Once again, in Theme Song , we find the questions considered in several other videos (Undertone, Remote Control, Turn On), a desire to establish an area of power, a tension between another and himself, between the spectator and himself.

Vito Acconci is lying on the carpet, with his head on his arm and his feet pointing towards a sofa which closes off the space in the background. His face, turned towards the spectator, fills half the screen and seems to want to leap out of the frame and get even closer. With this mise en sccne, the artist is suggesting that he is really there, behind the glass, deep inside the monitor, in a private but almost neutral place (direct allusion to the television as a domestic, popular object).

Vito Acconci lights a cigarette and turns on a tape recorder, located outside the frame, which he shares with the spectators, playing them the themes of the popular American rock songs which will structure and give rhythm to this face-to-face confrontation. Literally taking the words sung by Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and Kris Kristofferson as his starting point, he develops a long, seductive monologue. With the insistence of a Casanova, he moves into the spectators' space and invites them to come nearer, to get close to him. With a mixture of candor and manipulation, he protests his honesty and forces the relationship. The bewitching register of his voice as he sings and the slow movements of his body suggest possible encirclement. With this attempt at manipulation of an invisible spectator and its desire to make the screen disappear, making us forget technique and distance, Theme Song can be compared with Remote Control and, through the role and place assigned to the spectator, with Turn On and Undertone.

With the realistic effect of the mise en sccne, the songs which are almost theme tunes and the intimate tone of the artist's speech, everything combines to make this video an affective and ironic work on the problem of remote control.

Kamel Boukhechem