From the Archives: Vito Acconci Stars and Stripes
American avant-garde artist-cum-architect Vito Acconci died on April 27 in Manhattan. He was seventy-seven. Acconci is noted for early films and performance works that toy with power relations and foreground the autoerotic nature of the male artist. To commemorate his legacy, we looked back in our archives to our November/December 1976 issue, in which Ross Skoggard responds to a screening of Acconci’s 1974 film My Word at Artists Space in New York. Skoggard’s essay considers the “glamour quotient” of film as a catalyst for Acconci’s reconfiguration of the audience into a desiring, affirming lover. “Yards of film are devoted to Acconci’s funky body and face with the apparent intent to win approval,” Skoggard writes. “To an extent perhaps disturbing to the classically trained, liking Acconci means liking the movie, and liking the movie means liking Acconci.” We present the article in full below. —Eds.
Acconci’s self-exposing films enforce an intimacy with his audience that becomes the medium for investigations of sexual identity, mental process and cultural conditioning in the twilight zone between life and art.
By presenting his body as art, Vito Acconci would redirect the approval and respect traditionally reserved for the esthetic object toward himself. Film, with its history as purveyor of sex objects to the world, makes a natural vehicle for Acconci’s autoerotic involvement with his role as artist. Masturbation is his theme song. It is the only way he can take the whole gallery to bed with him. The idea of an artist having an erotic relationship with his or her audience has, until recently, been expressed mainly by singers. Janis Joplin, Liza Minnelli and Mick Jagger have all spoken of the sensual appeal of an audience’s reaction to their performances. Acconcci extrapolates the erotic content of public affection, which is the condition of stardom, from the achievement that earned it, and he defines his role as artist as one who has a “love” relationship with the public.
In his notorious gallery-piece Seed Bed, 1972––which had the artist (ostensibly) masturbating under a closed wooden ramp while fantasizing out loud (his mumblings broadcast by a sound hook-up) about visitors to the exhibition––Acconci made a particularly vivid and disturbing image of this relationship. Some of his films make hay with it, too. Three super-8 movies, Application and Conversions, both 1971, and My Word, 1974, feature the portrait of the artist as sex object.
Application, which records a performance done in Chicago in 1970, starts with Acconci’s bare torso being covered with lipstick kiss-marks by a young woman. On one level, the artist is impersonating a piece of drawing paper, with the woman’s lips as the pen. This is the art-historical sugar-coating on a pill we don’t want to take. We balk not only because this disagreeable transaction seems to date the film as pre-women’s movement but also because it anticipates and burlesques the affection we like to feel for artists and art works that please us. That the image is on film shames, as well, our love of movie stars (who manage to be both artists and artworks at the same time). When the woman has finished, the artist’s red-marked body looks as if it is in pain––closer to a gory Renaissance St. Sebastian than to anything in avant-garde art. In the second section of this film, Acconci makes a “monotype,” rubbing his red chest on another man’s back until both glow with the shared lipstick. Acconci peppers the stew with allusions to painting in all these movies. He may think this is the way the art audience likes it, or it may be that the art audience––and he––can’t help but detect painting allusions.
Conversions is a more Gothic fable about the artist-as-artwork. The first part has Acconci, in the dark, burning hairs off his chest with a candle. He clears a circular area around each nipple in about 15 or 20 minutes. You can almost smell the burning hair. The artist produces the illusion that he has a woman’s breasts because the now-bare skin picks up the light and comes forward in time-honored plastic tradition. But, as if this illusion were not enough, Acconci vainly tugs at his breasts. Later he walks naked toward the camera with his penis tucked between his legs. Two feet away, he turns and walks away, the illusion contradicted. The artist attempts to render Venus with his own body; it comes out Hermaphrodite. We get a sense of the Prison of the Flesh, the substance that opposes spirit.
The last part of Conversions is a strange dénouement: the artist in profile puts his penis back between his legs into the mouth of a nude young woman squatting behind him. The strange and unwieldly beast they make resembles nothing in Classical literature, and try as I might, I still read it as an image of a rather distasteful sexual politic, and nothing more. The somber, almost ritualistic air of the first part and the Muy-bridge-style exposition of the human body in motion of the second part give way to prurient interest in the third.
It seems that Acconci’s strongest, most memorable movies are those which seem most repulsive at first exposure. Conversions is difficult to watch, but when Acconci’s somewhat abrasive presence is gone from the screen we are left with a strange and almost beautiful parable of the will to form, of spirit and intransigence of the body. My feelings about My World, Acconci’s latest super-8 effort, also changed after its screening last spring at Artists Space––complete with an in-person appearance by the artist, who fielded questions. A day later, Acconci’s peculiar obsessions were forgotten, and my dominant memory was of Acconci himself. This film (in color) is better-behaved and in better taste (in temper with the times?), and yet during the screening I took offense at the artist’s vanity, which struck me as the film’s subtext. In retrospect, however, what’s wrong with an artist (or anyone) advertising himself?
Try to imagine a 140-minute TV commercial for an avant-garde artist. It would have to evidence taste, intelligence and a measure of obscurantism; and if the artist is very “today,” a dash of coy sex. Acconci is very “today” and his movie has all these qualities, and perhaps that was enough to make the two hours pass like one on the hard gallery chairs. In this movie Acconci’s love affair with the camera (audience) is a little more refined, and his definition of the artist’s role is more sophisticated. He treats his lover-audience a little better, and, if he seems a better artist with this picture, it’s because to that extent he seems a better lover.
Like his other films, My Word respects a formalist definition of the film medium pioneered by Warhol’s early endless opera. A rhythm of handwritten white-on-black titles intercut with short, prettily composed takes of Acconci, places (his loft and its roof) and things (furniture, clothes), describes the format. The images seem meant to illustrate the phrases or figures of speech they follow, and they are contrapuntal in an almost musical way. Thus the opening title, “No, I won’t talk about it,” is followed by a black-and-white shot of the corner of a white room. The camera pans back and forth imitating the shaking of the artist’s head: “No.” The phrase “I’m moving away from you in my mind” is followed by a succession of accelerating close-up pans of a wood floor. “I’ll stop thinking all together” is followed by a shot of black paper. Not thinking equals no image; therefore, on some level, the artist proposes that his images equal thinking. The titles, on the other hand, seem to embody speech rather than writing, because they are all phrases one hears or says but seldom reads.
After this introduction and demonstration of the kind of visual sign language the artist will employ, characters are introduced. These include the protagonist-artist-hero (Acconci) and an invisible, silent heroine (the audience) who goes by the names of Ann, Elaine, Susan and a few others. The rest of the movie is a parade of “relationship idioms” as Acconci alternately seduces and abuses her-them-us. The camera zooms in on the artist’s crotch and we know we are about to be treated to a reprise of the masturbation theme, only this time the text explicitly implicates the heroine (audience) in the act. (People in the audience tried not to squirm.) The Acconci of My Word doesn’t seem to want us to share a startling vision with him so much as to like (love) him. “Come with me, I’m free. You can tell by looking into my eyes.” Yards of film are devoted to Acconci’s funky body and face with the apparent intent to win approval, not really for what the body and face are illustrating, but for the body and face themselves. To an extent perhaps disturbing to the classically trained, liking Acconci means liking the movie, and liking the movie means liking Acconci.
During the question period following the Artists Space screening, a German man remarked that the film, were its titles more professionally printed, would begin to approach poetry. This idea caught on with the audience, perhaps because these days any investigation of metaphor can look to many like poetry. Acconci, though he didn’t reveal much about the film, knew enough to resist attempts to classify his effort as poetical. It is more concerned with the structure of language (what isn’t?), or rather with language as a sign system, or how a sign system can function as a language, or how a sign system and a language can interact. This is his work’s instrumental level, finally incidental to the intended emotional involvement of the viewer––achieved via an intelligent and ruthless manipulation of the sign system’s powers. On a more superficial level, Acconci also trades in the formal intelligence of modern painting. The rhythmic, almost serial quality of the word-image sequence in My Word evokes the popular wisdom that repetition can simulate profundity. Individual frames seem composed to appeal to modernist sensibility. Shots of striations of tar and tarpaper on a flat roof bring to mind very early Stella. Opening shots of a corner where walls and ceiling meet look like the projecting corner of a cube––trompe l’oeil á la Al Held.
I asked myself why these films were not videotapes: perhaps because Acconci’s autoerotic conception of his body as art object is more suggestive on film. We are used to seeing our idols on the silver screen. Moreover, film estheticizes its content much more than does video. Beautiful photography does not really come across on TV, which seems best suited to record processes rather than objects. On TV we watch what a thing does, on film what it is.
Although Acconci exploits the glamour quotient of his artist-presence, his statement can still be taken as ironical––as a satire of the ego-inflating benefits of either art or movie-stardom. On one level, My Word (especially) hangs on Acconci’s not inconsiderable ability as an actor. His vanity is tolerable because ambiguous (artistic creativity is not, in any case, a function of modesty). In Acconci’s swagger can be seen a sincere, indeed almost humble, acceptance of his own humanness, as we begin to understand the other features that make his latest film feel like a classic.
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In Frank Stella’s Constellation of Stars, a Perpetual Evolution, The New York Times
By Jason Farago
RIDGEFIELD, Conn. — For Carl Jung, a name was not just a name. In his 1960 book “Synchronicity,” the Swiss psychiatrist proposed that what you’re called may have a determining effect on your whole life, structuring your behaviors and your outlook in ways that resemble a secret compulsion. Someone called Herr Gross (“Mr. Tall,” in German) probably “suffers from delusions of grandeur,” Jung wrote, while Herr Kleiner (“Mr. Little Guy”) “has an inferiority complex.” The good doctor did not spare himself from this diagnosis; why is Herr Doktor Jung so interested in youth, while Freud (“Dr. Joy”) espouses the pleasure principle?
A pretty silly theory. But then consider “Frank Stella’s Stars, a Survey,” a quiet but cheering exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum here. Badly misclassified as a “minimalist” since the debut of his striped black paintings in 1959, Stella has spent decades reformatting the shapes and materials of abstract painting — to the point that his bulging reliefs and metal casts became something more sculptural than painterly. How to reconcile the gestures of art in two dimensions with the volumes of three? He found one answer, late in his career, in his own last name: the star (stella, in Italian), a motif he first explored nearly 60 years ago, then abandoned, and has since returned to with verve.
This show includes 25 works: wall-mounted or free-standing, indoors or outdoors, minimal or lush, jet-black or discordantly colored, as small as a softball or as high as a giraffe. The Aldrich has installed three stainless-steel stars in view of Ridgefield’s Main Street, while in the garden out back are two awesome stars, with struts made of teak or cast in aluminum. They’re settled into the grass like colossal jacks.
Almost everything here dates from the last decade. The star is a marker of 21st-century Stella, even if it has a small place in his early career. Still, whatever a clinical psychiatrist (or a scholar of onomastics) may make of this late constellation of stelle, to an art critic’s eye “Frank Stella’s Stars” is a testimony to an artist, now 84, in perpetual evolution. Its focus on the star motif ends up reaffirming the restlessness of this painter’s progress and his underappreciated engagement with new technologies of design, fabrication and display.
Stella broached the star as a compositional element with his shaped canvases of the 1960s. He had burst into prominence at 23, when the Museum of Modern Art showed his poker-faced “Black Paintings,” their surfaces obliterated by stripes. The stripes’ thickness and direction followed from the canvas’s edges and the brush’s thickness, resulting in abstractions derived from painting’s most fundamental components.
Young artists today have come to accept our “post-medium” condition, but in postwar New York the fundamental qualities of painting or sculpture were sacrosanct, and a painting’s success was frequently judged by how faithful it was to the medium’s essence. A painting was a painting, and “a sculpture,” as Stella famously said, “is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.”
In 1960, Stella started to paint stripes on canvases stretched across custom armatures: crosses, T’s, zigzags — and stars. Here at the Aldrich is an eight-pointed canvas from 1963, whose orthogonal red-orange stripes radiate from the corners to the center. (Also on view: a drawing and two lithographs, from 1967, that reproduce an asterisk-shaped canvas whose stripes form chevrons.)
Yet the shaped canvas, even more than the flat stripes, destroyed any remaining illusion that a painting is a window on a world. In the period this show hopscotches over, Stella’s paintings became more object-like (with the curved, colorful Protractors of the late ’60s), and then began to carom off the wall (in his great Polish Village series of the ’70s, reliefs inspired by pictures of wooden synagogues and timber buildings, all but lost during World War II). Among their challenges, these paintings insisted that their positioning on a wall is not incidental; painting and wall informed one another, not unlike a sculpture on a plinth.
In the 1990s, the artist began “painting” in three dimensions with the help of computer-aided design software, the sort that architects use for rendering buildings. Stella stellated once more in these hybrid paintings/sculptures, among them the 12-foot mural “Nessus and Dejanira” (2017), with a twelve-pointed star, made of multicolored aluminum lattices, nestled in a big fiberglass drape. These later reliefs pushed the limits of new fabrication methods, such as 3-D scanning and plastic rapid prototyping. But they still feel like art with an identity crisis, possible to admire but hard to love — and his smaller reliefs, with stars and Slinkies plunked onto steel plates, come across as zany for zany’s sake.
The way forward, Stella discovered at the turn of the 2010s, was to get off the wall, and use the computer as a painterly tool to produce stand-alone stars. The stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits. Stars collide and interweave in an illuminating gallery of small-scale prototypes, whose stellar forms appear as 3-D printing études.
The imposing “Fat 12 Point Carbon Fiber Star,” its 21 feet amusingly stuffed into an undersized gallery here, distends the star’s twelve points like overinflated balloons. Its glossy black finish is as sleek as one of the artist’s beloved racecars, though finish and color have never really been a major part of Stella’s art; a smaller aluminum star outdoors does not disguise its soldered corners and rusting joints. Unlike Jeff Koons’s fetish objects or Anish Kapoor’s distorting solids, Stella’s stars are more rewarding as exercises in style and shape, testing out and maximizing what a given medium can do.
Not unlike the orthogonal stripes on the early shaped canvases, the stars have their forms determined from a clear geometric process. You start out with a simple solid — most frequently a dodecahedron, or a solid with twelve pentagonal faces — and then form the star’s points by extruding each edge. The resultant twelve-pointed star (called a small stellated dodecahedron) can then be printed in nylon or thermoplastic, cast in steel or aluminum, rendered at two feet or twenty. It’s rule-based but pliable. Dwarfed beneath “Jasper’s Split Star,” whose points are half solid and half wire-mesh, I felt none of the arrogance that attends so much large-scale sculpture. The star is a sympathetic, even chummy offering, from an artist still committed to thinking anew.
A last, curious matter is the names of these stars. Stella may be the most out-there titler in contemporary art; his abstract paintings take their names from Brazilian birds and Balinese anthropology, Scarlatti sonatas and Nazi marching tunes. But the stars, curiously, have been baptized with the most unpoetic titles in his oeuvre. A small sculpture of two stars affixed to a metal truss is simply called “Stars With Truss I.” A star made of orthogonal metal pipes is just “Star With Square Tubing.” That beautiful teak stellation in the grass is called “Frank’s Wooden Star.” It’s as if these late works no longer needed poetry: just his name and the other stella, conjoined by the stuff of art.
Frank Stella’s Stars, a Survey
Through May 9 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main Street, Ridgefield, Conn.; 203-438-4519, aldrichart.org.
B-21’s big reveal by Air Force pegged to occur at the end of this year
An artist’s rendering of a B-21 Raider, with Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., as the backdrop. The Air Force announced Sept. 20, 2022, that it plans to unveil the B-21 in the first week of December during a ceremony at the Northrop Grumman production facilities in Palmdale, Calif. (Alan Radecki/Northrop Grumman)
The Air Force’s highly anticipated B-21 bomber, which has been in development for years, will be unveiled in December, the service announced this week.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown Jr. described the event as a “historic moment” for the military.
“We last introduced a new bomber over 30 years ago,” Brown said in a statement Tuesday, adding that the Air Force “must continue to rapidly modernize” to stay ahead of the security threats posed by China.
The B-21 is a long-range stealth bomber that will incrementally replace the B-1 and B-2 and become the backbone of the bomber fleet, the Air Force said. It can carry conventional and nuclear weaponry.
The new B-21 Raider will be showcased at a ceremony in December at Northrop Grumman’s production facility in Palmdale, Calif.
The development of the B-21 Raider is linked to concerns about advances in anti-aircraft weapons by adversaries such as China.
The bomber’s advanced stealth technology gives the U.S. a system “capable of penetrating enemy air defenses and reaching targets anywhere in the world, something approximately 90% of the nation’s current bomber fleet is incapable of doing,” Northrop Grumman said in a statement.
After the unveiling, the B-21 program will proceed with a testing phase.
The cost per plane is roughly $600 million, and the Air Force has indicated it could acquire at least 100 of them. The B-21 Raider is expected to make its first flight in 2023.
John Vandiver
John covers U.S. military activities across Europe and Africa. Based in Stuttgart, Germany, he previously worked for newspapers in New Jersey, North Carolina and Maryland. He is a graduate of the University of Delaware.
