vito hannibal acconci

Shelley Jackson

[AUTHOR]

TALKS WITH

Vito Acconci

[POET/ARTIST/ARCHITECT]

SJ: You’d long since left the page by this time, but in your piece Trademark you turn yourself into a printing press. You’re biting yourself, you smear the bites with ink, printer’s ink, specifically, and then you print them on—what?

VA: Anything. I could print them on a piece of paper, I could print them on the wall, I could print them on another person’s body…

SJ: So you were the writer, you were the printing press, you were also the page…

VA: Was I the page? I bit myself, but I didn’t make a bite print on myself. I used the bite to print something else.

SJ: I thought of the bite as itself a print on the page of your body.

VA: It’s a print, but it’s not a distributable print. It’s not a distributable print until the printer’s ink is applied. This was pre-Gutenberg Bible!

SJ: When I first heard about this project I didn’t realize you made prints. I thought you were just biting yourself and making marks that way—and the mouth is the place of speech, or language—so I thought of this project as the most self-referential writing loop, like you had taken your early interest in making writing refer only to itself about as far as it could go. But at the same time—

VA: At the same time there was this urge to publish! It’s like I wanted this ultimate privacy to then publish itself, then be public.

SJ: You said once that the bite mark was like a wound, but a wound that you wanted to infect other people with. That’s a strong metaphor for writing. A complicated one, because there’s this self-inflicted violence, or maybe it’s sexual, you can’t really tell… Maybe it’s hungry!

VA: Or maybe it’s very, very lonely, and there’s nothing else to do… An oral fixation seems to be operating in that piece. It’s not that you want to touch a part of your body, you want to ingest it.

SJ: You’ve said that at the time you thought of these activities as coolly systematic, but that looking back they seem pretty psychologically motivated.

VA: It was an art time in which psychological terms had been kind of abolished, so I don’t think I knew how to think that way. I was thinking I was doing a version of minimal art, except for the fact that I was using my body. But that “except for the fact that you’re using your body” makes a big difference! I remember I did a performance at the end of 1970, and also in the performance was Kathy Dillon, the person I was living with then, and Dennis Oppenheim—we were close friends then. I’m naked from the waist up. Kathy puts on very heavy lipstick and covers the front of my body with like a million kisses. Then I go over to Dennis, who’s standing at the wall, facing the wall, also naked from the waist up, and I rub the front of my body onto his back, so transferring Kathy’s kisses to him. And I remember Dennis afterward saying, “I had no idea the work was going in this direction!” We thought this was about color transfer. Wasn’t about color transfer.

SJ: It was another printing press! But a very sexy one.

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I never thought about the implicatipons of making prints with the hair or something from your body, turning a one off work into a commodity of sorts. As Acconci mentioned making the private public. I like the impermanence of the bite mark but at the same time it comes accross as a form of self harm.

High rise 1980- so cool, huge crude red penis soaring into the air.