ABSTRACT
In 1969 Vito Acconci shifted the terrain of his artistic practice from poetry and art criticism to performances that took the streets of New York and his own body as their mutual ground. This shift entailed not so much a change of medium, as a newly conceptualized relation of self and other, self and social world. Crucial to this relation was an investigation of beholding, understood as necessarily corporeal, temporal, and implicated in the construction of subjectivity, power, and desire. Coming to visual art as an outsider, Acconci perceived it to be an open category, with no distinctive attributes or immanent laws. As he put it,
Art for my generation was a kind of non-field, It didn't seem to have any inherent characteristics of its own. Art was a field into which you could import from other fields, so I felt free to come to it from the closed field of poetry, in which the parameters were set. Besides, I was interested in what all the arts had in common - the author mediating between the object and viewer. 1
