the image as frame, Broodthaers hoped to affect an insincerity of the text itself. Interestingly enough, Broodthaers collapses the experience of reading, sculpture, image and objects here as moveable acts of multiple and distinct framing processes, not by outwardly moving the book in any extensive way, but by freezing the work in its place. As such he addresses the temporal relationship to movement by short-circuiting the viewer’s practical perception, and thereby embodiment, of the text. As Broodthaers said himself regarding Pense-Bête, “here you cannot read the book without destroying its sculptural aspect. It is a concrete gesture that passes the prohibition on to the viewer.” 22 By disallowing practical access to the book, the work moves toward the immediacy that Acconci saw in Johns and hoped for in his own writing. In perhaps 33 the same way that Johns’ numerals are created in their own dissolution, Broodthaers’ text is re-born in its death as image. Broodthaers’ experiment would seem to take up the precise disruption that the possibility of a future of artwork in the totalized world of mediation demands: to produce an act that emphasizes the medial limit itself and disrupts the illusion of the book as aesthetic object. As Dieter Schwarz argues, Broodthaers employs a strategy similar to Rene Magritte, where the “plaster pedestal in Broodthaers sculpture offers a material frame that invites a reading against the abstract frame of the art context” to develop an “incommensurability between a real object and its representation”—to enact an existence between these two poles. 23 In fact, Broodthaers’ move to disturb the literary or aesthetic frame of poetry is behind much of the exciting work being done today with Conceptual and Cyberpoetics that attempt to move beyond semiotic and semantic displacements through what Marjorie Perloff has called a “textual rather than semantic indeterminacy.” 24 To Broodthaers surprise, however, viewers of the work reacted quite differently from his expectations: “Everyone so far, no matter who, has perceived the object either as an aesthetic expression or as a curiosity… No one had any curiosity about the text; nobody had any idea whether this was the final burial of prose or poetry, sadness or pleasure.” 25 Broodthaers’ experiment resulted in—as experiments should—an unforeseen production: a demonstration of the durable continuity of the viewing frame in the translatability of text to image, or book to sculpture. In short, Pense Bête reveals that media themselves inhabit frames just as we do and movement of that frame is a matter of 34 more than a meta-textual maneuver that remains within context. What Broodthaers forgets, is that while the prohibition of the medial frame of the book has been exposed, the frame of the gallery itself is left intact—an image without exit. Taking a look at Vito Acconci’s installation Where We are Now, Who are We Anyway? at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1976, however, this totalizing image of space is framed—and shifted—such that it continually collapses within itself. Acconci’s piece takes an upstairs room at the Sonnabend gallery and sets a series of wooden stools around a 60-foot table whose length extends out the window of the gallery into the open air of the city to serve as a plank, or “diving board” as Acconci refers to it, for possible exit. While the adjacent windows in the room remain shut in glass with the blinds drawn, the light and ‘noise’ from the outside world infiltrates the framed space through the open window as to infect it or spoil its calmness and totalizing boundary, to release its entropy. The installation, therefore, doesn’t just emphasize an inside and outside of the frame, but begins to develop them as indistinguishable, or, at least their separation as tenuous. Taking a step beyond Broodthaers, and perhaps even Nauman’s performance Walking around the Perimeter of a Square in an Exaggerated Manner, Acconci’s Where We are Now, Who are We Anyway? cuts a hole in the frame of the gallery, allowing us to consider a reflexivity of the frame as movement beyond itself in acts of perpetual exit. 35 Fig 9 & Fig. 10: Vito Acconci, Where We are Now, Who are We Anyway?, 1976. Installation. At the same time, Acconci hangs a speaker in the window that plays the soundtrack of a ticking clock to not only produce a sense of anticipation (as does the title of the work), but to emphasize the indistinct temporality (the clock does not provide a visual or audio representation of the hour or minute) of the intervals we experience in transition from this frame or that. Acconci’s voice is heard over the speaker as well, interrogating our own immobilizing sense of space and self: “Now that we’re all here together, what do you think Bob?” Such interrogatives echo the overlaying questions that accompanied his Middle of the World installation of the same year and that were printed as their own kind of poem in his publication THINK/LEAP/RE-THINK/FALL (1976): 36 Can you hold your ground? What kind of hold do I have on you? What are you holding onto? Do you ask yourself questions like this? Do you think a question tells the answer? Did you answer yes? Would you rather say maybe? Can you disappear? Do you shrug your shoulders? 26 The voice of Middle of the World even morphs the title of the Sonnabend installation, stating with a Steinian repetition as difference, “WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE WE KNOW WHERE WE ARE,” and fades out. The stern repetition of this phrase falsifies itself with each repetition and, as text, overruns its own immobilization to heighten the fact that within the act of perception, as Bergson states, we seize “something which outruns perception itself.” 27 Acconci not only provides a means for transition and rends the frames we inevitably inhabit, he challenges and addresses us directly at the source of our embodiment in the recurrence of the frame, marking the continual displacements of temporality through a disruption of the illusory stillness of place. 37 What Acconci resists is the viewer who takes his work solely on its word, regarding it as a mirror upon the world instead of an act to be continuously performed within and against it. Movement here is dependent upon the reader’s ability to shift the seen, or, in this case to cross through one frame into another and continually dive from the plank. Essential to this enactment of movement, therefore, is a process of direct address to the viewer, and second, the realization of our own rhetorical bodies within the recurrence of that address to shift the frame. As such, Acconci’s works—while produced prior to an age of digitization—serve as a strategic reserve for artistic methods that re-introduce a radical instability to the circuit between body and text—a circuit that takes on increasing importance the more it is seemingly effaced in our totalizing code-world of the digital image. ♦ The sentence you are reading is the mirror image of a sentence that appears elsewhere. Contrary to Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’ whose totalizing power has been passed down through such inheritors as Jean Baudrillard and Friedrich Kittler, the digital image brings us to the horizon of the image as we once knew it. Indeed, the disturbance of the image that would only rarely occur in the projector-burn of a film or the over-exposure of a photograph—that is, the failure and dissolution of the 38 illusion of the image—has become customary as computer-based images fail to upload completely or are decoded and ‘smeared’ across digital translations, as streaming videos skip and pop and become unbound from their audio, and as digital broadcasts freeze, run and glitch in an incessant cubist-pixel storm. That is, where once to “publicly point how mental images are formed, including the way their psychophysiological features carry their own fragility and limitations, was to violate a state secret of the same order as a military secret,” the clear field of the image is now flooded by its own fallibility. 28 Our new experiences of the image are of its tearing and glitch such that we are keenly aware (and often in fear of) its vulnerability, its fragile materiality, its lack of foundation. The danger of these imperfections, however, are not those that demand or require another image to fill its place—a fast-forwarding to the next scene—rather, they address the image’s source: the frame. The image in the digital, then, is essentially linguistic and significantly addressed by artworks that are able to rearticulate the body of text. As Kittler himself recognizes, the “illusion of an image, while in truth the mass of pixels, because of its thorough addressability, proves to be structured more like a text composed entirely of individual letters.” 29 The latter part of Kittler’s statement here carries particular weight in relation to Acconci’s early writings, whose attention to the minutest possibilities of framing found within textuality, insist on being addressed—at minimum—at the surface of the page rather than the blinding narrative line, page or book. Perhaps similar to Kittler’s own understanding of the 39 digital image as “forgery incarnate,” Acconci identifies his writing as one of “fugitive signs,” where “information …necessarily concerns the source of information.” 30 Acconci’s poetics move us beyond Jakobson and Derrida, semantics and semiology as a frontier for new writing, not because they invent new models of the brain or make use of state-of-the-art technologies, but because they relocate the image of text—the mind—as the very interval of framing. As Bergson argues, “our erroneous conceptions about sensible quality and space are so deeply rooted in the mind that it is important to attack them from every side.” 31 This will require a double-take of Acconci’s poetics of frequency. Acconci’s piece “The sentence you are reading” can be read as an enactment of the digital image for its productive effects of multiplying the possibilities of linguistic framing: The sentence you are reading is the mirror image of a sentence that appears elsewhere, a mirror image that, in turn, has been reflected in another mirror so that the words appear here in their proper order, except that – because of an imperfection in the mirror (an imperfection that, moreover, because of the reflection, can move from day to day and that becomes, hence, two imperfections, or three, or four) – certain letters in the original sentence have changed and, thus, appear here as letters still similar to, but not quite the same as, those that were written. 32 This work not only tells us that we are far from the original sentence, but that this sentence is actually the reflection of an imperfected mirror image of writing—what we could now see as the linguistic digital image—whose imperfections are temporally continual and contingent (“day to day”) and whose number is impossible to know (“hence, two imperfections, or three, or four”). Acconci not only recognizes 40 disturbances of the temporality of framing as constructive—they are the very source of the multiple readings and form of this work—but that such disturbances are found in the reader’s own imperfections and reflections of framing in their own reading (the sentence itself is an accumulation of digressions that disrupt a more familiar ‘natural’ temporality of the sentence measured within a breath). Indeed, just as we are given the digital image, the text here also maps the inverting process of the human eye in perception as it offers a multiplication of our possible relations to textuality and our own bodies within multiple intervals of time. Just as the fugitive sign does not signify and the digital image has no connection with the ‘real,’ the bleak view of digitization, in turn, tends to overlook the framing power of human perspective that Acconci emphasizes in his writing, even in the world of frameless code. However, it is this formal condition of framing that our conventional relationship to these systems often precludes. In fact, just as one might tend to forget the productivity of human framing in the endless loop of information that is the digital world, we may also mistake media’s orienting ‘charge’ as the metaphor for the multiple dynamics of our own cognitive action. In his Foreword to Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media, Tim Lenoir explains that “[a]ll forms of cognitive act” are dynamic self-organizing patterns of widely distributed regions of the brain rather than organized as sequential arrangements as the computer metaphor— information flows upstream—would model it. At the deepest level the relation and integration of these components give rise to temporality. 33 41 The time of our bodies, therefore, is hardly the time of our image of perception, just as the digital image is hardly an indivisible and totalizing force. Both the danger and the possibility of new embodiments in the digital age are founded upon the time of the frame. As Varela states, embodiment is founded in the frame’s link to temporality whereby the self-organizing components of our perception “require a frame or window of simultaneity that corresponds to the duration of the lived present.” 34 It is, in turn, the highly stratified and oscillating relation and separation of our bodies themselves that produce the intervals of framing our bodies pass within. Acconci’s poetics, thus, redefine the notion of the frame from that of a spatial demarcation to enacting it as a temporal displacement in movement. Such a transformation of the frame thereby hinders its capability for the stability of aesthetic contemplation and judgment as it has conventionally been used—either in service of a certain traditional aesthetic definition, say in Greenberg’s analysis of the avant- garde and kitsch, or in service of establishing an effective avant-garde. In fact, Acconci’s poetics emphasizes the intervals of framing itself in movements that are often neglected. For example, in his essay “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” of 1958, Alan Watts, who has a preference for the experimentalism of Cage, insists upon maintaining the frame as yard stick for the efficacy of experimentalism itself, only to find its limit: Now a skilled photographer can point his camera at almost any scene or object and create a marvelous composition by the way in which he frames and lights it. An unskilled photographer attempting to do the same thing 42 creates only messes, for he does not know how to place the frame, the border of the picture, where it will be in relation to the contents. How eloquently this demonstrates that as soon as we introduce a frame anything does not go. But every work of art involves a frame. A frame of some kind is precisely what distinguishes a painting, a poem, a musical composition, a play, a dance, or a piece of sculpture from the rest of the world. 35 How eloquent indeed. My reason for quoting Watts at length is that in his discussion of the artistic frame, he draws a distinct comparison between relationships to the frame itself. First, we understand the frame as that which demands mastery to develop a ‘marvelous composition,’ and second we understand the frame at a much more base level, that is, as that which—quite obviously—distinguishes an artwork from the rest of the world. Such a conflation is instructive for our attempting to enact the frame as movement, as this confusion leads Watts to a “homology… of the natural and aesthetic” boundaries of the frame that identify it as an intercession that “simultaneously mediates, secures, and ‘expresses’” a relationship of movement or transition between states. While Watts maintains, “[t]he formless murmur of night noises in a great city has an enchantment which immediately disappears when formally presented as music in a concert hall,” at the same time he pronounces that “if the contents of the frame are to rank as art they must have the same quality of relationship to the whole and to each other as events.” 36 In other words, the most successful frame is that which absolves itself of its own qualitative difference, to enact the movement that structures events in the ‘real world.’ We have seen this before: the frame must be enacted as the structure of our perception of the world, that 43 is, enacted as the continual movement of embodiment beyond our practical needs of immobilizing perception. Movement, here, underlies the image as text, and not a stilled representation we give to ourselves that stops and starts in successive positions that “are, at bottom, only so many imaginary halts.” 37 It is Acconci’s insistence upon shifting the frame as the frame in intervals of temporality that “restore to intuition its original purity and so recover contact with the real:” the very concreteness of our bodies. 38 What is more important about our concern with the cybernetic apocalypse is not a loss of the human, but a concern for the “reconfiguration of the status and function of framing.” 39 Or, to put it in the terms of the present essay, what is more important is the incorporation of language between the intervals of framing text and body. This circuit of text and body is the essential focus for radical writing as it provides a rend in the all-encompassing digital curtain through which new times of embodiment can occur. As media theorist Jonathan Crary argues: We must recognize the fundamental incapacity of capitalism ever to rationalize the circuit between body and computer keyboard and realize that this circuit is the site of a latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium. The disciplinary apparatus of digital culture poses as a self-sufficient, self- enclosed structure without avenues of escape, with no outside. Its myths of necessity, ubiquity, efficiency, of instantaneity require dismantling: in part by disrupting the separation of cellularity, by refusing productivist injunctions, by introducing slow speeds and inhabiting silences. 40 For writing in the infinite space and temporality of the digital age, thus, the question and possibility of framing reaches its summit and signifies not the end of text altogether—quite the opposite—but the absolute necessity of textual movement to 44 continually re-embody the frame as a point of contact in the concreteness of the immediate present. 41 45 Chapter 1 Endnotes 1 Acconci, “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci.” 2 Acconci, “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci.” 3 Acconci, “0 to 9 and Back Again” 3. 4 Johns. 5 Acconci, “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci.” 6 See Krauss “‘Voyage on the North Sea’”; Kittler 2. 7 Quoted in Kittler, Gramaphone xxix. 8 Kittler, Gramaphone 210. 9 Kittler, Gramaphone xxix. 10 As such, this does not analyze the expanding field of digital poetics. In fact, while I am indebted to much of Mark Hansen’s studies of ‘new media art,’ my investigation works in the opposite direction, utilizing contemporary phenomena as a means to re-read radical writings (often highly unread writings) of the past as they might better inform our possibilities of artistic production. Behind this approach is the belief that the page and book are still viable media for radical artistic production, perhaps, even more so within the age of their apparent death. For a powerful study of digital art, I highly recommend Mark Hansen’s book New Philosophy for New Media, as well as Kenneth Goldsmith’s website Ubuweb and Craig Dworkin’s E C L I P S E for current discussions of digital poetics and an exciting convergence of digital technology with radical writing. 11 Benjamin 222. It is also interesting to consider how Benjamin dedicated his later life to the Arcades Project, a work built entirely of quotation. 12 Kittler, Gramaphone 2. 13 Kittler, “Computer Graphics” 32. 14 Hansen 8. 15 Quoted in Virilio 23. 16 Virilio 24 17 Bergson 9. 18 Bergson 9-10. 46 19 Delueze 276. 20 Bergson 191. 21 Broodthaers. 22 Quoted in Schwarz 60. 23 Schwarz 63. 24 Perloff, “How Avant-Gardes Rise, Fall and Mutate” 24. 25 Schwarz 60-62. 26 Acconci, “THINK/LEAP/RE-THINK/FALL.” 27 Bergson 208. 28 Virilio 24. 29 Kittler, “Computer Graphics,” 32. 30 Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs” 109. 31 Bergson 212. 32 Acconci, Language to Cover a Page 122. 33 Lenoir xxiv. 34 Lenoir xxiv-xxv. 35 Quoted in Hebdige 338-39. 36 Quoted in Hebdige 340. 37 Bergson 190. 38 Bergson 185. 39 Hansen, 74. 40 Crary 294. 41 ‘Textual movement’ here is akin to Marjorie Perloff’s notion of “‘differential poetry,’ that is poetry that does not exist in a single fixed state but can vary according to the medium of presentation: printed book, cyberspace, installation, or oral rendition.” Perloff, “After Language Poetry.” 47 Chapter 2: Embodiment I can feel your body right next to me. I know I’m kidding myself. You’re not here. Media theorist Paul Virilio opens his title chapter of The Vision Machine with artist Paul Klee’s notebook remark that “now objects perceive me”—only to have W. J. T Mitchell remark some 11 years later that why “objects and images ‘look back’ at us” is an expression of what they want: “they want you.” 1 The notion of an objective, or automated perception in images, Virilio argues, is “one of the most crucial aspects of the development of the new technologies of digital imagery” and leads him to wonder how we can “accept the factual nature of the frame and reject the objective reality of the cinemagoer’s virtual image?” 2 And, further, where is the body in our 48 mix up of the real and the virtual? It would seem, with Jacques Derrida’s prescription that “there is nothing outside a medium” 3 and Rosalind Krauss’s diagnosis of the digital age as the “post-medium” condition, the body is truly without place, its concrete physicality swept up or absorbed by the mirror code of a digital interface. Code, in this sense, creates an undifferentiated world and renders the spaces within and between media null, ultimately confusing the physical world with that of endless information. Krauss’s own groundbreaking analysis of the ‘new’ medium of video in 1976 that focuses upon Vito Acconci’s video work, Centers, provides us with a stark illustration of such a disembodied narcissism that the digital world leads us into. Centers is a 22-minute and 15-second video in which Acconci points directly at the video camera, arranging the camera and monitor so that his gaze and finger appear at their center. According to Krauss, what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci’s plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double. In that image of self- regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre. 4 What Centers, and the digital age therefore, signify, is the autonomy of media and their incapability of address. However, what Krauss forgets, quite simply, is herself—her own framing capabilities as a viewer outside of the video. As Anne Wagner argues, it’s “as if the tight circuitry linking Acconci’s gaze and gesture somehow makes it impossible [for Krauss] to take up the implications of their vehement address. Nor does the idea of the viewer matter to her claims … [she 49 forgets that] the technology of the monitor opens outward, as well as in.” 5 Thus, what Centers allows, similar to our discussion of Acconci’s poem “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME),” is a key distinction within techniques of reflexivity that gets collapsed in that totalized image of the digital age. Fig. 11: Vito Acconci, Centers, 1971. Black & white video, 22:28 min. Image: Krauss “Aesthetics of Narcissism” 51. Centers may serve to trap Acconci within a medium, but only so he can point toward the possible exit from its circuitry—the body of the frame. If we look closer at the piece, that is, if we spend the full duration looking back at Centers, the intervals of multiple frames begin to surface. At times, Acconci points directly to us, at others the video camera filming him, at others the television or computer we watch the video upon and, again, at others the very screen that transmits the video. In a kind of Malevichean double exposure and an inversion of the totalizing digital logic, Centers hardly collapses the frames into one indifferentiated code, but enacts us within the multiple frames—de- and re-framing us within the striations of the falsity 50 of the image. Thus, whereas Krauss collapses media into its image, Acconci’s Centers, maintains the possible silences and disruptions of the circuit between image and viewer to continually remind us that, “there is always something outside of a medium”—an existence waged between the real and the virtual. 6 Fig. 12: Richard Serra, Boomerang, 1974. Color, Mono, 10 min. Video Still. Image: Ubuweb. Centers warrants a comparison to Richard Serra’s video Boomerang made two years prior that develops an electronically delayed audio feeback loop of Nancy Holt’s own spoken thoughts into the headphones she wears while being videotaped. Similar to Centers, Serra sets up what appears to be an inescapable media-habitat, a circuit that ineffably binds and collapses the human voice into the disarticulation of media. However, as the video progresses, the multiplications that occur actually 51 enact multiple layers of embodied reflexivity such that the exchange of medial interface—framing—is emphasized. Consider a transcript of the opening words, keeping in mind that the words are each echoed seeming infinitely over the top of each other: Yes, I can hear my echo… and the words are coming back on… on top of me …uh… the words are spilling out of my head and then they’re turning into my ear… it, uh, puts a dis…tance… between the words… and… their apprehen…sion… or their comprehension. The words coming back… seem slow… they don’t seem to… have the same forcefulness… as when I speak them. I think it’s also… slowing me down… I think… that it makes my thinking slower. I have a double-take on myself… I am once removed from myself. I am… thinking… and hearing… and filling up… a vocal… void. I find… that I have trouble… making connections between… thoughts. I think… that the words… forming in my mind… are somewhat detached… from my normal… thinking process. I have the feeling… that… I am not… where I am…. I feel that this place… is removed from reality…. Although it is a reality already removed… from the… normal reality. As a kind of aural (and textual now) companion to Centers, Nancy Holt’s speaking structure is a double exposure of the exchanging frame. An exchange that parses the different frames of her senses as the words travel from voice and head into the media and then turn back into ear. The video, as well as the transcript above, has the effect of Jasper Johns’ multiple layering of numerals that is a simultaneous removal or dissolve of a conventional body into a void (“I am once removed from myself. I am… thinking… and hearing… and filling up… a vocal… void”) as well as the creation of multiple embodiments (“I have a double-take on myself”) within the interval of real and virtual worlds (“it is a reality already removed… from the… normal reality”). Further, the space of the subject is collapsed and warped (“I am not 52 where I am…I feel that this place… is removed from reality”) and delays and slow speeds reconfigure embodiment in disjunctions of time (“The words coming back… seem slow… I think it’s also… slowing me down”) such that the variable frequency of the work emphasizes relative disjunctions (“I find… that I have trouble… making connections”). While Wagner argues that we see Holt “staring into a void” as she made to “inspect, even to inhabit, the invisible line between present and past,” I would add that in our seeing her we find ourselves in similar intervals between frames. 7 The effects of Boomerang give us a powerful example how a poetics of frequency might develop new bodies within framing to give us the ability to dismantle the digital age’s “myths of necessity, ubiquity, efficiency, of instantaneity… by introducing slow speeds and inhabiting silences.” 8 It is telling, then, that towards the end of Serra’s video, that the ‘other-reflexivity’ of the multiple framing exchange between media, the image, and the body, come to light: The lights… are shining down on me while I am speaking… about these things…. These lights contribute a rather… uh… substance, sub-stanceless … reality… to the situation. The light… in its immaterialllliitttyyy… is like the sound in its immaterialllliitttyyy… The light… hits me and reflects off of me… into the camera…. The words leave me and are reflected back into my ear and into your ear…. You are hearing… and seeing… a world… of double reflections… and… refractions. Holt’s connection of the substance and substance-less light returns us to the paradoxical notion of Bergson’s matter of images. Such a collapse of the immaterial and material movement of ‘words,’ ‘body,’ and ‘image’ is “the logical paradox of veritable ‘observation of energy’ made possible by the ‘Theory of Relativity’ that we 53 accept as it introduces a “third type of interval—light.” 9 What Holt comprehends within this interval of light, is not an absolute sense of body or image, but the path of the shifting frame itself that modifies the practical separations of the real and virtual. As Virilio states, taking into account this interval of exchange “would therefore help modify the very definition of the real and the figurative, since the question of REALITY would become a matter of the PATH of the light interval, rather than a matter of the OBJECT and space-time intervals.” 10 I emphasize Virilio’s use of the word ‘matter’ here to surface the intervals of the recurring frame as an infinite relativity of image, body, media and text that produces a concreteness of adjustment and has the possibility of spawning a “being of the path, after the being of the subject and the being of the object.” 11 What Holt discovers is ourselves and our bodies in the interval of exchange (“The words leave me and are reflected back into my ear and into your ear…. You are hearing… and seeing… a world… of double reflections… and… refractions”)—addressing us within embodiments of passing. By setting another of Acconci’s video works, Undertone (1973), beside his poem “Let me explain,” we get an even more visceral sense of the insistent address of his work—an address that demands we see the gaps in the framework, often by staging the failure of media to completely absorb us. Undertone sets up the scene of an interrogation, the table pitting a distance between us and Acconci as he speaks insistently, “I need you to be sitting there facing me, because I have to have someone to talk to, to address this to.” While this video, similar to that of Acconci’s infamous Seed Bed (1972) performance, is often noted for its gender and sexual politics, here I 54 would like to consider its formal processes of enacting a frequency of multiple embodiments. The subject of the video is Acconci’s attempting to engage in a masturbatory fantasy by imagining a girl underneath the table rubbing his thighs, enacted by Acconci’s recurring chant of “I want to believe there is a girl here under this table, I want to believe, I want to believe there is a girl here under this table rubbing my thighs, rubbing my thighs” combined with his looking up at the camera to exclaim “So I need you to stay fixed, I need you to stay fixed there, I need you to stay fixed there in that chair, I need you there in front of me.” Not only do we have the familiar insistence within Acconci’s work, but also the continual placing and re- placing, framing and re-framing across the recurrence of the insistent address (“I want to,” “I want to,” “I need you,” “I need you”). Undertone, therefore, has us materialize multiple bodies within a frequency or recurring perspectives. As Acconci emphasizes in his notes to the work, it is the hands and shifts of perspective—the relativities of viewpoint—that are of prime importance: I’m sitting at the head of the table, opposite the viewer at the other end. My hands are on the table; I’m looking at the viewer: ‘…I need you to be sitting there, facing me; I need to have someone to talk to… I need to keep looking at you straight in the eye, to prove that I’m not hiding anything…’ Then I’m looking down; my hands are under the table: ‘…I want to believe there’s a girl here, under the table… she has her hand on my thigh… she’s pushing her head in against my knees, opening my knees apart…’ My hands are up on the table again; I’m looking out at the viewer again…. My hands are under the table again; I’m looking down again…. 12 55 As Acconci’s description of the video—a kind of procedural poem in itself—shows, the continual address of the viewer and its relation to the materiality of the hands enacts a recurring shift of body and matter in intervals of viewpoint. We frame, thus, the bodily fantasy of the woman under the table—a body that we know is not there and in a place we cannot see—but also our own bodies as the possibility of Acconci’s own need—we are impossibly ‘fixed’ here and there again as the contact for Acconci’s empty hands. Similarly, Acconci’s poem, “Let me explain” demands that its reader continually ‘comes closer,’ and breaks from this direct address with multiplying definitions and descriptions of the general concepts of ‘place’ and ‘thing’ and ‘human,’ only to ask us to ‘come closer’ again and again: Let me explain. A place is a way for admission or transit; physical environment; physical surroundings; an indefinite region or expanse; a building or locality used for a special purpose; a particular region or center of population; an individual dwelling or estate; a fortified military post; a particular portion of a surface; a passage in a piece of writing; the point at which the reader left off; … Come closer. There. Now let me explain. A thing is a matter of concern; a particular state of affairs; an event, circumstance; a deed, act, accomplishment; a product of work or activity; the end or aim of effort or activity; whatever exists or is conceived to exist as a separate entity or as a distinct and individual quality, fact, or idea; … But you can’t get it from where you are. Come here. That’s better. There you are. Here, let me explain. A person is an individual human being; … 13 56 Here, as with Undertone, we have an enactment of the differential frames of address and the recurrent layering of a displaced body and site. Acconci, therefore, not only enacts the source of information as a kind of endless cycle of varied description (the layering relational separation effected by the use of the semi-colon) but also the shifting positions that multiple frame of address affect (pronounced by the use of periods to emphasize the gaps between here. And. Here). The progression of Acconci’s directives to ‘come closer’ seem to pull us directly into the frame of the text to the point where we are embodied at the surface of the text’s temporality: “There you are. Here,” a line whose double play on “here” shouldn’t be disregarded. Further, as Acconci adjusts the frequency of our relation to the page, his descriptions morph through lists of relative identifications of the concepts of place, thing and human being to produce a knowledge of difference rather than fixed definition, emphasizing multiple frequencies of framing, even framing at the spaces of interval: “A place is… a particular portion of a / surface; a passage in a piece of writing; the point at which a / reader left off.” Acconci’s texts give us a direct invitation into these intervals, pulling us into a close-up with the possible disruptive frequencies of the media-body circuit. Thus, juxtaposing Acconci’s poetry in “Let me explain” with his video becomes instructive as they both utilize address as a point of contact. Maintaining this work’s connection to his video pieces that often present Acconci himself face-to-face with the viewer, “Let me explain” enacts, as has been said of his video work, “a dizzying psychological circuit” in which embodiment occurs across the multiple frequencies within the textual descriptions and the page. 14 In turn, as 57 Acconci regards his video work as a contact of “close-up …as a place where my face on-screen faces a viewer’s off-screen—a place for talk, for me talking to you, the viewer” 15 —“Let me explain” intersperses a complex list of descriptions of the concepts of place, thing and human being with phrases that try to pull the reader closer to the frame of the page Thus, rather than stabilizing the apparent all-consuming power of mediation and information, Acconci enacts framing as movement to “turn the image” over and thereby address the source of textual embodiment as ourselves. As Deleuze explains, the digital world of “[i]nformation plays on its ineffectiveness in order to establish its power… [and] this is why it is necessary to go beyond information in order to defeat… or turn the image over.” 16 To do so, requires a shifting of the frame such that data flows are reflexively double-exposed “on two sides at once, towards two questions: what is the source and what is the addressee?” 17 Centers, Undertone and “Let me explain” enact this reflexive double exposure by emphasizing a process of address that demands the audience enact a collision of physicality and mediation within the intervals of their framing. As Acconci reaches out to us in these works we lose faith and lose confidence in media and cycle through multiple frames and positions in our relation to the works only to find no stable ground in the commonality of a shifting frame. The address in Centers, Undertone and “Let me explain” is, therefore, not only a demand on the viewer to realize their own framing abilities, but a demand for the viewer to keep changing their position in relation to the work, to continually re-embody themselves against the source of mediation itself: 58 the frame. One even imagines holding the text of “Let me explain” closer to their face or getting so close to the screen that the words and images seem to dissolve us within themselves until Acconci remarks, “I can feel your body right next to me. I know I’m kidding myself. You’re not here.” 18 The absorption necessarily fails, the intervals arise, and the endless loop of the digital mirror-circuit snaps open with the shocks of our shifting bodies. The fact that objects and media perceive us is profound not in the sense that it establishes the outright autonomy of objects and media themselves, but because it recognizes the very structure of objects and media as our own structural possibilities of perceiving them—that is, as the structures of our very bodies. The reflexive exchange within the perpetual shifting of frames of Acconci’s works demands our continual embodiment against our tendency to overlook, not only the artificiality of the work as a poem or video, but the shifting frame in all perception. As systems theorist Niklas Luhmann proclaims the formal condition of any observing system, including media themselves, is that “they are forced to distinguish between self- reference and other-reference. They cannot do otherwise… they must construct reality—another reality, different from their own.” 19 This, then is the reflexive double exposure that moves us beyond a modernist meta-textual practice to what Acconci calls a “shifting of the shift.” The ‘double-take’ is the untiming movement of the frame in shift, whose permutations and modulations of the textual image stretch, warp and crack its surface in slow speeds and striations. The totalized image of the digital doesn’t survive the embodiment of passing; the logic of its map is lost 59 and within that loss new embodiments arise. The multiple frequencies of the radical text perpetually enact the frame of the text, body and world as movement to find the gaps of a provisonal subjectivity. ♦ How does your mind function when you read? Returning to the opening line of Acconci’s poem “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME),” combined with the title itself, it is clear that Acconci is interested, not just in the movement of the reading process, but multiple movements (“MOVE/ MOVES”) that might reconfigure our relationship to text and time (“DOUBLE TIME”) by enacting the poetic frame as movement. Acconci describes his interest in movement as a “shifting of the shift” which redefines the poetic frame—as well as the frame of the viewer—and realizes such limits not as those which differentiate the writing from the reader, but as the crucial point of contact with his reader where a provisional subjectivity might be established. That is, a subjectivity continually framed (or continually de- and reframed) against a stable orientation to the text. As Acconci writes in a letter to poet Clayton Eshelman, “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.” 20 In looking closer at Acconci’s interest in movement, therefore, we find an approach to language that extends beyond the 60 familiar semantic slippage and semiological disruptions so characteristic in studies of modern and postmodern experimental poetry. Instead, Acconci’s work presents a kind of continual exit act for re-entry that rends the totalizing semantic field to write across the edges of its frame, that is, to pass the poetic frame such that it becomes less the borders of poetic experience, but the permeable membrane, the passage through which the textual field becomes indistinguishable from the movement of our bodies and the concrete physicality of our worlds. What is striking about Acconci’s double exposure of the frame in “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME),” is that we, as readers, are not merely absorbed into the space of the poetic page, but instead are continually thrust toward its limit as we imagine the beat of walking on a city street as we read, or imagine the act of reading as we walk to the corner store. Acconci articulates movement, therefore, as a physical binding of the frame of the work to that of the reader. It is here that we are neither here nor there but stranded in a perpetual re-linking of one frame to another; a kind of embodiment within continual transfiguration, a perpetual figuring of deferral. One of Acconci’s earliest photographic pieces of 1969, Throw, gives us a very physical sense of movement’s—and therefore our body’s—necessary and inevitable attachment to the frame. In the work, Acconci performs the act of throwing a ball while holding a Kodak Instamatic camera and snaps photos at the point of reaching back in order to throw and at the point of following through. Deceptively simple and perhaps seemingly mundane, Throw develops movement not through defining specific parameters of space and portraying phenomena as crossing 61 through or against those stable frames—but by shifting the frame itself. It is instructive, then, to consider Bergson’s redefinition of “real movement” as “the transference of a state than of a thing.” 21 Here, the double move of Throw is enacted by the juxtaposition of the two images—or, more properly, states—that establishes a perpetual circuitry of resonance and difference between one and the other; emphasizing movement s an imprint of time rather than an effect of space. Fig. 13 & Fig. 14: Vito Acconci, Throw, 1969. Image: Acconci, Diary of a Body. While Acconci gives us the plain directives of Throw—indeed, frames the frames—by telling us at what point each photo was taken and even presents them as “photo 1” and “photo 2,” this chronological relationship is still disturbed by the abstract nature of how the frame has shifted. In considering the juxtaposed images in and of themselves, we tend to oscillate between the two, hardly considering the 62 notion of the possible ball as it might somehow be represented here and focusing instead on the physical act and its shifts within the interval between the frames. It is a relationship that Deleuze, in his analysis of cinematic images, defines as irrational: “There is no longer association through metaphor or metonymy, but relinkage on the literal image; there is no longer linkage of associated images, but only relinkages of independent images.” 22 Therefore, Throw presents us not the relationship of “one image after the other, [but] one image plus another, and each shot is deframed in relation to the framing of the following shot.” 23 Framing here includes not just the taking of the picture, but embodiment itself that occurs in the process of framing and de-framing—a process of passing. Movement in Throw is not visualized, thus, but enacted within the instability of the body as it is located within shift and the frame is passed across and within the two states. Throw ultimately breaks the very “law of our representation that the stable drives away the unstable” wherein “movement becomes a mere link,” to instead move the frame in acts of embodiment. 24 An early example of Acconci’s “shifting of the shift” in his writing came in an addendum to the last issue of his co-edited mimeograph magazine of visual and conceptual poetics, 0 to 9. 25 Entitled “Streetworks,” the addendum includes a series of conceptual-based works with the intention of taking the act of writing into the streets. “Streetworks” stages—not a leaving of the linguistic—but the re-framing of the linguistic within the physical and the concrete, establishing the linguistic as an event enacted across multiple space-times. In one of his “Four situations using streets and identification,” Acconci gives us the following directive: 63 A situation using streets, labels, buses General circumstances: Street Works I; March 15, 1969; 42 St. to 52 St., Madison Ave. to the Ave. of the Americas. Particular circumstances: A label attached to the side of a bus; the label noting the time and place of the bus when the label was at- tached. Four buses; four stopping places, on Fifth Avenue; four times; four gummed labels, 1x3”, contents not recorded. Developments: transitive verb; intransitive verb; copulative verb; active voice; passive voice; present tense; past tense; future tense; present perfect tense; past perfect tense; future perfect tense; progressive present tense; imperfect tense; historical present tense; indicative mood; subjunctive mood; imperative mood; participle; ger- und; infinitive; adverb; prepositional phrase; conjunction. 26 The act of Acconci’s possible poem (the text exists as it frames an act that was once performed on March 15, 1969 and could be performed again), not only shifts the time-stamps of the labels throughout the city, but such shifts Acconci realizes as essentially a linguistic development. The linguistic developments, of course, are the textual matter that shifts—connects and disconnects—the temporal frames of language itself: ‘transitive verb,’ ‘prepositional phrase,’ ‘future perfect tense,’ ‘copulative verb.’ The developing body of text here doubles the bus as a kind of grammatical machine within the four intervals of Fifth Avenue whose ‘contents are not recorded.’ As with many of the “Streetworks” performed by such artists and writers as Arakawa, Lucy Lippard, Bernadette Mayer, Anne Waldman and Hannah Weiner, the writing exists within and addresses us from the intervals between the surfaces of page and street in order to move both the frame and ourselves—to move our bodies beyond the page and be re-embodied through language in physical space. 64 The collision of the physical and linguistic that “Streetworks” enacts foregrounds Acconci’s later movements into conceptual, video and performance art as one that is seeking out and testing the viewer’s ability to continuously re-frame and re-embody ourselves within the passing of the frame. Fig. 14: Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, Cover Fig. 15: Street Works, Addendum to Issue 6 of 0 to 9, Issue 3, 1969. Image: 0 to 9. Image: 0 to 9. Acconci’s poetic process, therefore, as an act that “led him off the page,” is less the abandonment of poetry itself but a way to re-enact the frame in shifting relations between text and body. Many of his visual works are coupled with notes that can be seen as poems in themselves, just as his earlier written works present the directives to frame the body and text beyond the page. In fact, as Acconci states, an abandonment of the page was not the principle on which he moved off the written 65 surface, in fact, it was an extreme attention toward the page as frame itself: “At that point I wanted everything to be about itself so much that it probably never occurred to me that you could lead to another space.” 27 Thus, Acconci’s attention to the frame isn’t a matter of medium per se, but a shift beyond the frame as border affected by an intense approach to the frame as movement, spilling out into the intervals where embodiment occurs. In talking about his poetics, then, Acconci refers directly to the frame of the page, rather than poetics as a whole: “the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.” 28 Acconci’s poetics of frequency, therefore, puts pressure upon the poetic frame of the page itself such that its practical surface and border begins to smear and rend, spilling beyond itself in an enactment of movement that includes the body, text and image in intervals of temporality. As part of “Street Works IV,” Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) was the way Acconci got himself “off the writer’s desk and into the city.” 29 Reminiscent of the act of walking text found in his poem “MOVES/MOVES,” Acconci explains the process of Following Piece in his notes to the work: Vito Acconci FOLLOWING PIECE ‘Street Works IV,’ sponsored by the Architectural League of New York October 3-25, 1969 Activity. New York City, various locations. 23 days, varying times each day 66 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. 30 Fig. 16: Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969. Image: Acconci, Diary of a Body. 67 At first glance, the project and its constraint seem straightforward and the relationship and address of one to the other quite clear—Acconci will follow his subject until he or she enters a private place. However, considering the piece closer, we realize that there are multiple frames of address at work here—that, not only is Acconci following another person, and a photographer is also following Acconci, but there is a fourth layer of contingency: ourselves. Thus, while Acconci is not only subject to the contingencies of what the subject might do, but the photographer’s viewpoint and our own are subject to that contingency as well—we are all inhabiting shifting frames. It is important, therefore, to note Acconci’s own description of Following Piece as an ‘activity;’ specifically an activation of the frame that connects body to body and body to text in a recurrence of address. Here, the grammatical machine of the bus in “A situation using streets, labels, buses” is replaced with the layering of multiple bodies—the subject followed, Acconci’s who follows, the photographers, and our own; a multiplied physicality of interval that gets into “the middle of things” by being “distributed over a dimensional domain.” 31 Echoing Benjamin’s demand for our attention to the position of artworks, Acconci explains in his notes to Following Piece that it is an enactment “out in space” but also “out of time (my time and space are taken up, out of myself into a larger system.) Fall into position in a system. I can be substituted for, I can be replaced. My positional value counts here, not my individual characteristics.” 32 Acconci, therefore, exposes both the shifting of our framing capabilities as he subjects his own viewing frame to shift, exposing and losing the practical control he has over the frame as an artist: 68 FOLLOWING PIECE: Additional Note 1972 Out of the body. What I wanted was to step out of myself, view myself from above, as an observer of my behavior. I would be more concerned, now, with stepping into (the shoes of) the person I followed: I would be too close to the other person—too close to myself?—to observe myself. 33 Ultimately, Acconci develops an embodiment of passing, where the enactment of a recurring frame has produced a double exposure that makes his own embodiment indistinguishable from the physicality of the other (“too close to the other person”) as well as the physicality of his own framing (“too close to myself?”). The multiple intervals that Following Piece enacts are the very intervals in which Acconci’s poetics of frequency enacts a reflexivity of the frame, forcing us to trip over our own viewing and reading process, building layer upon layer of viewpoint reading in a recursive manner to ultimately remove the practicality of perspective from our hands. They are works in which we have a hard time keeping track of our sight—who is leading who, where to look, where Acconci looks, where the camera looks, where the followed looks? We don’t trust what is happening here, we are unsure and we confront the work’s—that is our own—ability to hold it together. It’s as if Acconci is telling us it is our trust in signs—in transparent sight— that idealizes viewpoint and prevents us from our own embodiment. Due to their multiple and reflexive frames of address, these pieces emphasize a process of reading and looking—as well as an artistic technique—that is built more from its possible 69 blockages and gaps than its ability to hold or follow a static picture in mind. As Acconci says himself, any time you do something, you make decisions about time and space. I wanted those decisions to be out of my hands. I could be dragged, carried along by another person, I could be a receiver. I could be the agent of the overall scheme, but I didn’t want to be the agent of the particular action. I could make the ultimate decision that my space is going to change now, but I don’t know where it’s going to go. 34 Acconci’s technique of enacting the frame as movement, therefore, is one in which viewpoint is infinitely deferred and the contingencies of sight—the non-sites of our looking and or reading—are engaged as the points of contact with the reader where rhetorical bodies emerge. ♦ In this sense, Acconci’s “shifting of the shift” comes clear, where movement in a poetics of frequency is no longer the marking of a defined border—a mere surfacing of the page—but a process of an interval that links and re-links us to different states of embodiment. To look again at Malevich’s Black Square then, we see neither the painting nor the frame, or even the painting versus the frame, but the blinding interval of the image itself. Our oscillation between the black and white of the painting is that horizon of the process of framing which “can be grasped only in flight, when we no longer know where it passes between the white and the black.” In other words the existence of frames—that is the existence of ourselves—is, at its 70 core, born of the resonance of frequency itself. Our passing frame, therefore, takes on dimension and clarifies the reflexivity that Acconci’s work enacts; dissimulating it from a meta-poetic process and recasting concerns of materiality in poetics as it has most commonly been conceptualized. By multiplying the frame, a reflexivity of framing creates a double-vision that could be recognized as the experience of experience—or the double exposure of, in connection with Bergson, matter and memory. It is a dissolution of representation, but in the opposite direction than that of Magritte’s treachery of images (‘this is not a pipe’), in that the passing frame collapses within itself as a limitless limit, enacting the ‘convention’ and ‘representation’ we use to differentiate ourselves from painting or writing, as the embodiment of an infinite relation. It is no mistake that the closing line of “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME)” states that “[t]here is no fixed limit to the size of the image your eyes can send to your mind.” Taking in hand Acconci’s careful attention to framing, the last line emphasizes the very process “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME)” enacts: a multiplication of the frames of reading and writing within and beyond the page, as well as within the reader. Reading “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME)” closely, attention is called not only to the ambulatory navigation in the space of a city block, but the process of the eye in movement across the page in reading, the contact of a finger upon the key of a typewriter and the impression of a symbol into a page like the marks of teeth into skin. 35 Acconci’s double move, thus, not only “thematizes the mode of [poetry’s] printing and production” and therefore calls “attention to his 71 poem’s physical, typewriterly construction,” but, what’s more, engages the production of text for the possible intervals of its making, the disruptions of multiple frequencies within its apparently seamless sequential time. 36 By disrupting the frequency and thus multiplying the spatial and temporal frames of his work, Acconci can be seen as moving the obsolescent image that Kittler argues disembodies us in the digital age. In turn, such written works as “Let me explain” and “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME)” address the contact of a split- second stop as a provisional space within which new interfaces can be made with textuality and the sensory apparatus. Ultimately, Acconci’s work crosses the wires of the determinant times and temporalities of our bodies as they might be undone through altered relationships to textuality—suggesting that the collapsible image of the spectacle, to the contrary of the digital apocalypse, is the possible utopic site of human and textual embodiment. 72 Chapter 2 Endnotes 1 Virilio 59; Mitchell 352; 221. 2 Virilio 60-61. 3 Quoted in Mitchell 204. 4 Krauss, “Aesthetics of Narcissism” 50. 5 Wagner 68. 6 Mitchell 214. 7 Wagner 75. 8 Crary 294. 9 Virilio 74. Interestingly enough, Virilio mentions that Einstein had, at one time, intended to call his ‘Theory of Relativity’ a ‘Theory of Viewpoint.’ 10 Virilio 74. 11 Virilio 74. 12 Acconci, Diary of a Body 328. 13 Acconci, Language to Cover a Page 122 [excerpt]. 14 Vito Acconci: Video and Performance. 15 Quoted in Vito Acconci: Video and Performance. 16 Deleuze 269. 17 Deleuze 269. 18 These lines are said by Acconci himself in his face-to-face video work Theme Song (1973). 19 Quoted in Mitchell 220. 20 Quoted in Dworkin, “Introduction” xiv. 21 Bergson 202. 22 Deleuze 213. 73 23 Deleuze 213. 24 Bergson 203. 25 This title is obviously influenced by Jasper Johns’ series of paintings 0 through 9 which had a profound effect on Acconci. 26 Acconci, 0 to 9 670. 27 Acconci, “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci.” 28 Acconci, “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci” 29 Acconci, “0 to 9 and Back Again.” 30 Acconci, Diary of a Body 76. 31 Acconci, Diary of a Body 77. 32 Acconci, Diary of a Body 77. 33 Acconci, Diary of a Body 82. 34 Acconci, “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci.” 35 My use of this ‘bodily’ simile here is purposively specific to direct attention to the connection of Acconci’s textual ‘body’ of work to his body art, specifically “Biting Piece” (1970) where Acconci bit himself wherever his mouth could reach, then photographed and inked the teeth impressions, to make a secondary impression on a page, calling the work “Trademarks.” Identifying Acconci’s body art as an “explicit continuation of his poetry,” Craig Dworkin argues that “Trademarks” “dramatizes and makes visible what can come from the poet’s mouth.” I am indebted to Dworkin’s discussion of Acconci’s relationships of textuality and corporeality. See Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs” 99-101. 36 Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs” 97. 74 Chapter 3: Frequency Read this word then this word then this word next. In his essay, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” Jean-François Lyotard claims it is the task of the avant-gardist to undo a “presumption of the mind with respect to time.” 1 While disjunctions of linearity are prevalent in studies of the avant-garde, I would like to consider the disruptions of temporality—more specifically the varying frequencies of Vito Acconci’s poetry—as necessarily the production of provisional subjectivity at the utopic site of the interval of framing. While this raises pertinent questions about possibilities of re-reading the avant-garde beyond the scope of our analysis here, it is an enactment powerfully illustrated in Acconci’s writing and crucial for the possibilities of textual embodiment in the digital age. 75 Let’s begin by mapping one reading of the avant-garde—linear and temporal disruption—within another: the disappearance of the subject. When founder of the avant-garde Situationist International Guy Debord proclaims that the “situationists will place themselves in the service of the necessity of oblivion,” he taps into the ‘negative’ philosophical project that could be seen as underlying all avant-garde activity, what Manfredo Tafuri states is “the disappearance of the subject.” 2 However, while this disappearance often gets read in a ‘purely’ negative light that ultimately conflates the avant-gardes with the very capitalist rational utopias they resisted, I would like to shift such a disappearance to the intervals of framing in Acconci’s writing as a possible site of productive embodiment; an embodiment reframed from the residue of annihilated time. Thus, as Frances Stracey has argued in her analysis of Situationist Pinot Gallizio’s Cavern of Anti-Matter (1959)—an installation of Gallizio’s industrial painting and fashions that covered the entire surface area of a gallery to enact an ‘infra-thin’ moment, or what Gallizio called an encounter between “the antimatter of the ceiling and the matter of the ground”— what is produced is “not the disappearance of the subject or regression to a non-I state… [but] the emergence of a new provisional subjectivity, one not yet fully established, institutionalized, or disciplined.” 3 Just as the apparent ‘purely negative’ digital image can be the very site for its most “volatile disequilibrium,” the disappearance of the subject might be the very utopic site of textual embodiment. 76 Fig. 17: Pinot Gallizio, Cavern of Anti-Matter, 1959. Image: Notbored.org. Gallizio’s staging of the disappearance of the subject should be moreover noted for its collapse of the frame of the gallery—now draped in Gallizio’s industrial painting—with the body of the viewer—the ‘models’ of the installation similarly draped with portions of the industrial painting. Gallizio’s description of the piece as a ‘cavern’ implies a cavity or hole through which matter itself is turned over or inverted (‘anti-matter’). Echoing the Malevich’s Black Square as an interval of expansion, Gallizio has enacted the frame not as a defined border that confines the subject, but, as Stracey argues, as an unfixed “itinerant shelter” whose “provisional horizon was emphasized by the temporary aspect of this limited duration installation and by the impermanence of its structure,” contesting “Le Corbusier’s model of an eternal and permanent modern architecture.” 4 Such a combination of a disrupted 77 temporality with the disappearance of the subject can be re-articulated in this cavern as the intervals between our own practical perception where new embodiments might occur. Gallizio’s cavern doubles as the passing of mind in the shifting of frames, opening up untimed positions “in which the subject expands rather than is contained.” 5 It is a vision of our lapse—a suspension of our own practical perception as we oscillate between body and matter only to discover a provisional subjectivity of collapse. In “The Reenchantment of the Concrete,” Francisco Varela introduces his theory of mind as enaction through the anecdote of a mental lapse: Picture yourself walking down the street, perhaps going to meet somebody. It is the end of the day and there is nothing very special in your mind. You are in a relaxed mood, in what we may call the ‘readiness’ of the walker who is simply taking a stroll. You put your hand in your pocket and suddenly discover that your wallet is not where it usually is. Breakdown: you stop, your mind-set is unclear, your emotional tonality shifts. Before you know it a new world emerges: you see clearly that you left your wallet in the store where you just bought some cigarettes. 6 It is just such an ‘adjustment,’ to bring back Jasper Johns’ description of the action of his art, that Varela argues makes up the “very stuff of our lives.” 7 The use of the breakdown to illustrate mental activity is what allows Varela to formulate a notion of embodiment within the interval between familiar cognitive situations just as Gallizio hopes to overhaul the gallery as its own interval for the production of new subjectivities. Both Johns, Gallizio, and ultimately Acconci, create a reflexivity of double exposure to enact embodiments of passing. The practical frames—or conventions—of the gallery, painting or poetic page and, thereby, the structures of 78 our own perceptions, are broken down to find new bodies and subjectivities in recurrence. Convention, in turn, is what Varela identifies as a “readiness for action” that we have proper to specific lived situations and embodiment is the result of the mental adjustment of that conventional loss—the result of the oscillation between a convention and its unrecognizable alteration in a figure-ground confusion. As Varela further explains, these osciallations are the symptoms of very rapid reciprocal cooperation and competition between distinct agents activated by the current situation, vying with each other for differing modes of interpretation constituting a coherent cognitive framework and readiness-for action. 8 But during a breakdown, that coherence is momentarily lost and the frame itself resembles more what Varela refers to as ‘hinge’ that serves both as the gap between and the re-linkage of possible existences. Luhmann’s ‘other-reference’ of media and Wagner’s “equipment breakdown” of video and audio in Serra’s Boomerang, are doubly mapped on the operation of our minds in a state of lapse. In turn, an enactment of multiple frames that is the process of Acconci’s poetics of frequency, establishes the shift of the mind between conventional frameworks as the very seat of embodiment. Thus, matters of the concrete in his poetics are the very possibilities of contact with his reader in the variable frequencies of textual framing. Johns’ insistence on a concreteness of adjustment and Gallizio’s subject of ‘anti-matter’ are not so far out of reach here in the continual enactment of the poetic frame as a matter of text. In fact, a varying frequency of textual embodiment isn’t “merely an 79 abstraction, nor is it a step toward something else: it is how we arrive and where we stay.” 9 ♦ “Make a painting of frequency.” This directive is given in one of Marcel Duchamp’s notes of his Box of 1914, a collection of 16 notes written as one of the textual halves of his Large Glass. At its simplest, “frequency,” by its definition in physics, is “[t]he number of occurrences of a periodic quantity, as waves, vibrations, oscillations, in a unit of time.” 10 While the notion of frequency immediately connects us to temporality, critic Linda Henderson recognizes that Duchamp’s interest in the notion of frequency also connects to his fascination with invisible forces—what he often termed the ‘infra-thin’—that have the ability to invisibly link phenomena in such a way that produces interstitial or altered phases of experience. Inspired by the pre- war science of ‘classical ether physics,’ the notion of frequency was of interest to such prewar avant-gardists as Duchamp and Apollinaire as it “called to mind the electromagnetic waves that were revolutionizing the field of communication:” just as X-rays earlier had produced a radically new way of seeing (and with it a distrust of human perception) and had popularized the notion of space as filled with vibrating waves and varying frequencies… wireless telegraphy… electricity and electromagnetism must have been particularly appealing because [of their]… implications for culture. 11 80 One of the primary implications here is that space becomes filled with infinite variations of temporality; space becomes space-time. In fact, as Paul Virilio establishes, Einstein’s “Theory of Relativity” was initially a “Theory of Viewpoint” that emphasized the infinitely unstable positions and times of the perceiver as the essential relation to the world. Frequency can thus be seen as a variable of the circuit between bodies, world, text and the image whose disruption signals the possibility of new spaces and times for embodiment. In one of the numerous occurrences of the ‘infra-thin’ in his writings, Duchamp explains the ‘infra-thin’ as both a textual and temporal relationship: “It would be better to go into the infrathin interval which separates 2 ‘identicals’ than to conveniently accept the verbal generalization which makes 2 twins look like 2 drops of water.” 12 As Marjorie Perloff notes, “[i]n aesthetic terms, the ‘interval between two names’ which is the infrathin spells the refusal of metaphor—the figure of similarity, of analogy, of likeness—in favor of the radical difference at the core of some of the most interesting conceptual art works and poetries of the past few decades.” 13 This core of radical difference returns us both to Crary’s circuit of body and text as a site of “latent but potentially volatile disequilibrium[s]” and establishes frequency as a recurrence within a temporal frame—a recurrence that is not the repetition of the same, but a repetition of difference. Perloff’s link of conceptual artworks and poetry addresses the commonality of frame disruption we find in the work of Acconci’s diverse career as one that exceeds semantic play and reconfigures the apparent ‘simplicity’ and ‘shock’ of the 81 avant-garde to an address of shifting the position of the viewer. The parallels between such recent ‘avant-garde’ projects as Language poetics, the Art & Language Group and Conceptual Art of the sixties and seventies share a similar vector that interrogated the frame as a stabilizer of perspective. In discussing Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos own idea of concrete poetry, Eric Vos argues that it moves “towards the very basics of language… [I]t does not function as a representation of some extra-textual concept, thing, action, or quality, but as a condensed gestalt from which perspectives on such concepts, things, actions, or qualities (may) emerge.” 14 What de Campos realizes is that the work that addresses a movement of the frame is not solely an image or metaphor per se, but a model for transforming and repositioning the viewer—an “open-theory model” at that. As Vos continues, the concrete poem doesn’t, therefore, merely serve as an image of concreteness, “but also, and perhaps even more enlightingly, as an image of our possibilities to develop such a characterization.” 15 In taking a look at conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs we get a clear sense of a core of radical difference as it is necessarily found within the continual re-positioning of language and body. One and Three Chairs presents the viewer with three variant frames of a chair: a ‘real’ chair, a photograph of a chair, and the definition of the word ‘chair.’ While it is clear that Kosuth disrupts a singular mediation of ‘chair’ across multiple frames (linguistic, photographic and ‘real’), the tension of Kosuth’s work isn’t just the indeterminacy of a semiological system, but a shift toward material tensions of language, image, objecthood and body. In fact, what Kosuth develops in this 82 Fig. 18: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs, 1965. Image: Antecamera.com. experiment develops what Gilles Deleuze calls a new “analytic of the image” that reveals the “stratigraphic” structure of our brains and the intervals of our as they correspond to reading. Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs recognizes that the difference at the core of repetition is founded in that fact that perception is hardly as pure and practical as we assume. That, when in fact we encounter an image or text—that is, when we frame—we necessarily frame image after image or word after word upon that image, much in the way of the layering that occurs in Johns’ 0 through 9 paintings. As Henri Bergson states, [p]erception does not consist in merely impressions gathered, or even elaborated, by the mind… [but] truly involves a reflection, in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say the projection, outside 83 ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mold itself.” If, after having gazed at any object, we turn our eyes abruptly away, we obtain an “afterimage” of it: must we not suppose that this image existed already while we were looking? 16 Therefore, Kosuth’s work not only presents multiple mediations of the chair-image, but is reflexive to our own perceptual frames that we lay over again and again upon each image in infinite exposures. Looking at these ‘chairs’ necessarily implies that we put the ‘real’ chair over the photographed chair over the definition of chair and on and on. “It is true,” Bergson continues, “that we are dealing here with images photographed upon the object itself, and with memories following immediately upon the perception of which they are but the echo” such that stabilized and practical perception is always too late; every perception is a reflection shrouded over the present. 17 Bringing back Varela’s breakdown, then, the recurrent and disjointed structure of our perception, is the structure of our embodiment that hardly can be sought in the practical and immobilized representation of our bodies as still. As Deleuze argues, Noël Burch put it very well when he said that, when images cease to be linked together ‘naturally,’ when they relate to a systematic use of false continuity or a continuity shot at 180 degrees, it is as if the shots are themselves turning, or ‘turning around’, and grasping them ‘requires considerable effort of memory and imagination, in other words, a reading. …Not in the sense that it used to be said: to perceive is to know, is to imagine, is to recall, but in the sense that reading is a function of the eye, a perception of perception, a perception which does not grasp without also grasping in reverse, imagination, memory, or knowledge. 18 84 “To read,” therefore, “is to relink instead of link” as the frame is always already a recurrence of the image as it was. Kosuth’s use of the familiar convention of the chair, then, is hardly an accident. In fact, to exemplify the disjointed structure of the mind, Varela presents Lakoff and Johnson’s “basic-level categories” of perception that are the images we encounter most commonly in our lives. Once we perceive such familiar objects as chairs, tables, trees, doors, etc., we immediately shift and oscillate through different frames of our cognitive structure whereby “[i]f we take a chair, for example, at the lower level it might belong to the category ‘stool,’ whereas at the higher level it belongs to the category ‘furniture.’” 19 Thus, in practically viewing Kouth’s work as a series of distinct images or description of a chair, we miss the point and efface the act of framing—our own multiple viewpoints and positions—that a great deal of avant-garde, conceptual and concrete works enact. As Gertrude Stein writes in “An Acquaintance with Description:” What is the difference between three and two in furniture. Three is the third of three and two is the second of two. This makes it as true as a description. And not satisfied. 20 Semiological shock and semantic play, therefore, are dissatisfying descriptions themselves of the effects of radical writing as the core of difference is trapped within a totalizing image of language just as the physicality of all chairs is absolved in a notion of ‘furniture.’ Instead, radical writing demands we recognize our own continual displacement and perpetual embodiment within reading images. A poetics of frequency then is “less a question of novelty as such than of coming to terms with 85 specificity and difference;” a perpetual difference that is ourselves in the infinite re- positioning of framing. 21 Turning to Acconci’s poem “READ THIS WORD” and setting it beside an excerpt of conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s contemporaneous work “This square should be read as a whole,” provides for an illustration of how Acconci directly addresses the frequency of reading only to short-circuit our consecutive selection process as we read: READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD NOW SEE ONE WORD SEE ONE WORD NEXT SEE ONE WORD NOW AND THEN SEE ONE WORD AGAIN LOOK AT THREE WORDS HERE LOOK AT THREE WORDS NOW LOOK AT THREE WORDS NOW TOO TAKE IN FIVE WORDS AGAIN TAKE IN FIVE WORDS SO TAKE IN FIVE WORDS DO IT NOW SEE THESE WORDS AT A GLANCE SEE THESE WORDS AT THIS GLANCE AT THIS GLANCE HOLD THIS LINE IN VIEW HOLD THIS LINE IN ANOTHER VIEW AND IN A THIRD VIEW SPOT SEVEN LINES AT ONCE THEN TWICE THEN THRICE THEN A FOURTH TIME A FIFTH A SIXTH A SEVENTH AN EIGHTH (Vito Acconci) This square should be read as a whole; or these two vertical rectangles should be read from left to right or right to left; or, these two horizontal rectangles should be read from top to bottom or bottom to top; or, these four squares should be read from upper left to upper right to lower right to lower left or upper left to upper right to lower left to lower right or upper left to lower left to lower right to upper right or upper left to lower left to lower left to upper right to upper left to lower (Adrian Piper [excerpt]) Reading both of these pieces, we instantly recognize that they are constructed of ‘directives’ which attempt to frame our relationship to the piece itself and seem intent on semiological displacements. Quoting Kate Linker, Craig Dworkin argues 86 that these ‘directives’, “[r]ather than merely referencing some signified beyond the page…gesture forward and backward within their pages as well… [such that] ‘language points to itself, reflexively describing its motion over the page.’” 22 In turn, these apparently simple ‘directives’ direct us, not into a singularly sequential relation to the text—though the piece begins by describing one (only to collapse it within a reflexive act)—but into a complex loss of orientation to the text such that we have to slow down our reading process just to keep perspective. The semiological disruption, therefore, is enacted as a disruption of the framing capabilities of the viewer through a heightened and disorienting frequency of text, exposing something within reading that outruns reading itself. However, though the affect of these works clearly overlap, and not to neglect the clear reflexivity to shape and form (Piper’s full piece makes a perfect square, just as Acconci’s piece ends on “AN EIGHTH” line) and the differing nature of the imperatives of the two (Piper’s auxiliary of “should be” versus Acconci’s “DO IT NOW”), Piper’s work demands alternate relationships to reading form itself—the square—while Acconci emphasizes alternatives to the sequential frequency of reading lines and words consecutively. Acconci addresses the transition process of a highly conscious reading frame that is attentive to the affect of single words (“READ THIS WORD”) to a practical reading process that neglects the power of framing as it readily conforms to the familiar sequential frequency of reading itself—erasing letters, words and the spaces between them for entire lines, capturing “THIS LINE IN A GLANCE” and eventually spotting “SEVEN LINES AT ONCE.” The 87 implication is less the favoring of one framing or frequency over another, but a surfacing of the multiple frequencies of framing itself as they might preclude a singular erasure of embodiment—that is, an emphasis on the cavities and intervals of our reading process. The interval—or lapse—is a process integral to reading. Acconci’s poem, therefore insists on the blockages, the displacements and disruptions, the contingency of framing by emphasizing the gaps of our perception within the textual image—a gap that we normally fill to see the text we are reading. As Bergson points out, Acconci’s “READ THIS WORD,” similar to Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, demands we consider the “host of different relations which can be expressed by the same word, according to the place it occupies and the terms which it unites” that our conventional reading process precludes by noting “here and there a few characteristic lines and fills all the intervals with memory-images which, projected on the paper, take the place of the real printed characters and may be mistaken for them.” That is, Acconci insists upon the intervals at the heart of the image of text as well as our varying positions in relation to that text such that we shift our frame. In turn, we are to understand what we “shall never be able to understand it if [we] start from the verbal images themselves:” that there is always a gulf “between two consecutive verbal images… which no amount of concrete representations can ever fill.” 23 Thus, taking in hand the variable rate of movement within a frame as well as the interval movements between framing, the concept of frequency becomes an apt metaphor for the perceptual affects I am seeking here in Acconci’s writing. Specifically, 88 frequency is the ‘infra-thin’ space or interval between the medial frame of Acconci’s written work and that of the viewer or reader; the moving split-second contact—or circuit—between body and text. ♦ Duchamp’s painting of frequency is his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 who took its origins from Eadward Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey’s invention and experiments with chronophotography. While much has been written about Duchamp’s painting since its uproarious introduction to America at the New York Armory Show in 1919, I would like to focus on its enactment of the conventionally ‘still’ figure of the nude for its recurrence of the frame in what Duchamp himself would call a kind of “mirrorical return”—a process that emphasizes the physicality within the intervals of framing. Perhaps in connection with Gallizio’s own re- fashioned models, Duchamp continually re-invents the nude in his painting as to construct a new subjectivity with each step that overlaps the previous. The nude seems to build herself up frame upon frame, even twisting, distorting and scattering their clear and defining lines to construct a body from their remnants. 89 Fig. 19: Eadward Muybridge, Nude Descending Stairs, 1887. Image: Filmsite.org Fig. 20: Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Fig. 21: Vito Acconci, Step Piece, 1970. Image: Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Oil on canvas, 58 x 35 in. Acconci, Diary of a Body. 90 Duchamp’s nude is embodied in her passings through frames and in the intervals of their re-linkages from step to step. At the same time, Duchamp hardly replicates the distinct frames found in the experiments of chronophotography, instead he collapses the steady barrier of the individual frames such that the only possible remaining borders are the active and permeable intervals between bodies. In viewing the work, then, we too are active, constructing the nude from the remnants given only to find ourselves oscillating between forms, walking forwards and backwards with her up the stairs to discover no clear or precise image. Comparing Duchamp’s work to Acconci’s Step Piece (1970) therefore, shows us that for embodiment to occur—that is, in order for there to be existence—it must recur, such that physicality and contact are only achieved within the intervals of re-linking frames. In Step Piece, Acconci set himself the task of stepping up and down from a stool repeatedly for as long as he could each day for the period of four months, after which he supplies a typed report to the ‘public’ of each month’s activity. Acconci not only clearly binds the world of the physical to the temporal—in a process that produces multiple embodiments across varying frames of time—but he binds these multiple embodiments to language itself with his multiple reports. As he states in his notes: “(Announcements are sent out, inviting the public to come see the activity, in my apartment, any day during the designated months. At the end of each month’s activity, a progress-report is sent out to the public.).” Acconci’s reports, similar to Duchamp’s collapse of frames, express infinite intervals of time through which the 91 body is built. As Acconci says of Step Piece, “I can build myself into the space as I build myself up” as we recourse from the physical image to the first month’s report of being able to perform “3 min. 20 sec.” and “3 min. 40 sec.” on February first and second respectively, to the third month’s performance of “20 min. 6 sec.” and “19 min. 20 sec.” on July 30 th and 31 st . 24 These variants of performance, what Acconci refers to as improvement, serve to indicate Acconci’s body always as a core of difference. While the physical act is ‘repeated,’ the embodiments are a result of their infinite difference and recursion. While one prevailing idea of Conceptual art is its interrogation of rhetorical devices as they expose institutional structures, Mel Bochner observes that “there is no art that does not bear some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to irony.” 25 Such works as Step Piece and Following Piece, then, hardly limit themselves to a disembodied rhetorical play, instead the works often stage the physicality as an interval of contact with the reader or viewer—a varying frequency of embodiment. These works develop a site where the rhetorical gets tied up with the physical that is made and re-made again in the ‘infra-thin’ intervals of framing; emphasizing that a rhetorical act—the act of reading and embodying text—is always a physical act whose gaps and disruptions addresses the viewer as well. As Craig Dworkin writes, “these works do not so much provide the record of a past event—an hermeneutic object that can be analyzed for meaning—as they… leave the viewer to pursue particular plots within their own parameters.” The work of frequency, thus, is a translation to the body, a kind of multiple and recursive incorporation of text where 92 Acconci continuously builds himself up into space across the multiple intervals of multiple frames. Acconci’s writing, therefore, is ultimately a double exposure of his conceptual and performance work—movements of frame against frame. In “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME),” Acconci makes a third move beyond crossing the temporalities of reading, writing and walking in his choice of source material for the written element of his work. Shefter’s, Faster Reading Self- Taught, is a text intent on altering the frame of the reading process for its reader; quite literally, it hopes to empower the reader to reframe his or her own reading ability and, thus, his or her relation to textual material. Referring to the use of meta- textual sources for poetics in an author’s note to Paul Carrol’s 1968 anthology, The Young American Poets, Acconci emphasizes the framing act of selection involved with his source material, not as it can determine a meta-poetic content for his writing, but as it can be the form of the work itself: Hypothesis about ways of writing, ways of reading—if a book is defined as writing on paper, discuss a hand-writing lesson; if reading takes place one word at a time, then discuss each word (definitions, functions)—can be the form of a particular piece of writing. 26 While Dworkin and Perloff recognize this reflexive form as being a kind of Wittgensteinian language game that “constitutes an extended meditation on the grammar of reading and writing,” I would also emphasize how Acconci’s move to use reflexive source texts emphasizes the acts of reading and writing as essentially acts of selection—that is, textual framing. 27 93 Interestingly enough, the catalyst for this empowerment of the reader through a recurrence of the frame, at least from what Acconci gives us in “MOVE/MOVES: DOUBLE TIME,” is a close analysis of the typewriter itself: We know that when a key is struck, the letter or symbol is printed on the paper at the moment contact is made with the carriage, and that each time an impression is made there is a split-second stop. Similar to Holt’s immediate double exposure of media, body and light, what is at play here in this brief description has its own refraction. Shefter, and thus Acconci, are working to slow down our conventional relationship to the typewriter to better understand or ‘see’ the possible gaps or slippages in what normally appears a fluid process. These split-second stops of contact are directly realized as Acconci’s source text goes on to compare the differences of typing-time between the “champion typist,” the “skilled office worker” and the “‘hunt and peck’” artist; the latter allowing us to “clearly see the numerous stops” in all typing despite the “optical illusion” of the speed typist’s activity. The magnification of textual description here attenuates the illusion of a fixed frequency of typing speed—and thus, our own variable frequencies of reading, writing, walking and embodying text. Embodiment occurs within the intervals of framing—intervals that are emphasized by the concreteness of Acconci’s language found within its recurring transitions that jolt the reader out of a stable orientation to the work. As Acconci states, language “in order to work ‘normally,’ has to remain transparent so that it leaves the world as it is. 94 When language becomes solid, it prevents normal flow, from person to language to world”—embodying us in the anti-matter world of interval. Such an attention to the surfaces and slippages of textual production—what could be seen as embodiment occurring within the apertures of reading and writing—pervade Acconci’s work. The space of interval is a predominant part of Acconci’s written oeuvre, as the frame of numerical sequences cleave found narratives and open parentheses interrupt and space out poems. For example, in “RE,” Acconci emphasizes the framing action of the parentheses to not only create altering frequencies of temporality, but also of space and depth within reading: (here) ( ) ( ) ( ) (there) ( ) ( )( ) (here and there -- I say here) ( ) (I do not say now) ( ) (I do not say it now) ( ) ( ) ( ) (then and there -- I say there)( ) ( ) ( ) (say there) ( ) (I do not say then) ( ) (I do not say, then, this) ( ) ( ) ( ) (then I say) ( ) ( ) ( )(here and there) ( ) (first here) ( ) (I said here second) ( )( ) ( ) (I do not talk first) ( ) 28 As is obvious with a glance at this excerpt of the poem, the parenthetical framing function completely distorts the frame of textuality itself. As the text demands we read empty space, even making time for the intervals of text and attention, the text constructs itself from its negative. The textual body here is one built of its 95 opposite—silence—or of its own annihilation and these empty spaces invite our own framing and embodying—we fill in the gap. Not to ignore the various spatial and temporal plays (the form and use of the locative deictics of “here,” “there,” “now,” “first,” “second”), but “RE” allows us to inhabit the silences that Crary argues dismantle digital culture’s “myths of necessity, ubiquity, efficiency and instantaneity.” 29 Acconci asks us to not only make the text along with him—that is to continually de- and re-frame the work—but to inhabit its intervals and perpetually reproduce ‘provisional subjectivities’ through embodiments of passing. To bring together, then, framing as a process of enactment with matters of text as our lens for taking a closer look at Acconci, we will have to address more complexly, and quite literally, the matter of image as the interval of frequency. For if the concreteness of Johns’ 0 through 9 images is that which inspired Acconci’s early writing’s attempt to enact linguistic matter, it is the image that similarly is modulated and altered through our embodiments in passing. The numbers of Johns’ paintings, therefore, are born from their own dissolution in the same way that we oscillate between frameworks of mind. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty points out, “the form of the excitant is created by the organism itself” such that we apply our conventional frames to Johns’ numbers in order for them to breakdown and capture us in the interval that gives rise to the concrete. 30 The reflexive double exposure thus rearticulates the avant-garde tasks of the disruption of temporality and the disappearance of the subject to discover a provisional subjectivity in the infinite intervals of frequency. 96 As a central point of her critique of the 2007 show “Hommage à Malevich” in Hamburg, Tupitsyn points out that the show missed the opportunity to display Kasimir Malevich’s Black Square painting “as an easy target for perpetual appropriation” since it failed to “properly introduce Malevich’s own reproduction of his painting.” 31 Had visitors to the show seen evidence of Malevich’s own process of multiplying his eidetic painting, perhaps the Black Square could be read for its continual possibilities of embodiment. I say ‘read’ here to heighten the textuality of Malevich’s image as it might be seen through his connections to the contemporary ‘avant-garde’ poets of his time who felt that the “word is broader than its meaning”—who demanded that there be no “no intermediaries—symbols, meaning.” 32 Poets who, like Acconci, attempt to lay bare, not the fact of representation, but the act of framing as it exposes the structure of ourselves and allows for further embodiment. Without such a recurrent reflexivity of a variable frequency, the homage to Malevich ends with the “macabre appropriation” of a photograph of Malevich’s own still body, lying in state. Acconci’s writing, on the other hand, runs the ‘mirror-circuit’ between body and text red hot, showing how framing doesn’t just allow vision, it gives us the edges of vision, the corporeality and cavities of vision that continually bind physicality to language and develop new permutations of body and subjectivity. In this sense, and in Acconci’s poetics of frequency, we are continually becoming another such that Rimbaud’s “I is another” is the only possible existence. Such a notion of enaction and embodiment corresponds directly to the temporality of 97 the subject where a Bergsonian conception of the matter of memory and image as indistinguishable is established. Existence, therefore, is found within forgetting from gap to gap in perception—the passing from frame to frame—or what Varela might call our oscillation between the hinges that link us in and out of mental breakdowns. Vito Acconci’s poetics enact a frequency of continual framing where Gertrude Stein’s statement that “there must be no remembering … otherwise there is no existing” 33 comes clear; a medusan site for embodiments of passing where the instant of reading must be the instant of forgetting. 98 Chapter 3 Endnotes 1 Lyotard, The Inhuman 107. 2 Quoted in McDonough xii; xi. 3 Stracey 93. 4 Stracey 90-91. 5 Stracey 93. 6 Varela 325. 7 Varela 328. 8 Varela 334. 9 Varela 320. 10 Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary, Comprehensive International ed., vol. 1, s.v., “frequency.” 11 Henderson 193. 12 de Duve 160 [my emphasis]. 13 Perloff, “‘But isn’t the same at least the same?’” 14 Vos 23. 15 Vos 23. 16 Bergson 102-03. 17 Bergson 103. 18 Deleuze 245. 19 Varela 335. 20 Stein, “An Acquaintance with Description” 507. 21 Perloff, “After Language Poetry.” 22 Quoted in Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs” 94. 99 23 Bergson 115. 24 Acconci, Diary of a Body 160; 162. 25 Quoted in Ward 38. 26 Quoted in Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs” 95. 27 Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs” 95. 28 Acconci, Language to Cover a Page 43 [excerpt]. 29 Crary 294. 30 Varela expounds this point precisely by stating that “common sense, then, must be examined on a microscale: in the moment during a breakdown it actualizes the birth of the concrete” (329). 31 Tupitsyn 465. 32 Alexander Kruchenykh quoted in Compton 578. 33 Stein, “Portraits & Repetition” 178-79. 100 Conclusion: Lapse In her essay “How Avant-Gardes Rise, Fall and Mutate: The Case of Language Poetry” of 2004, Marjorie Perloff argues that the crucial challenges of Language poetics are now “widely accepted”—or absorbed—by the mainstream. Since “[t]he digital revolution has intervened,” she states, “the notion of language as a system of signs with its own semiological relationships” is commonplace with online technologies. 1 Similarly, Language poetry’s confrontations with “reader construction (who owns the text?) becomes irrelevant” with the infinite possibilities of digital transformation and distribution. “And we,” Perloff argues, in the midst of this digital revolution, “are still trying to come to terms with its fallout.” The question we face then, is what do we do as writers after Language poetics? This very question was recently posed to 10 young North American poets on Kenneth Goldsmith’s website of radical writing Ubuweb. Many of the responses 101 give us little definition of a path of action and read more as laments in admiration of Language poetry. Goldsmith himself states that Language Poetry “has succeeded in pulvering syntax and meaning into a handful of dust [where] to grind the sand any finer would be futile.” 2 Similarly, poet Christian Bök argues that Language poetry “has pushed poetry as far as poetry on the page can go” but continues to state that “poetry must find new avenues of thought beyond poetry itself.” 3 Beyond indeed, but where? In the case of Vito Acconci’s poetics of frequency, the orienting charge of language is less the structure of language itself or the frame of the page applied to it, but our own framing capabilities as that which structures language within a temporal sense. Framing, therefore, is not specific to radical writing as it is not specific to language; and Acconci’s concern with the orienting charge of language—and our movement or jolting out of that orientation—is less a concern with language per se, but a desire to shift, or continually de-frame and reframe us in relationship to the image of the word. This revises the poet Charles Simic’s recognition that “[o]ut of the simultaneity of the experience, the event of language is an emergence into linear time” 4 and Jean-François Lyotard’s recognition of “sentences, supposedly speaking of something to someone, remain tacit on the subject of their referent and their destination.” 5 Instead, it is the event of ourselves—our embodiment—that frames us within language and binds us to the subject of our referents as our destinations. It is ourselves that insist on Malevich’s Black Square as a door or window to pass 102 through, rather than a continual deferral of a singular way of being—an embodiment of passing. For Acconci, the spatial and temporal are the essential components of ‘convention’ that becomes the necessary means for “shifting the shift” in his poetics. So, in our attempt to frame the indecipherable content of Malevich’s Black Square or Johns’ dissolving numerals, we also take for granted the limit the frame doesn’t merely represent, but enacts as the frame of our own perceptive capabilities: the dynamic oscillation within the instant of a de- and reframing of mind that serves to continuously bind the image to its own impossibility—it’s utter falsification and erasure of itself—as well as the necessity of such impossibility for our continued embodiment. This is the moment and matter of lapse: the frame perpetually enacted to resonate the often held distinct spaces of interior and exterior, of self and world, of, in Henri Bergson’s terms, matter and memory. “MOVE/MOVES (DOUBLE TIME),” like much of Acconci’s written work, is deceptively simple in layout and idea. However, the striking depth of Acconci’s writings are their restless confronting of the complex questions of temporality, perception , visuality, language and (the impossibility of) their representation at the level of reading and writing itself. Acconci’s is a writing at the surface of text, a kind of flattened signification that addresses language at its basest limit of mediation. As Acconci himself states, it is a language used “to cover a space rather than dis- cover meaning.” 6 While this kind of figuration of language is often read as a ‘material’ or ‘concrete’ thrust and related to ‘avant-garde’ shock, the concreteness of 103 Acconci’s work leads us to a text born in the interval of the passing frame—the textuality that reflexively engages the ‘readable’ and ‘writable’ frames of language and image. As his explorations of the multiple spaces of performance, video and architecture exemplify, Acconci understands that the affective power of art lies not so much with representation as it does in the possibilities of framing. The process of his art, thus, traces a multivalent investigation of the circuit between body and text. Fig. 22: Vito Acconci, “DROP (ON THE SIDE / OVER THE SIDE),” 1969. Image: Acconci, “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci.” 104 It is Acconci’s interest in matter as that which collapses the idealist and realist borders of our differential relationships to objects, images, the world and our bodies that not only ‘led him off the page,’ but serve as the possibilities for new architectures and performances of writing text. As a kind of companion piece to Malevich’s Black Square, Acconci’s “DROP (ON THE SIDE / OVER THE SIDE)” takes the “three boundaries of one page” of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary and sets them before us, producing not the representation of a window or door for exit through the back of a book, but the very frame—the kind of gapped footprint—of reading after the fact. It’s as if Acconci shows us what we take in one glance at the Dictionary, or the residue that’s left once we frame the page for reading—the things left behind—the spaces where “the reader left off.” This untimed space of reading, what Eve Meltzer has called “[t]he gaping emptiness at the center of the three boundaries… seems to suggest that language has no center, that in fact, what is there, roughly at the center of this book of so many words—words that point to words that point to words, and so on—is nothing.” 7 However, this nothingness is necessarily always the ‘other-reference’ and ‘open- theory model’ of any mediation, that is, the infinite shift of our bodies that frame the mediation itself. Acconci has us take account of the shifting of the frame such that the emptiness of his textual-images become filled with the incessant permutations of our own re- and de-framing in reading and looking. The canvas is available for our own smearing of it edges—indeed it’s built from the remnants of words themselves—a still pool for the slightest shift or modulation of our bodies. In 105 response to the digital fallout, Acconci’s poetics give us the new image of thought as the shift and gap of reading—thought as the movement of the frame. As Gilles Deleuze argues, perhaps ‘Empty’ and ‘disconnected’ are not the best words. An empty space, without characters (or in which the characters themselves show the void) has a fullness in which there is nothing missing. Disconnected, unlinked fragments of space are the objects of a specific relinkage over the gap: the absence of match is only the appearance of linking-up which can take place in an infinite number of ways. In this sense, …[the] image is read at the same time it is seen. 8 The image of text in a poetics of frequency, therefore, is the untimed frame whose only address and obligation is to the permutations we bring to it in our own framing and shifting embodiment. Thus as portions of maps, magazines, newspapers, books, dictionaries, thesauruses, audio tapes, telephone weather reports and Ezra Pound’s “Alba” are all transposed from their original contexts in Vito Acconci’s writing, apertures are exposed around and within the multiple spaces and forms of textuality. What is astonishing here is that the intervals are engaged at seemingly infinite scales, from national broadcasts and the grid locations of Hagstron’s map of the five boroughs of New York City, to the displacing gaps between letters and apertures of parentheticals in the briefest poems and statements. For the opening of his essay on Acconci, “Fugitive Signs,” Craig Dworkin excerpts the following lines from a longer poem as they encapsulate this physicality of textual removal: 106 I am he(re) that drops letters Dworkin effectively points out how these few short lines bracket off “conventional reference (‘re’: ‘with regard to’) … in favor of a focus on the physical manipulation (‘drop’) of the very material of language (‘letters’), which only points back to its place on the page (the locative ‘he[re]’).” Which is to say that, beyond the familiar frame of signification, Acconci gives us here (again) a physical removal in progress, such that the parentheses not only serve to create an alternate reading of the lines (here / he)—lines that are reflexive of both Acconci’s future move to leave poetry behind and reflexive of the physical embodiment of the page itself (conflating the poet’s body with the page)—but the impossibility of a singular subject in the infinite movement between “I am he” and “I am here.” The linguistic ‘image’ of “I am he(re)” is medusan; a place where the “he” is only constructed from the annihilation of the “here,” where we are unable to trade in one frame for the other. It is a frequency that produces a temporal glitch—a doubling image—where Acconci suggests that we can embody the impossible frame of being text and human at the same time. Thus, one not only thinks and reads in the empty times and spaces of Acconci’s textual removals and transpositions—the holes these operations create—but imagines the empty spaces they (and we) have left behind, vestiges of blank reserve, residues of lost occupancy. In the early writing of Acconci, therefore, embodiment and image are “no longer confused with the space which serves as its place, nor with the actual present which is passing,” but the 107 infinite resonance of layering frame upon frame that produces a double exposure wherein the boundaries of object, world, image and subject reach their limit and pass into one another. 9 “DROP (ON THE SIDE / OVER THE SIDE)” enacts framing to indicate there is always something within perception (and language) that allows it to exceed itself and directly presents these utopic sites—a kind of clearing, a blank frame to fall into and embody how we wish. 10 Acconci’s work reveals that the exit from the disembodying mirror circuit of the digital, quite simply, is our own physicality built up through a continual leaping through frames and into the void. Acconci addresses us from within transgression, addresses us at the site where our rhetorical bodies are found and found again, demanding that we continually re- ‘charge’ the circuit between body and text as a reserve for the future of radical writing—the marks of his own transgressive career serving as evidentiary sites for continuing embodiment against the incessant fallout of the human in ones and zeros. That’s why, even though it sounds impossible, we say that you read when your eyes are not moving. 108 Conclusion Endnotes 1 Perloff, “How Avant-Gardes Rise, Fall and Mutate.” 2 After Language Poetry. 3 After Language Poetry. 4 Simic 102. 5 Lyotard, “Foreword” xv. 6 Acconci, “Early Work” 4. 7 Meltzer 39. 8 Deleuze 245. 9 Deleuze 100. 10 This actually brings us to a conjunction of Henri Bergson’s statement that “we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself,” (208) with Eve Meltzer’s recognition that Acconci’s treatment of language reminds us that “there is something inherent in the signifier itself—at the level of both sound and letter—that allows it to exceed itself” (41). 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Their proposal was not well rec and a and them and a gratify them 98, as less than 5% of the genome through girl hat the rate of progress in human a and and the all a children and the 20) proposed whole-genome shotg always the and girl concerned and and grumbled the the they to un sequencing of the human geno always though their truly always they to could eived (21). However, by early 19 at a had been sequenced, it was clear t there the their the 134 the as These that through they and any there and the great to all that the the as are always a again very slow (22), and the prospects f a governess the and arranger affairs at char-acter 5 goal were uncertain. In early 19 all that always things always the and an a a to this a thought a come and the advantage and after-taste they they their to genome sequencing worldwide wa as the children advisor the the then that or finishing the genome by the 20 And the and the and 135 all things can and Biosystems) developed an automa a a that all as as are And time and and them A sequencer, subsequently called t came zer. Discussions between PE Bios than and a and to comrade and at the the through the and a the all that the always good 98, PE Biosystems (now Applied Always too the always the to to their this arranging the to ted, high-throughput capillary DN And he ABI PRISM 3700 DNA Analy There and this to to a good talker to and about along and there that and to anger 136 they together gross ed in a plan to undertake the seque these common he 3700 DNA Analyzer and the w gone that a at a To that the than that that This the the gets to class that them always a any hole-genome shotgun sequencing crazy ). Many of the principles of opera a the to them all and systems and TIGR scientists result as are ncing of the human genome with t all came Alfred to the to a a attractive a a and approach and and comes any getting are are to tradition that are techniques developed at TIGR (23 that tion of a genome sequencing facili agree all any 137 can cility (24). However, the facility e a gone and to to and to to capacity roughly 50 times that of their than to s were required for sample prepar together courageous enome assembly. Some argued th and a time conviction rom the H. influenzae genome to t this that the and a that things this conviction repeat sequences was not feasible time this this ty were established in the TIGR fa The the college then and a to and nvisioned for Celera would have a The any and TIGR, and thus new development Alfred a ation and tracking and for whole-g tall the that and at the required 150-fold scale-up f threw acquaintance Alfred art things to are and and he human genome with its comple The all and answer 138 care things er genome was thus chosen as a te time a things all that certain tongue the then towns Giorgone this took takes y on a large and complex eukaryot anything to to Gerald Rubin and the Berkeley Dr about the that class eotide sequence of the 120-Mbp e any they and to all them any them they as good (25). The Drosophila melanogast a always the art the a grow air a about and culture always American st case for whole-genome assembl all that and ic genome. In collaboration with the to and a osophila Genome Project, the nucl they them against them after the and the As a to 139 them hila genome was determined over George about any the ophila genome-sequencing effort r and always to And a as And always children and grown always And a anything anything against there anything are all they alright a the that uchromatic portion of the Drosop The could than the a 1-year period (26-28). The Dros as that thing attacking the than to this to glowing the closing them the esulted in two key findings: (i) tha to there the and the trust the and think that and a 140 that’s to a things to to got and a enerate chromosome assemblies w time the the the a cheeks a a and to and children the to tation with substantially less than a their and to and about those a a a a to alright a a careful they t the assembly algorithms could g a a and at almost the greyish temper to to anger tenacious generous all ith highly accurate order and orien after they about thinks all the that are to to 141 get go a to carry ertaking multiple interim assembli and and to could inal assembly was not of value. T as and always great all and the And convinced And talk to always talking to and am to then away all time as careful can’t to a 10-fold coverage, and (ii) that und And the to agree es in place of one comprehensive f Time to that to clear theories the and then good their and all to and alright that the and and they this and their 142 custom tic changes in the public genome e then and thing to to-morrow to-morrow and all about to-morrow There f Celera (29), led to a modified wh a to always to time too the the The admired and them to-morrow and to pproach to the human genome. W all time and any change any tell hese findings, together with drama And altogether the always Alright another another think talk to-morrow another fort subsequent to the formation o to temper a talks always about agree a a and this They And and time ole-genome shotgun sequencing a could this agreed that to give that are 143 the any-thing to a anything about trust always change equence coverage of the genome o arguing and always all and that a a get terim assembled sequence data av thinking get tell this till and gets tell this talking about all to to all and turns a to any tell truly there And to e initially proposed to do 10-fold s to that three two three the and the time ver a 3-year period and to make in tell all can all and again to can all all and talk there and again together then against 144 and to to can to another about country ns included a plan to perform rand this the thinking they the The glowing clear coverage and to use the unordered always certainly things gments and subassemblies publish at city ded Genome effort (30) to acceler the to always city toys and d the quarterly announcements in t city o report. Although this strategy pr the chairs and then and about get and to the ailable quarterly. The modificatio a around and about about a and clean om shotgun sequencing to ~5-fold And the good and unoriented BAC sequence fra And to ed in GenBank by the publicly fun The and and the gloomy and ate the project. We also abandone The he absence of interim assemblies t good a gold the 145 and german and complicated rly that was consistent with a who this that grew to eight-fold coverage, the human ge agreed these to then the always gravest And time themselves s the Drosophila genome was wit twelve grave come a to always Alfred all though there that a and could ever, it became clear that even wit girl the classic there ovided a reasonable result very ea good and and cultured le-genome shotgun assembly with At that a and And an the cause this and nome sequence is not as finished a the away cause general the and to then the and a and then that h an effect 13-fold coverage. Ho a could 146 a truth gained the them and they and their their tradition and them Celera could generate an accuratel come all an about could the to that and as they good and this could quence of the human genome in le a that the a and could and the and can around all them aunts’ talking and a and the h this reduced coverage strategy, t to girl those those to girl all all as thought to all creatures to all y ordered and oriented scaffold se this thought and Alfred to to good They 147 this they a that that appearance and And to and trousseau the a and choice quenching was initiated 8 Septem all to to acquaintance to always and The this a as as and as to a 2000. The first assembly was co this twenty as all that and and then this the all the and as the to ss than 1 year. Human genome se The these and all to a the the all always to than to to tastes and ber 1999 and completed 17 June 2 again all ago 148 the toned all then art though alas gilding all away the those and and this college embly reported here was complete a to the things and that there to a a could be the whole-genome random shot through give tapestry tone to can he human genome. We developed there and and the as the as that complicated thrust take and and the taken a mpleted 25 June 2000, and the ass arrangement to all air and this always afforded and the that d 1 October 2000. Here we descri All and covered all as as gun sequencing effort applied to t The a 149 aesthetic chairs The that aspiration American couches s for assembling the ~3 billion bp triumphant and after almost and admit and and all a mosomes that make up the Homo always a completeness erived data were shredded to remo always and George nce from chimeric clones, foreign these bled contigs. Insofar as a correctl a all and admiration there as and there The green a aesthetic the the two different assembly approache These a they The this to the to to this that make up the 23 pairs of chro The the the sapiens genome. Any GenBank-d The this the ve potential bias to the final seque Altogether DNA contamination, or misassem always through this the there a to there a 150 a any about to a control me sequence with faithful order a the to Alfy to the the their to a through to them a course thing al for an accurate analysis of the h and to about though clear ed a considerable portion of this m then that that clearing the quality of our reconstruction o that career ur preliminary analysis of the hum these thinking to as to y and accurately assembled geno A and a talking about about and and and to Alfy and and that good nd orientation of contigs is essenti to things ask the and uman genetic code, we have devot And and all and anuscript to the documentation of Alfy along f the genome. We also describe o And 151 asked a to a the to as think could putational methods. Figure 1 (see the and together things things truly a and to anyhow any that an amuse carefully grand-fathers issue; files for each chromosome cannot to nce Online at www.sciencemag.or tradition thoughts always the then told at that and all to and an genetic code on the basis of co a actual their always and at any this that always there to a to this grown fold out chart associated with this a good can be found in Web fig. 1 on Scie an aspiring a there am 152 to throw the admit to to aristocratic and always and to that class DC1) provides a graphical overvie a country and twenty a encoded in it. The detailed manua Gossols all They them through there children to to always to genome are just beginning. To ai Alfred Gossols trouble aspiring a a to are and there to to to a a g/cgi/content/full/291/5507/1304/ The the Gossols there and w of the genome and the features to children to all all Alfred as go and as to l curation and interpretation of the And there come Alfred 153 gone lytical sections, we have divided t this The city to these . A summary of the major results they the the ten a ground a the the garden attended the themselves all this and grass away and the the the then the them the ection. 1 Sources of DNA and Se the and d the reader in locating specific an content always a give all he paper into seven broad sections This always an about acres the center to around a carefully trees always almost the and the clouds the there and and and and and and appears at the beginning of each s All acres the 154 trees growing sembly Strategy and Characterizat good the all and and ground and the then the the the the them could and and that the the ation 4 Genome Structure 5 Ge all that they and that and and the them always came that any quencing Methods 2 Genome As the chew and them to the calling then and and and and and around and get the the all all ion 3 Gene Prediction and Annot And the a and the and the they and and the Gossols and 155 always them great and them toward too and correct the the de Examination of Sequence Vari this good dicted Protein-Coding Genes in th all the to a a and and a 1 Sources of DNA and Sequenci to to around go together they there gotten anyway all get there to to a children to a a and to glutton and nome Evolution 6 A Genome-Wi Always and ations 7 An Overview of the Pre them the a any trade to think to e Human Genome 8 Conclusions come a anything to comfortable and alright all could to them comfortable and and 156 they those there gotten to talking could there the good to to the to they go anyway tion discusses the rationale and et and and things the their the could on to ensure ethnic and gender div any and the took and give and to then always all alright all could always about get all and children and always always Alright all could ing Methods Summary. This sec then their the and and and and hical rules governing donor selecti to the the and away to could that and and them 157 Almost came es for DNA extraction and library as all they almost going are to two construction is the first critical ste almost going NA libraries are not uniform in siz to and all to already the the the to They the all things great and as talking and and the the ersity along with the methodologi too to that and to children talk and construction. The plasmid library to to p in shotgun sequencing. If the D to all they them all to All a all a all and the a children to the and then then and 158 a and they them then the all mly represent the genome, then th They and they them the the all things could and to to are to all to and got always and children to to the go go got ly reconstruct the genome sequenc e, nonchimeric, and do not rando them then all and and and the e subsequent steps cannot accurate and then any at at at the and called to a anything to are there and course children to the got always and any come come can’t 159 Alright go and And about children to to ghput sequencing and the computa the the the the creaking ent tracking of enormous amounts gone their to get to and get then there tired to always the tired million sequence reads; 14.9 billio and tired the any tired d tracking from both ends of plas tired to children to talked the going and e. We used automated high-throu All and and and again tional infrastucture to enable effici They coming and comes a to a comes a to can and to almost of sequencing information (27.3 these times any and the n bp of sequence). Sequencing an this all 160 them they their they and all tired all as as them conscious bp libraries were essential to the c the they genome. Our evidence indicates t to toward sequences was greater than 98%. the they go all than caught es and the World Medical Associa a the about that to that that good that f Helsinki, offer recommendations to and all and about They the and the the the a mid clones from 2-, 10-, and 50-k And and omputational reconstruction of the The anger hat the accurate pairing rate of end told as and could to and Various policies of the United Stat against to a to a act about and children tion, specifically the Declaration o any against 161 and the always a talk the they get to and and they any the always about and children uman subjects. We convened an I to thought get awful take coaxed 31) that helped us establish the pr and there going and city an DNA and the informed consent a the then them and to a to to about and all children and they they again toward and telling to the for conducting experiments with h then a any children to And nstitutional Review Board (IRB) ( They too any content the otocol for obtaining and using hu They time and around and they 162 all troubles all and thing them unteers for the DNA-sequencing s a children and the and several steps and procedures to pr and a another and the entiality of the research subjects ( to and grown to their ge consent process, a secure rando two and their specimens and records, circumscri a the all the the good searchers, and options for off-site their as them the any process used to enroll research vol The the gave to and tudies reported here. We adopted then then then then that otect the privacy rights and confid There and to children and donors). These included a two-sta the always then m alphanumeric coding system for the the a them and a bed contact with the subjects by re them 163 the them them to this a and all always too all and the elera applied for and received a C Gossols alone All the to a he Department of Health and Hum to At time already and thought at time to a going orized Celera to protect the privac a a and could and all a and as thinking this though then as this tell contact for donors. In addition, C gone content the the alone and ertificate of Confidentiality from t As a this a to This And this anxious arrange the an Services. This Certificate auth all that temper that gentle 164 and to d to be donors in Section 301(d) o good to a a them then after them then to as that then the always all and U.S.C. 241(d). Celera and the IR gentle and gentle of a completed human genome sh all gentle children to children onors of diverse ethnic backgroun a gave they the their They thing of the individuals who volunteere those children to to and always after to and always as them all and and them these f the Public Health Service Act 42 The children the B believed that the initial version The these cheery great and ould be a composite of multiple d a that children all all and ambition 165 they contentment d, on a voluntary basis, to select a cheerful that then and all gentle a that a and and to African American, Chinese, Hispa They good 21 donors (32). Three basic items children and three them to this to the were recorded and linked by confi gentle they all after children : age, sex, and self-designated eth and them at and ds. Prospective donors were aske these gentle and And the this cheerful temper and together to then n ethnogeographic category (e.g. They a nic, Caucasian, etc.). We enrolled They grown these are are always and are of information from each donor w The children always three they dential code to the donated sample them three as them 166 could es, ~130 ml of whole heparinized children children then ~130 ml of whole heparinized blo about and As a too them they and angry the to them the and three pecimens of semen, collected over the themselves their they themselves hoblastoid cell lines were created to ion. DNA from five subjects was turned their and that ailing nogeographic group. From femal They good good blood was collected. From males, to the their the tings angry at and the that and as all angry the od was collected, as well as five s This all and and a a 6-week period. Permanent lymp The by Epstein-Barr virus immortilizat They altogether against them a the 167 and three ing: two males and three females the then against these things a angry the the the afterwards and three an-Chinese, one Hispanic-Mexica all grown ig. 2 on Science Online at www.sc as to them cildren to them 04/DC1). The decision of whose the the the the chickens to temper any to the selected for genetic DNA sequenc their Always and the a around to and And and and the the —one African-American, one Asi this they n, and two Caucasians (See Web f their their bundant and glad all ience.org/cgi/content/291/5507/13 tell and and and and gentle a angry thing and 168 References 0 to 9: The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969. Eds. Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer. New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2007. Acconci, Vito. “0 to 9 and Back Again.” Interview. Ecstatic Peace, 2006. ___________. Diary of a Body: 1969-1973. Milan: Charta, 2006. ___________. “Early Work: Movement Over a Page.” Avalanche 6 (Fall 1972): 4. ___________. Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci. Ed. Craig Dworkin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. ___________. “Shelly Jackson talks with Vito Acconci.” Interview. The Believer 4.10 (December 2006 / January 2007). ___________. THINK/LEAP/RE-THINK/FALL. Wright State University: University Art Galleries, 1976. After Language Poetry: 10 Statements. UbuWeb. 10 Oct. 2007 <http://www.ubu. com/papers/oei/index.html> Benjamin, Walter. “The Author as Producer.” Reflections. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books, 1978: 220-39. Broodthaers, Marcel. “Announcements.” Archives: Contemporary Art. 20 Sept. 2007 <http://perso.orange.fr/archives.carre/Broodthaers%20Announcements.html> Compton, “Malevich’s Suprematism: The Higher Intuition.” The Burlington Magazine. 118.881 (August 1975): 576-83; 585. Crary, Jonathan. “Eclipse of the Spectacle.” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum, 1984, 283-94. de Duve, Thierry. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Trans. Dana Polan with the author. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 169 Dworkin, Craig. “Fugitive Signs.” October 95 (Winter 2001): 90-113. ____________. “Introduction: Delay in Verse.” Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci. By Vito Acconci. Ed. Craig Dworkin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006, xi-xviii. Hansen, Mark. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Hebdige, Dick. “Even Unto Death: Improvisation, Edging and Enframement.” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (Winter 2001): 333-53. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the “Large Glass” and Related Works. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1998). Johns, Jasper. Making Sense of Modern Art: Jasper Johns 0 through 9, 1960. SFMOMA online. 27 Sept. 2007 <http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/ artworks/3289.html> Kittler, Friedrich. “Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction.” Trans. Sara Ogger. The GreyRoom. 2 (Winter 2001): 30-45. _____________. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1999. Krauss, Rosalind. “Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1 (Spring 1976): 50-64. _____________. “Voyage on the North Sea:” Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999. Lenoir, Tim. “Foreword: Haptic Vision: Computation, Media, and Embodiment in Mark Hansen’s New Phenomenology.” New Philosophy for New Media. By Mark Hansen. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004, xii-xviii. Lyotard, Jean-François. “Foreword: After the Words.” Art After Philosophy: Collected Writings, 1966-1990. By Joseph Kosuth. Ed. Gabriele Guercio. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, pp.xv-xviii __________________. The Inhuman. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1991. Mann, Paul. The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde. Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1991. Marino, Melanie. “Body as Place: Vito Acconci’s Gaze.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 21.1 (January 1999): 63-74. 170 McDonough, Tom. “Introduction: Ideology and the Situationist Utopia.” Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Ed. by the author. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002: ix-xx. Meltzer, Eve. “What’s the Matter with Words? Vito Acconci’s L-l-l-language of the Written Text.” Fort da 9.2 (Fall 2003): 27-47. Perloff, Marjorie. “After Language Poetry: Innovation and its Theoretical Discontents,” Electronic Poetry Center of SUNY Buffalo. 28 Oct. 2006 <http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/after_langpo.html> _____________. “‘But isn’t the same at least the same?’: Translatability in Wittgenstein, Duchamp and Jacques Roubaud” Jacket 14 (July 2001) 28 Oct. 2006 <http://jacketmagazine.com/14/perl-witt.html#fnB15> _____________. “How Avant-Gardes Rise, Fall and Mutate.” Unpublished article. Schwarz, Dieter. “‘Look Books in Plaster!’ On the First Phase of the Work of Marcel Broodthaers.” October 42 (Autumn 1987): 57-66. Simic, Charles. “The Partial Explanation.” The Uncertain Certainty. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985: 101-04. Stein, Gertrude. “An Acquaintance with Description.” A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993: 504-34. ____________. The Making of Americans. 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Film and Video Umbrella. 30 Oct. 2006 <http://www.fvu.co.uk/projectdetail/artist/A/55/Vito%20Acconci> Vos, Eric. “Critical Perspectives on Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry: An Introduction to this Volume (with an Appendix on Carlfriedrich Claus).” Experimental Visual Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the1960s. Eds. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker. Atlanta: Rodopi Editions, 1996. Wagner, Anne M. “Performance, Video and the Rhetoric of Presence” October 91 (Winter 2000): 59-80. Ward, Frazer. “Performance Art: (Some) Theory and (Selected) Practice at the End of This Century.” Art Journal. 56. 4 (Winter 1997): 36-40.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Reid, Richard Anthony (author)

Core Title Embodiments of passing: Vito Acconci's poetics of frequency and Ta(g) A(c)t

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature

Publication Date 11/05/2007

Defense Date 10/22/2007

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Acconci,Art History,embodiment,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,Stein

Language English

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), St. John, David (committee chair), Kamuf, Peggy (committee member), Kemp, Tony (committee member), Kincaid, James R. (committee member)

Creator Email rreid@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m909

Unique identifier UC1463223

Identifier etd-Reid-20071105 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-588760 (legacy record id),usctheses-m909 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Reid-20071105.pdf

Dmrecord 588760

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Reid, Richard Anthony

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu