Unlike most of Vito Acconci's Super 8 films and videos, Two Takes is a work without emotion in which he deals with taking possession as an urge and not in terms of desire or the pleasure of satisfaction. The two sequences present two scenes in which the artist seizes an object external to him.

Grass / Mouth is a fixed colour shot of the artist's head and shoulders, against a background of green foliage in the summer sun. He crams his mouth full of leaves and, despite phases of nausea, he continues his action. He does not swallow, he is accumulating this environmental, natural and earthly element. The artist's concentration on the action is only equalled by the density of the urge in the absence of distance which might sometimes characterise the subject's relation to the motivations for his act.

In the second sequence, Hair / Mouth, Vito Acconci fills his mouth with the long hair of Kathy Dillon, his partner. The play on nausea overcome is also present here. The faces placed one above the other stare out at us in a fixed close-up. The fact that the film was processed in black and white and in slow motion is reminiscent of the old silent movies and the slow, fitful return of a memory. The scene is thus situated in the past.

The title also means "two film takes". The technique of pictures transforms the reality which it catches. By contrasting color and real time with black and white filmed in slow motion, Vito Acconci suggests that Hair / Mouth was shot before Grass / Mouth. This could be transcribed in the following way: today I am taking possession of environmental objects, whereas before my urges were directed towards affective objects. In Two Takes, the part of the body highlighted is the mouth. It refers to psychology and the libido (sexual urge and urge to live).

Vito Acconci's relationship with performance or body art is not just experiment. In Two Takes, he uses video, the body and the action for a representation of the urge.

Thérèse Beyler