Poetry is yielding, the opposite of solid concrete you smash into and get hurt by. Hammered together as concrete poetry, this yin and yang make a hard-hitting unity. Words are bricks a concrete poet mortars together, the poems bruising-edge slabs hurled at listener-accomplices – duck or you'll be knocked senseless. Vito Acconci debuted on the art scene as a concrete poet. He soon moved off into making art that had not yet been named. The late '60s were heady times of rebellion. Artists scorned white-box museums and commercial galleries. They lived and showed their work in lower Manhattan's rundown storefronts. Ad hoc actions of protest carried the revolutionary spirit of '68. The art world felt like a neighbourhood. It was small and the sense of community among visual and performing artists was strong. One Saturday afternoon in 1970, Acconci sat alone in a booth at Max's Kansas City, the local artist hangout. He started rubbing a small area of his forearm, and for no obvious reason he continued to rub the skin long after the spot had become marked. This seminally unpretentious
action was re-enacted and documented in grainy black-and-white photos. Acconci became a media artist upon the recording of personal nothing-very-special actions, first on super-8 and then on video. The raw black-and-white video image reinforced the physicality of the work. The actions were at once disturbingly aggressive and laughable. In one tape he tries to convince himself a girl is under the table rubbing his thigh. He keeps at it for half an hour until the videotape runs out. Video pieces typically were half an hour or one hour long, depending on the tape loaded in the recording deck. Artists scorned the commercialism and expense of video editing studios. Some artists cobbled together crude editing rigs, but Acconci just ran his tapes end to end. On the replay, if he liked what he saw he kept the tape, dubbed in the jargon of the day a shoot or oeuvre. Otherwise back into the deck went the tape for the next shoot. The primitiveness of video suited the esthetic of the times. It was cheap and hardly worthwhile collecting. Consequently, it attracted an enthusiastic following in universities and alternative spaces. Artists who had worked alone in rundown lofts with only a body part or a dog to point their camera at suddenly had venues all over the country for their work. And they had fans and even critics who saw in the crude works the beginnings of a new art form. 

Acconci's Remote Control started out as a performance at a vital but short-lived art spot on the upper East Side. The Finch College Museum had 15 minutes of fame showing new works of Richard Serra, Dennis Oppenheim and other luminaries. Acconci's performance which had live people doing things for a live audience was called an event or piece. The term performance art for the kind of the work Acconci was cooking up in 1971 had not yet been coined. Remote Control owes more to ballet and theater than traditional visual arts. Acconci and Kathy Dillon, the other performer in the piece, are squashed Becket-like in plywood cages in separate rooms. They see and hear one another via video. Each cage has a microphone, camera and video monitor bringing the performers together for their pas a deux. The audience mills about from room to room, and occasionally exits for a draught at a nearby pub. The staging is reminiscent of olden times when the hoi polloi took in plays standing in theater pits. They knew the plays well and took a breather when the action slowed. The plot of the piece is straightforward and implausible: Acconci works at getting Dillon to tie herself up with a rope. He cajoles, he commands, his mastery of manipulation is on display. The main obstacle seems the means of communication. “I have to convince myself that you're here – I'm still conscious of TV – it's not like a real person yet.” Presumably if their cages were in the same room, Acconci would have no trouble getting the woman to do his bidding. The tying-up action is curiously fascinating. Acconci says, “I'm bringing the rope over your knees slowly… I'm lifting your legs now, gently… passing the rope under your legs.” He mimes the action, imploring the woman to follow along. His tone is deferential, ultimately submissive. He puts himself subservient to the woman's will to obey or reject his entreaties. In effect Acconci begs the woman to tie herself up because he's such a nice guy. His performance and Dillon's reaction are deliciously passive-aggressive. Today viewers see Remote Control as a two-channel video with Acconci on one monitor and Dillon on the other. The tension between resist and submit is mesmerizing. This stress is the sticky flypaper of reality TV which invariably has a boss-person getting a subordinate to do something objectionable. However, no one gets terminated in Remote Control. The action plays out like a ballet. When the female sighs and complies the male happily prances about and when she rebels he walks around forlornly.

Barbara London