Centers — Vito Acconci's mirror-like video

1971

Artists: Vito Acconci · Year: 1971 · Medium: Single-channel video — Acconci pointing at his own mirror-reflection in the camera for 22 minutes · Substrate: Sony Portapak video camera; 22-minute continuous take; Acconci pointing at his reflected image in the camera's own reflected view · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Independent; EAI (distribution) Vito Acconci's Centers (1971) is a twenty-three-minute, single-take black-and-white video. Acconci stands in front of a mounted video camera. He raises his right arm and extends his index finger. He points at the center of his own video image on the monitor beside him. He holds the pose, with the arm locked at the shoulder and the finger aimed at the lens, for the entire twenty-three minutes until his arm fails and his hand wavers, then drops. The piece is often described as being about the gaze, or about the narcissism of the video image, or about performance endurance. All true. But the specific move the piece makes — the operational move — is to turn the medium back on itself. The camera looks at Acconci. Acconci looks at the monitor, which is showing Acconci. Acconci points at himself in the monitor, which means he points at the camera, which means he points at the viewer of the resulting tape. The circuit closes. The viewer becomes the object of a gesture the tape has been rehearsing since before the viewer arrived. This is a video work in the specifically cybernetic sense. The feedback loop — camera, monitor, performer, viewer — is the work. The duration is the work. What Acconci adds to the circuit is the failure of his own body to hold the pose, which makes visible the temporal structure that closed-circuit video otherwise hides. Centers is the cleanest possible demonstration, in 1971, of what live video does that film cannot: it returns the viewer's own attention as part of the event. Every subsequent piece in this archive that uses real-time feedback — Bruce Nauman's corridor pieces, Dan Graham's Present Continuous Past(s), Peter Campus's mirror installations — rests on the diagram Acconci drew in 1971 with his arm. The arm was the proof. Lore Acconci was thirty-one, had been a poet and a concrete-poetry magazine editor (0 TO 9, co-edited with Bernadette Mayer), and had begun making performance and video work only two years earlier. He shot Centers in his own Prince Street loft on a borrowed portapak. He held the pose in one take. The tape was made with no retakes — it had to be one take or the piece failed — and afterward his shoulder ached for a week. The work was first exhibited at the 112 Greene Street gallery later that year and acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1980s. Acconci moved away from performance and video in the mid-1970s to found Acconci Studio, an architecture practice, and died in 2017 at 77. His estate kept the original ½-inch reel, which is now at Electronic Arts Intermix. Sources • Acconci, Vito — Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, ed. Moure (MIT, 2006). • Museum of Modern Art — Vito Acconci: Language to Cover a Page (exh. cat. 2016). • Electronic Arts Intermix — Vito Acconci catalogue.