The Red Tapes is a feature-length video in three parts recorded on three separate tapes and intended for large-screen video projection. This work is a complex synthesis of Vito Acconci's artistic research with his novels and short stories, his poetry, Following Pieces, actions and performances, Super 8 films and videos. It shows the psychological structure of the individual and his relationship with others and with a specific culture. Vito Acconci's intention is also to go to the heart of the problem of creation by means of this existential question: how to handle the constraints of society's expectations and given forms of language (codes and conventions) on the individual? The title itself suggests critical word play, on the one hand because of the expression "red tape", meaning paperwork and administrative formalities, and on the other hand with the dominant sepia of the third tape and the association of the color with the expression "to see red" and the sentiment of revolt.
The first part shows, on the one hand, the structure of the self beneath the concept of biography, although here there is no narration of personal experience, and on the other, the relationship with American national history (for example, Kennedy's assassination) and the shared reactions of the population expressing collective experience.
The second part evokes temporal and human relationality. The individual past is symbolized by the stone which is moved, in a manner reminiscent of Sisyphus. The individual's relationships with others are successively set up: solitude (in prison), the couple, companionship, the street and friendship. This journey closes with an adventure story of life in the wild (a relationship between chronological time and individual experience in an isolated, closed space). The idea of an enclosure which is simultaneously temporal, spatial and affective is dominant.
In the third part, the earthy references - wind, sand - and cultural references - legendary, literary (The Last of the Mohicans) and sociopolitical (Miss America) emphasize the awareness of belonging to a culture, its meaning and its aims. Recognition of the American identity by the individual and the group provide a conclusion, if not an end, to the problem posed and the video then finishes with a long sequence in which Vito Acconci standing, in a low-angle shot, declares into the microphone as if claiming something: "We found it".
The biographical, the relational and awareness of culture form the three concentric spaces for creation. The emergence of the personality in the third part is set in a dialectic relationship with the proposal of the first tape: the arbitrary immersion of the self, through birth, in a given culture.
The diversity of the languages used, the fragmentation, the discontinuity, the spatialization, the interweaving of different codes and the distance between the text and the image make this video a sort of maze.
The spoken text evolves from a monologue to the structured dialog of a theatre play (in the last part). The monologue is interspersed with leitmotivs, a chorus like in the theatre: "We are the people", lists of words and contextualizing and descriptive onomatopoeias. The collective voice is alternately symbolic of the human - through the expression of feelings and fantasies: "We had no country. We sailed away. How deep is the ocean ? How deep is the ocean ?" - and American culture: "We told you to shape. We told you to form. We told you to build".

At the beginning, Vito Acconci appears with his eyes blindfolded, and then makes his performer's body and the conditions of "near-ESP exercises" to present a world using various media: photographs of landscapes (taken straight from a book), buildings, cars, an atomic mushroom cloud, maps of the United States, playlets with miniature objects (buttons, plastic figurines, model cars), sequences with fixed shots of abstract images structured by the light, tracking shots in sober theatrical decors - linear or storied architectures. The video image takes on a special role when it is reduced to a grey screen used systematically as a caesura. Associated with the variations and richness of the text and the vocal expression, along with religious music, it is a place for theatricality.
In My Word, Vito Acconci showed himself in relation to a romanticized biography and in introspective reflection, while at the same time already moving away from the work in Super 8 and his early videos, by expanding the body of the artist to fill the space of the workshop and the city in a sensibility which joined up with the American artists of his generation. In The Red Tapes, Vito Acconci extends his questioning of the self to move into the social and cultural space by synthesizing the knowledge acquired in his earlier works.

Thérèse Beyler