LANGUAGE TO COVER A PAGE: THE EARLY WRITINGS OF VITO ACCONCI
edited by Craig Dworkin. MIT Press/411 pp./$34.95 (hb).
Best known for his video and performanceart, Vito Acconci's
experimental arrangements of text from the late 1960s and 1970s are
published, many for the first time, in Craig Dworkin's Language to
Cover a Page. In the semblance of other nouveau roman writers,
Acconci's writings are consistently unorthodox. He shuffles
ordinary language, toying with syntactic repetition and grammar while
paring down the text to give equal, or perhaps greater, importance to
what is not said or seen. The text could easily fit in a book half its
size, if in accord with conventional, economical ideas of layout; but
this would be doubly elusive, for in Acconci's work, space serves
as punctuation. Dworkin's assemblage of Acconci's experiments
is provocative in content and exquisitely packaged.
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NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.