Vitto Acconci.Barry Schwabsky Is there anything reasonable about Vito Acconci's work? His bizarre routines, eccentric objects, and impractical projects are among the salient embodiments of what cultural reactionaries from Jesse Helms to Martha Bayles would condemn as the sickness of contemporary art. And in a way they're right, since the great value of his work is symptomatic rather than diagnostic. At least the philistine view recognizes this much. Sometimes Kate Linker does too, as when (apropos of Acconci's 1975 work Leveling) she invokes "a language-world in which the self can reconnoiter re·con·noi·ter v. re·con·noi·tered, re·con·noi·ter·ing, re·con·noi·ters v.tr. To make a preliminary inspection of, especially in order to gather military information. v.intr. its terrain only poorly." Her book is useful as the broadest available consideration of Acconci's work--particularly for its documentation of Acconci's installation and video works of the '70s, which have been somewhat eclipsed by the notorious performances of the late '60s and early '70s on the one hand, and by his more recent public-oriented projects on the other. But as interpretation, the book does little justice to its subject, thanks to a determination to reduce the folly of art to the normative tepidness of "discourse," to translate Acconci's turn from "(personal) neurosis neurosis, in psychiatry, a broad category of psychological disturbance, encompassing various mild forms of mental disorder. Until fairly recently, the term neurosis was broadly employed in contrast with psychosis, which denoted much more severe, debilitating mental to (political) paranoia" into an academic "framework for a program of cultural analysis." Despite the work's goofy ineffectuality, its skewed skewed curve of a usually unimodal distribution with one tail drawn out more than the other and the median will lie above or below the mean. skewed Epidemiology adjective Referring to an asymmetrical distribution of a population or of data plausibility, Linker is all too anxious to assure us that "Acconci's decision confirmed contemporary practice." But his stance is closer to that of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's schizo schiz·o n. pl. schiz·os Offensive Slang A schizophrenic person. schiz  o adj. on a stroll than to a shrink putting culture on a couch. Contrasting his later with his earlier work, the artist noted that "instead of attacking, public art insinuates." What his art has never done is sermonize ser·mon·ize v. ser·mon·ized, ser·mon·iz·ing, ser·mon·iz·es v.tr. To deliver a sermon to (someone). v.intr. To deliver or speak as though delivering a sermon. . Which isn't to say it has no consequences for "theory," but rather that it can help clarify how what theory "does" is as important as what it "says." Barry Schwabsky is a New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of art critic and poet. |
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