Air Time @ Vito Acconci.1973

- ACCONCI Vito, Air Time, 1973.

« Two intersecting areas: the ‘field’ of the gallery and the ‘point’ of an enclosure, off to the side. The gallery space is a floating space: it’s nearly empty, no images to focus on: the corners are resting places, listening places: ‘radios,’ white boxes containing tape loops in my voice: the sound comes from one box at a time, skips and winds across the space.

These are programs: prerecorded messages addressed by me to you, the passer-by—or storages, places to keep my voice for myself, places where I can steady myself, build myself up.

Scenarios: ways to define your positions, keep you here – ways to widen the space, break through it, send you out of it. This is my voice from the past: this is in the back of my mind while I’m elsewhere, now, in the ‘recording studio,’ on the spot.

Tape excerpts: …on the air, in the air… a field, the air is clear, you’re walking in a field, you can see for miles along the hill, down the valley… you can slide down the hill, the long soft grass moves under you in your direction, aiding your slide, your slide out of his space… the plot shifts, snag in the plot, as one of them moves his leg forward, I can think of him ready to trip me, I have to sneak around in order to get to her… you can be sitting there, as she might have been, as if creating difficulties for me, making contradictory demands on me, as she might have done…

I’m off to the side, enclosed in a small closer space: a red light blinks on the door: recording studio: I’m ‘on the air’: you, the passer-by, can survey me, keep an eye on me, by means of a television set outside, in the gallery space. This is a place where I can isolate myself, in order to deal with an obsession, in order to cut myself off the fantasies and interactional possibilities on tape — or a place where I can pin down an obsession that can generate the fantasies outside. I’m sitting here, looking into a mirror, not to see myself but to see myself in relation to a specific person I’ve been involved with for an extended time: I look at the mirror as if she’s in here with me, as if I’m looking at her, as if I’m talking to her through the crowd: recreate incidents we’ve been through together: see myself the way she’s seen me, hear myself the way she’s heard me. You, the passer-by, have to be there, outside, so you can certify my positions: once you’ve seen how I’ve been with her, I wont’t be able to deny it, I’ll have to come to terms with it,  I’ll have to leave her — I might be able, then, to get myself off the spot, join into the fantasies, the open field, where I’ve already sent you. »