Stimson, Between Inside and Out, 2013

sculpture and the vitrine
Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part
defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the
museum. They separate objects from their contexts, group them with other
objects, both similar and dissimilar, and often serve to reinforce their intrinsic
or aesthetic values. The vitrine has much in common with the picture frame,
the plinth and the gallery, but it has not yet received the kind of detailed
art historical and theoretical discussion that has been brought to these other
modes of formal display.
The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin
of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in
the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialogue with the
development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxtons Crystal Palace
(1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and
shop window in the rise of commodity culture and their apposition with
Constructivist design in the work of Frederick Kiesler; as well as original
readings of the use of vitrines in Surrealism and Fluxus, and in work by Joseph
Beuys, Paul Thek, Claes Oldenburg and his collaborators, Jeff Koons, Mike
Kelley, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Damien Hirst and Josephine Meckseper,
among others. Sculpture and the Vitrine also raises key questions about the
nature and implications of vitrinous space, including its fronts onto desire and
the spectacle; transparency and legibility; and onto the ideas and practices
caught up in ordering, collecting, preserving and the archive.
John Welchman is Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism in the
Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego.
9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 1
4/15/2013 10:51:08 AM
SUBJECT/OBJECT: New Studies in Sculpture

Published in association with
the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK
We have become familiar with the notion that sculpture has moved into
the expanded field, but this field has remained remarkably faithful to
defining sculpture on its own terms. Sculpture can be distinct, but it is rarely
autonomous. For too long studied apart, within a monographic or survey
format, sculpture demands to be reintegrated with the other histories of which
it is a part. In the interests of representing recent moves in this direction,
this series will provide a forum for the publication and stimulation of new
research examining sculptures relationship with the world around it, with
other disciplines and with other material contexts.
Other titles in the series include
Sculpture and the Museum
Edited by Christopher R. Marshall
Sculpture and Archaeology
Edited by Paul Bonaventura and Andrew Jones
Reading the Royal Monument in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Edited by Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau
Giacometti: Critical Essays
Edited by Peter Read and Julia Kelly
Iconoclasm
Contested Objects, Contested Terms
Edited by Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay
Sculpture and the Garden
Edited by Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell
Sculpture and Psychoanalysis
Edited by Brandon Taylor
Figuration/Abstraction
Strategies for Public Sculpture in Europe 19451968
Edited by Charlotte Benton
4/15/2013 10:51:08 AM
Sculpture and the Vitrine
Edited by John Welchman
4/15/2013 10:51:08 AM
John Welchman and the contributors 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission
of the publisher.
John Welchman has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited
Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East
110 Cherry Street
Union Road
Suite 3-1
Farnham
Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT
USA
England
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Sculpture and the vitrine.(Subject/object)
1. ArtExhibition techniques. 2. SculptureExhibitions. 3. Show windows.
4. Glass constructionHistory.
I. Series II. Welchman, John C.
730.1dc23
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Sculpture and the vitrine / edited by John Welchman.
pages cm. (Subject/object: new studies in sculpture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-3527-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Sculpture. 2. Display cases. I. Welchman, John C., editor of compilation. II.
Nichols, Kate. Art and commodity.
NB1135.S48 2013
730.75dc23

ISBN 9781409435273 (hbk)
2012045463
This publication is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.

Edited by the Henry Moore Institute
Commissioning Editor: Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain
Henry Moore Institute Editor: Jon Wood
Henry Moore Institute Editorial Assistant: Kirstie Gregory
4/15/2013 10:51:09 AM
ashgate.com copyrighted materialashgate.com
Contents
List of illustrations
vii
Notes on contributors
xv
Subject/Object: New Studies in Sculpture

Lisa Le Feuvre
xix
Acknowledgments
xxi
Introduction
John C. Welchman
Art and commodity: sculpture under glass at the Crystal Palace

Kate Nichols
23
Through the vitrine: Damien Hirsts For the Love of God

Tag Gronberg
47
Magic windows: Frederick Kieslers displays for Saks Fifth Avenue,

New York in 1928
Barnaby Haran
69
Between Wunderkammer and shop window:

surrealist naturalia cabinets
Marion Endt-Jones
95
Sculpture in Fog: Beuyss vitrines

Claudia Mesch
121
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vi
sculpture and the vitrine

6

Framed devices: Paul Theks Technological Reliquaries

Susanne Neubauer
Unattributed objects: the Mouse Museum, the Ray Gun Wing,

and four artists
Genevieve Waller
Fluxus soapbox
Cornelia Lauf
179
Twentieth-century display case archive

Daniel Edwards
197
10 Cults of transparency: the curtain wall and the shop window in the

work of Dan Graham and Josephine Meckseper

Sarah Lookofsky
143
159
211
11 The transparent signifier: Hirst, invisibility, and critique

Elyse Speaks
231
12 Between inside and out

Blake Stimson
251
Index
271
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12
Between inside and out

Blake Stimson
Public space is the last gasp of the civilized world;

public space is the Great White Hope;
public space is belief and religion;
public space is wishful thinking.1
Vito Acconci
It is the weakness of the human being that makes us sociable .
Thus from our weakness our fragile happiness is born.2
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The body is public when it crosses the boundary of the body.3
Vito Acconci
This chapter will ask a lot of the reader. My aim is to take Vito Acconci, an
artist who can readily be identified with the outsiderism of the avant-gardes
pater le bourgeois, and place him squarely inside a form of beingbourgeois
interiority, it is sometimes calledtypically associated with the bourgeoisie
itself.4 Venturing even further afield, I will also be considering Acconci in
the context of an interchange between inside and out that draws its primary
meaning from the pre-bourgeois tradition of religious conviction broadly
associated with the Catholic Middle Ages. By considering Acconcis work
in this formal, spatial manner, pre-bourgeois, bourgeois proper and anti- or
post-bourgeois configurations of self and world will all be viewed as a kind of
continuum. I will be arguing for this broad overview not for the purposes of
sidestepping the substantive differences between each of these configurations,
of course, but in order to unpack the sometimes awkward confluence of
vestigial desires that gives Acconcis work peculiar relevance and vitality for
the world we find ourselves in today, a world that, among other things, can
only be fully understood through its myriad forms of religious revivalism.
My working premises are, first, that there is a definable relationship between
4/15/2013 10:51:53 AM
252 sculpture and the vitrine

interior self and exterior world; second, that this relationship, like anything
else, changes over time and has a traceable history; and, third, that this
history, like any other, is given cultural expression in human-made form on
every level. In other words, I will be considering Acconcis work in the context
of a broadly conceived history of subjectivity that focuses specifically on the
boundary or interface between self and world. We could call that interface
the skin ego, as it is sometimes referred to, but I prefer to consider it from
outside in rather than inside out and label it the membrane of publicness.5
By reversing its polarity in this way, we can think with Rousseau and cast that
membrane less as a protective enclosure and more as the place of weakness or
vulnerability from which our fragile happiness is born.
The membrane that I will attend to, thus, is a quasi-architectural, punctuated
encasing that, in one way or another, has served to house the different desires
that come together in all of Acconcis work from his earliest days as a poet
through to the present, including, along the way, his best known and most
formative work, Seedbed (1972) (Figure 12.1). There is a much larger history
to the symbolic life of the container form, of course, but as touchstones for
a reading of Acconcis distinctive response to this tradition we can look to
three representative formations: the reliquary and its sacred, ritual status
during the pre-bourgeois epoch (Figure 12.2); the vitrine and its liberating
disenchantment of religious vision in scientific and consumerist forms of
display during the bourgeois period (Figure 12.3); and the empty container of
the dehumanized commodity itself that came to the fore as a post-bourgeois
aesthetic value or symptom for the neo-avant-garde art movements of the 1960s.
Works associated with this last category include Andy Warhols Brillo Boxes,
say, or Donald Judds specific objects; or any of the periods many glassbox art works such as Joseph Kosuths descriptively titled Box, Cube, Empty,
Clear, Glassa Description (1965), or Timm Ulrichss Selbstaustellung (1961)
(Figure 12.4). These latter-day vitrines were either empty, or housed objects
that highlighted their arbitrary, ordinary, or passive qualities. They promised
the freedom of disaffiliated negation by detaching aesthetic judgment from
the crypto-religious justifications left over from the Enlightenment without
proffering any alternative transcendent god, moral principle, or social ideal
in their stead. What is absent from these late container forms, therefore, is
not only the Middle Ages sacred separation between the mundane and the
divine, but also the Industrial Ages erotically-charged distance from things
experienced as primitive or exotic, on the one hand, and things precious or
prized, on the other.
The progressive dissipation of interiority from the first to second stages
in our history of the container form was initially signaled in the Communist
Manifestos famous slogan all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy
is profaned and given fuller theoretical exposition much later in Walter
Benjamins well-known account of the melting away of aura.6 Put schematically,
4/15/2013 10:51:53 AM
12.1Vito Acconci, Seedbed, January 1972 at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York, film still.
2010 Vito Acconci / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
12.2Bayeux Tapestry, unknown (British) textile artists, c. 106682. Linen, wool,

50.8 cm 70 m. Muse de la Tapisserie de Bayeux, detail. Reproduced by
special permission of the City of Bayeux
4/15/2013 10:51:53 AM

12.3Gaston Doumergque inaugurating The Ancient Arts of America at the Pavillon de

Marsan, Louvre, Paris, MayJune 1928. Phototheque du Muse de lHomme,
Paris, 2005
if the bounded form of the reliquary distinguished the realms of the sacred
and the profane, conjuring relations of reverence and the authority of divine
right, the glass boundary of the vitrine separated the consumer or exhibitiongoer from a cornucopia of objects provided for their scrutiny, arousal, and
delectation. This new experience of separation cultivated an acquisitive desire
in the nineteenth-century shopper, connoisseur, scientist, or colonialist. In so
doing it redirected the aims of the eighteenth-century art lover, philosophe, and
revolutionary away from the residual transcendence of the Enlightenments
collective ideals as the primary register of abstraction and towards the
emergent immanence of liberalisms possessive individualism.
While effective at generating desire, the interiority of the vitrine also
produced a kind of anxiety or vulnerability. Where the reliquary had affirmed
a clearly defined role for the viewer by providing a stable cosmological relation
between sacred and profane worlds and guidance about how to transition
from the drudgery of the one to the bliss of the other, the vitrine cultivated
an equivocal experience filled with both desire and anxiety for its beholder
by exciting a sense of movement back and forth from one side of its glass
boundary to the other. As the experience of selling ones labor on the open
4/15/2013 10:51:53 AM
12.4Timm Ulrichs, Erstes Lebendes Kunstwerk (Selbstaustellung), 1961. Installation at the

Juryfrei Kunstaustellung, Berlin, 1965. 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM

market became more and more common with increasing industrialization
and urbanization, the experience of becoming a commodity, of being the
object of the consumers gaze, of imagining being inside the vitrine oneself
and subject to the scrutiny and desire of employers and consumers, became
evermore available. The glow radiating from the reliquary was replaced by
the shimmering resplendence of the artificially lit display case as a kind of
substitute aura, stopgap measure, or temporary reprieve from the loss of
aura altogether. The vitrine thus represented a kind of purgatory or middle
condition with its glass boundary serving as a figure for the tenuous surface
tension keeping apart inside and outside, private and public, object and
subject, in a manner that was ever more unstable and insecure.
Benjamin returned time and again to this theme in his Arcades project,
comparing and contrasting what he called the phantasmagorias of the
market with those of the domestic interior, arguing that the former became
more extreme, more fetishistic, more brittle, and more spectacular, as a
function of, and at a pace in keeping with, the ever-more cloistered conditions
of the latter. The bourgeoisie, he argued, burrowed down into womb-like
interiorsthe ultimate example being the periods opium densas a way to
fend off the fear and anxiety created by the scary, ever-equivocal, exterior
marketplace of own making. The nineteenth century, like no other century,
was addicted to dwelling, he wrote:
It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased
him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwellings interior that one
might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument
with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.
What didnt the nineteenth century invent some sort of casing for!
Pocket watches, slippers, egg cups, thermometers, playing cardsand,
in lieu of cases, there were jackets, carpets, wrappers, and covers.7
The final stage in this epoch of the psychosocial symbolism of the container
form was, as Benjamin puts it, the first decades of the twentieth century, with
its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well-lit and airy, its
putting an end to dwelling in the old sense. This is the moment when the
surface tension of the vitrine that had delineated object and subject, private and
public, interiority and exteriority, bourgeoisie and proletariat, substantively
gives way in the final collapse of the auras power of consecration.8
We can see the central tension of the bourgeois vitrine reaching a splintering
point in the architectural ideals of the 1920s. On the one hand, modernist
architects cultivated the airy transparency of open plan interiors and glass
walls that, as Manfredo Tafuri put it, revolutionized aesthetic experience by
letting the outside in and the inside out:
Now it was no longer objects that were offered to judgment, but a process to be lived
and used as such. The user summoned to complete Mies van der Rohes or Gropius
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM
Blake Stimson 257

open spaces, was the central element of this process. Since the new forms were
no longer meant to be absolute values but instead proposals for the organization of
collective lifethe integrated architecture of Gropiusarchitecture summoned the
public to participate in its work of design. Thus through architecture the ideology
of the public took a great step forward. [William] Morriss romantic socialist dream
of an art of all for all took ideological form within the iron-clad law of profit.9
On the other hand, we can see a fiercely defensive residual attachment to

interiority taken up in the name of modernism by architects of a slightly older
generation who abided by Adolph Looss maxim that A cultivated man does
not look out of the window.10 A house, like a person, Loos insisted in high
nineteenth-century fashion made newly defensive for the twentieth, must be
discreet on the outside; its entire richness should be disclosed on the inside.11
While the inevitable collapse of this tension between inside and outside
is evident throughout much of the twentieth centuryBenjamin famously
dreamt of its contradiction being laid bare by film in the 1930s12it does
not inform fully self-reflexive artistic strategies until the 1960s, by which
time the structure and dynamics of the vitrine had been inverted. Instead
of the container holding subject and object apart in a tenuous, topsy-turvy,
conflicted manner as it had during the bourgeois era, it now brought them
together and made them interchangeable. Warhols many invocations of his
own interiorlessnesswhich he also effectively cultivated in othersare
cases in point. His five hundred or so film portraits or screen tests in which
subjects faced an unmanned camera while it ran through a 100-foot roll of
film offered the real-time experience of the collapse of interiority. As one
commentator has explained, it was what it is like to sit for your portrait,
with each poser trapped in the existential dilemma of performing aswhile
simultaneously being reduced tohis or her own image.13 Similarly, we can
think of the many ways that artists came to use the container form in order
to frame the radically mundane equivalence of a mute object or empty space
by creating bases, pedestals, boxes, vitrines, and other settings designed to
be filled with exchangeable, interchangeable objects. These include Piero
Manzonis Base Magica (1961), Robert Morriss Box for Standing (1961), as well
as Ulrichss Selbstaustellung (Figure 12.4), for example; or Claes Oldenburgs
Store (1961), Ben Vautiers Sculpture vivante (1962), and Gerhard Richter and
Konrad Luegs Leben mit Pop (1963). Different, but related are the mid-1960s
mirrored rooms by Yayoi Kusama and Lucas Samaras; the transparent cubes
of Hans Haacke and Larry Bell made around the same time; Oscar Bonys
Working Class Family (1968); Gilbert and Georges Singing Sculpture (1969);
and, finally, Haackes MoMA Poll (1970).
In each case the artist has highlighted the institutional frame for art rather
than the art itself. This concern would, of course, subsequently open out
into the genre of Institutional Critique associated with Haacke and others
that is, to the container of the gallery or museum or institutional art world
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM

as a whole; but in the 1960s, when the art work first and foremost gave
expression to the lived experience of the commodity form, the emphasis on
the container served primarily to give expression to existential rather than
sociological conditions. This was clearest, again, with Warhol: When I look
at things, I always see the space they occupy, he said, I always want the
space to reappear, to make a comeback, because its lost space when theres
something in it. I really believe in empty spaces.14 Or, in what might serve
as a synopsis for this moment in this history of the container form: Pop took
the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside.15 The subject
of all of these period works was the psychosocial membrane that separates
interior, affective experience from external, social authority, and across which
the process of becoming human is realized. Warhol, especially, depicted that
membrane becoming transmissible to the point of dissolution and, with it,
human experience dissolving into images or consumer-friendly forms of
belief, truth, and material existence.
It wasnt until 1968 that the empty indeterminacy of the abstract and
exchangeable interiority taken up by Warhol and the others comes to be
filled again with concrete and motivated particulars allowing the boundary
between inside and outside to be reconstituted. Until that turning point,
the container in 1960s art was just the flipside of the bourgeois vitrine with
containment experienced as travesty rather than solace. While Acconci
reflected that the flaw in minimalism, as he saw it, was that it could have
come from anywhere like the black monolith in 2001,16 Morris provided a
richer account in response to the prompt of an interviewer:
[Interviewer]: You have described Passageway as a kind of tomb and Box for
Standing as coffin-like and have said that there is something paranoid about
the grey plywood works of the 1960s. What did you mean by these comments?
[Morris]: Art as a closed space, a refusal of communication, a
secure refuge and defense against the outside world, a dead
zone and buffer against others who would intrude.17
Identifying proactively with the abstract and exchangeable interiority of the

commodity rather than the reactive comforting-cum-suffocating interiority of
bourgeois domestic life was a kind of death or refuge, as Morris put it; but it
was the death of surrender to the abstract empty space of the commodity form
that relieved artists from the onerous burden of developing an alternative
attachment, and thus an alternative interiority, of their own.
We get a sense of Acconcis shift away from this abstract interiority in a joke
he made recently at Richard Serras expense: he wished, he said, that when
viewers made their way inside a Serra sculpture they would find a hotdog
stand there.18 In one sense this is simply a Pop-inspired deflation of the
residue of high modernism in Serras worksomething like Claes Oldenburg
having fun with the honorifics of monuments, say, or Christos having his
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM
Blake Stimson 259

way with the stateliness of the Reichstag. More importantly for our purposes,
however, it also offers a reformulation of Pop arts image of the secure
refuge of exchange value (art as only image, as nothing more than the empty
container of the commodity form) with a rudimentary form of use value (hot
dogs), even if it does so in a jokey manner. He put the difference this way:
I dont want viewers; I really want users and inhabitants, or participants.19
Its not quite as simple as this, of coursein reality Acconci both does and
does not want to give his art over to users and inhabitants. Or, to make the
same point the other way round, he wants both the smothering refuge of the
bourgeoisies private interior of reflection and the defilement or effacement
of that interiority in the deadening, street-level experience of consumer
exchange. Like Warhol, Morris, and the other dead zone box artists,
Acconcis medium is the boundary between inside and outside but his aim is
opposite: to work against the atrophying of that boundary by re-embodying
it. The goal is to make the boundary elastic and skin-like in order to enable
reciprocal negotiation between inside and outside without allowing the two
to dissolve into each other. Like Serra he wants both the bodily expressiveness
of the form and the taciturn withdrawal of that same expressiveness in the
postmodern reduction to the abstract equivalence of the container. The
problem with Serras work, from Acconcis perspective, is that these two
tendencies exist together as a contradiction without entering into meaningful
dialogue.
We can find something of this dialectical elasticity of the boundary
between self and world, interior and exterior, vitrine and commodity, in most
of Acconcis work. Consider, for example, the desire expressed by his studios
inside-out design for a United Bamboo store in Tokyo (Figure 12.5). One piece
of promotion draws out the main theme by calling it, A Clothing Store As Soft
As Clothes, As Soft As Skin.20 This softness or pliability is suggested in the
architectural floor plan, in the plasticity and frosted, backlit translucency of
the PVC sheeting used to make the walls, counters, shelves, and ceiling (the
skin glows from within, the promotional description says), as well as in the
self-selected imagery of shoppers-cum-models projected from the dressing
room to a large screen above the front entrance facing the street (Figure 12.6).
In each of these design elements, the inside makes itself known to the outside
rather than simply retreating back into the nineteenth-century bourgeoisies
suffocating interiority, or merely casting itself out into the dead zone of the
infinitely exchangeable commodity form. On the one hand, this design is
indistinguishable from what has been called the new spirit of capitalism. By
creating the experience of reciprocal exchange between consumer and business,
it individualizes and spectacularizes the act of consumption by offering
itself both as a way of achieving self-fulfillment by engaging in capitalism,
and as a path of liberation from capitalism itself.21 On the other hand,
however, it strives for the same goal that has always driven Acconcis work:
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM
12.5Acconci Studio, United Bamboo, 2003. Tokyo, Japan, floor plan. 2010 Vito Acconci /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM
Blake Stimson 261

12.6Acconci Studio, United Bamboo, 2003. Tokyo, Japan, front. 2010 Vito Acconci /
to take whatever medium is availablewords on a page, the floor of a gallery,

ones own body or that of another, or the experience of walking, blinking,
following, or shoppingand reconstitute it as the negotiable, relational
membrane that mediates between self and others in such a way that we
experience ourselves as social actors rather than isolated economic beings.
In so doing, even a glitzy fashion boutique trieshowever unsuccessfully
to stand for more than the privatization of the public sphere by refashioning
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM

the old Enlightenment dream of private experience brought to life in the
relational activity of a public.
Generally, this tension between private and public, institution and body,
or system and lifeworld, defines all of Acconcis work, including Seedbed, a
piece that, by his own account, marks most decisively the architectural turn
that has been his focus since 1980 (see Figure 12.1). One way to understand
the appeal of architecture for Acconci is to think further about his distinction
between viewers and inhabitants. At the center of this is the idea that the form
of architecture itself can take on human qualities rather than being reduced to
a static image or empty, interchangeable form. We might call it performative
architecture, living architecture, or bio-architecture. The artist often raises this
question in interviews and writings, putting it this way in conversation with
Richard Prince, for example: Seedbed started by taking architecture, something
assumed as neutral and apart from person, and filling it with person: Id be
part of the floor, the wall would breathe.22 That filling of the boundaries of
the architectural containerthe floor, wall, ceilingwith personhood was
also a kind of displacement from the interior to the boundary between inside
and outside. Acconci typically describes this as a form of moving out of the
way in order to activate the space for the beholder in a manner drawn from
what he calls his father artminimalism. Yet this removal was explicitly
tempered and redirected by a mother figure that he took from feminism.
I started to feel embarrassed about being male, he says, and it led me to
make work where I could allow myself to be vulnerable.23 He wanted to
become a living, breathing, embodied container form, it can be said, in order
to cultivate Rousseaus weakness from which our fragile happiness is born.
To achieve that vulnerability and the permeable, elastic relations between
inside and out it required, I would blend with the space, he noted, I would
be part of the architecture of the room. I wanted to be part of the floor.24
While he invokes the notion of architecture-as-womb, Acconcis meaning
is never womb-like in the nineteenth-century bourgeois senseof being
encased and protected from the world of exchangenor is it the death-like
refuge in the commodity that Robert Morris described. Instead, it is womblike in its generative sense of giving birth or turning inside outward as a
productive, enriching gift to the world, or inviting the outside in, with a warm
embrace. Like some of his earlier worksFollowing Piece (1969) and Proximity
Piece (1970), say, or Hand & Mouth (1970) and Pryings (1971) (Figure 12.7)
Seedbed marks that vulnerable boundary with aggression or impropriety,
violation or perversion, of course, but does so in a way that merely stretches
the boundaries of social norms rather than puncturing them through and
through. In this way, Acconci never fully gives himself or his audience over
to defilement or effacement; nor does he offer to collapse interiority into the
homogenous or unitary exteriority that was the hallmark of Warhol, Morris,
and the other dead-zone artists. The public address system in Seedbed that
4/15/2013 10:51:54 AM
Blake Stimson 263

12.7Vito Acconci, Pryings, 1971. 16:16 minutes, film still. 2010 Vito Acconci /
allowed Acconci to respond to the footsteps of his audience from under the
floor while maintaining the barrier between them can serve as a case in point:
he inverts Warhols arch period claim that Pop took the inside and put it
outside, took the outside and put it inside. Rather than making the two
positions interchangeable, he puts them into the living experience of dialogue.
If we consider Acconcis work in light of the larger history of the collapse of
interiority that ranges from the pre-bourgeois reliquary through the bourgeois
vitrine to the fully interchangeable post-bourgeois commodity form, we can
see him trying to draw out a vital and feasible future for interiority from
freighted elements in its past. Taken as a morality play, his message is that
workable human value was furnished by the pre-bourgeois and bourgeois
container forms together with the reification of that value in myth. The
critical measure allowing for a distinction between myth and humanity for
any container experienced as a symbolic form, thus, would be based on its
pliancy, elasticity, and permeability and not on either its sheer fortitude or
its simple transparency. Acconcis shorthandThe body is public when
it crosses the boundary of the bodyis a kind of formula for that critical
measure of pliancy.
4/15/2013 10:51:55 AM

One way to come to terms, historically, with Acconcis concern is to
consider it in the context of the argument developed by Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. The old dream of
mans aspiration to Godlinesshis capacity for transcendence in reason,
for comporting himself in the public interestwas forever being reduced to
sovereignty over existence, in the lordly gaze, in the command, rather than
being enlarged to God-like universality through the process of enlightenment.
The distinction between God and man, between the universal and the
particular, they complained, had been reduced to an irrelevance.25 This is
Enlightenments mythic terror which itself springs from a subrational fear
of the superrational or a horror of myth.26 Such a reduction collapses the
boundary between inside and outside, sacred and profane, in the harsh light
of positivized, instrumentalized, monetized transparency, turning all human
reason away from the old dream of enlightenment to the cold calculations of
self-interest. Charles Baudelaire famously saw that collapse in photography
when he said that it would lead each of us to prostrating himself before
external reality, to imagining not what he dreams, but what he sees.27
By piercing the boundary of the container form and draining the world of
the interiority enclosed within, we participate in a transition not from myth
to reason, but from prostration before the authority of God to obeisance to
the authority of external reality as it is. What is lost in that transition is the
capacity to imagine that another world is possible.
Acconci, by contrast, has always sought to work both ends toward the
middle. He is perfectly clear about his relation to the old form of prostration:
I hate religion, he explained, and I love not believing.28 Even the
Enlightenments secular substitute for the promise of religion gets no purchase
from AcconciI hate the universal categories for which, if something
is beautiful, its beautiful forever, or if its true, its true for eternity.29
The last thing he would do, therefore, is to prostrate himself before some
reified, institutionalized notion of art. This postmodern, post-Enlightenment
form of secularism is common enough and was generally shared by the box
artists of the 1960s. But Acconci also refused to bow down before the figure
of emptiness that stood for Enlightenment transparency transformed into the
invisible hand of the commodity form. Transparency cuts both ways: towards
the universalization of rights and towards the universalization of power.30
Where the great bourgeois project of modernism naively reached for the
former as its paragon, post-bourgeois postmodernism has come to suffer the
latter as its negative ideal.
Instead of resting on this negative ideal like so many of his contemporaries,
Acconci harkens back to bourgeois and pre-bourgeois forms of enclosure,
returning to the old faith in interiority as enlightenment, and the even older
faith in interiority as God before that. He does not do so as a simple believer,
of course, but in a structural manner that fleshes out the social function of the
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Blake Stimson 265

vitrines boundary, a border that the bourgeoisie both creatively advanced
and actively dissolved. We can see this everywhere in Acconcis work: in his
restless, stuttering attention to questions of bodily distance and proximity, in
his recourse to questions about the inside and outside of architectural form,
and in the way in which he works with conventions of religious mediation:
The thing that still interests me about Catholicism is the number of saints. Theres
no void, no distance between person and God. There are all those saints
in between: every misfit, every problem has a patron saint attached. So youre
always part of a crowd, and theres no abstraction, everythings tangible.31
By taking on mediation as his primary artistic concern, we might say that

Acconci is simply carrying on the business of art that has been passed down
from the larger history of opposition to the world as it is, the opposition
between inside and outside, between the innate human capacity to experience
truth and beauty and the institutionalization of those capacities in perverted
form on behalf of the powers that be. Consciousness of the antagonism
between interior and exterior is requisite to the experience of art, is how
Adorno put this modernist doctrine.32 But it might be even more useful for
our purposes to go back to Marxs thinking about the historic loss of that
antagonism at the very moment when the triumphant order of the vitrine had
just commenced. We can see the loss everywhere in his critical writings: in his
account of shops whose show cases display all the riches of the world, Indian
shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, furs from
Russia and spices from the tropics, all bearing odious, white paper labels
with Arabic numerals and then laconic symbols s. d.,33 for example; or in
his broadside against the Great Exhibition and its Crystal Palace (discussed in
Chapter 1), the new Pantheon in which the bourgeoisie displayed the gods
which it has made for itself, honoring the concentrated power with which
modern large-scale industry is everywhere demolishing national barriers and
increasingly blurring local peculiarities of production, society and national
character among all peoples.34
More fundamentally, Marx came to associate that loss with secularization.
Atheism, he wrote in 1844, no longer has any meaning. While the
transformation of religious belief into a matter of private choice had served
the bourgeoisie in their construction of a transparent, exchangeable sense of
self, the starting point of socialism would have to be something altogether
different, even opposite: the theoretically and practically sensuous
consciousness of man and of nature as essential beings. Socialism, in
other words, could not rest on the bourgeois negation of the bounded self
represented by the reliquary, but instead would need to draw out a positive
self-consciousness of man, no longer mediated through the abolition of
religion.35 Humanity needed to generate its own container form, its own
internal sense of human freedom and purposespecies-being, he called it
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that would realize itself in dialogue with the world outside. Socialisms
critique of capitalism and its vision of human self-realization had to be
based on a theory of human essence that could not realize itself when the
interiority of the subject was stripped away by the brute, asocial exteriority
of the marketplace, and the relation between inside and outside collapsed.
The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual,
as the existential laws of marketplace exchange assume, in its higher, more
fully human reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.36 It is only by
fleshing out the container form, by filling it with person, as Acconci would
later put it, that society can exist and Marxs man can be redeemed: man
in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, man in his contingent existence, man just
as he is, man as he has been corrupted, lost to himself, sold, and exposed to
the rule of inhuman conditions and elements by the entire organization of our
societyin a word, man who is not yet a true species-being.37
Neither Marx, nor Adorno, nor Acconci advocate a return to religion;
but all three do return to something like the older intermediary function of
saints when they refuse the progressive depletion of the boundary between
inside and out by the commodity form. In the end, this refusal was the great
modern project lost to instrumentalization of reason, the project of public
life that served as the bourgeois Enlightenments grand thesis to bourgeois
liberalisms antithesis of vulgar transparency. Acconci called it the last gasp
of the civilized world and the Great White Hope. Rousseau put it this way
in one of its founding formulations:
He who dares to undertake the making of a peoples institutions ought to
feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming
each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part
of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being;
of altering mans constitution for the purpose of strengthening it.38
Changing human nature, as Rousseau put it, is Acconcis project and it stands
diametrically opposed to the passive spectacle of 1960s dead zone art.
Minimalism was his father and feminism his mother, he likes to say, and it
is not too much of a stretch to think of that relation as being Oedipal. Public
space isnt a piazza anymore, he says in one characteristic passage, I dont
think public activity exists.39 But this does not mean that he does not want it
to exist, that his project has not always been about bringing it into existence.
I was grounded in the 60s notion of public spacewhere discussion occurs,
argument occurs, and then the revolution happens, he says, adding that
he doesnt believe that anymore. Instead, the revolution is sneakier than
that. Everyone is withdrawing to a home computer and cell phone and
the public has become a mix of capsules.40 Trying to figure out how to
make public space from the private space of the commodity form has been the
project that has governed his career from his earliest days as a poet up to the
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Blake Stimson 267

present. The container defines the boundary that mediates between private
and public, self and world. It is the skin ego, or the membrane of publicness, or
the weakness from which our fragile happiness is born. It is, thus, both means
and medium for altering mans constitution for the purposes of strengthening
it. Getting that boundary right means resocializing it, or making it elastic by
reinhabiting it with person. It means making the boundary neither opaque
nor transparent but instead making it into a living, breathing form of human
nature that can transform itself. This is the sneaky problem that Acconci has
made his burden at least since Seedbed: those millions of capsules are going to
make public space, he says with all the conviction of a true believer, though
I am not sure exactly how.41
Notes
1.
Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci: Making Public (The Hague: Stroom, 1993), p. 13.
2.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Book IV, as translated by Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from
Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. vii.
3.
Acconci in Heinz Schulz (ed.), Vito Acconci: Courtyard in the Wind (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2003),
p. 98.
4.
The author thanks Leah Theis and Lisa Zdybel for research assistance, and Douglas Kahn, Elise
Archias, Julie Martin, and John C. Welchman for editorial guidance.
5.
See, for example, Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989).
6.
Aura, Benjamin explained, is a strange tissue of space and time; the unique apparition of
a distance, however near it may be. Aura was, first and foremost, a way of experiencing
otherworldliness, transcendence or entitlement, but it was also an experience born in significant
measure of conventions and devices like reliquaries that articulated the boundedness, and
thus separateness, of the otherworldly, the auratic, or the sacred that the bourgeoisie would
later come to profane. According to Benjamin, the melting away of the auraand of the ritual
forms that maintained itwas a function, first, of the increasing emergence of mass culture,
mass production, and mass consumption; allied, secondly, to the growing intensity of mass
politics. What the former afforded the latter was not only a set of economic relations that could
be retooled as political organization, but also a form of self-abstraction in the new equivalence of
wage labor and the ever-growing iconic status of commodities that enabled and facilitated social
aggregation. The display of objects in vitrines, department stores, and world exhibitions shored
up this experience of self-abstraction in two ways: department stores allowed consumers to begin
to consider themselves a mass by generalizing and formalizing the process of consumption and
abstracting it from utility, while the large trade exhibitions provided empathy with exchange
value by asking consumers to Look at everything [and] touch nothing, thereby further
distancing them from the experience of use value. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty,
and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), p. 23; Walter Benjamin, The Arcades
Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), pp. 43, 201.
7.
Benjamin, Arcades, pp. 22021.
8.
As a result, the desire of the present-day masses to get closer to [or possess] things is
consummated together with their equally passionate concern for overcoming each things
uniqueness. The abstract equivalence of the commodity form was a chimerical figurea fetish,
in Marxs terminologyfor the abstract equivalence of the democratic rights that initially had
been given to them as citizens and were subsequently revoked in their capacities as wage laborers.
Benjamin, Work of Art, pp. 223.
9.
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1976), pp. 1023.
10. Le Corbusier quoting Loos, cited in Beatriz Colomina, Sexuality and Space (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1992), p. 74.
4/15/2013 10:51:55 AM

11. As one commentator put it, Looss architecture rejected the ideology of transparency: Even
when glass architecture triumphs in the twenties, Loosian houses will continue to stand opposite
along the streets, with more and more solid walls, genuine protective screens separating the
private from the public. We can get a sense of how loaded this opposition was from the meanspirited characterization of Loos by one of his students, Richard Neutra, who himself became a
leading apostle of transparency. Loos, he said, was a violent but quiet spoken attacker, a reformer
of ruthlessness and at the same time a most calm, almost whispering, mildly smiling philosopher
of wrath (quoted in Holly Watkins, Schoenbergs Interior Designs, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 61:1 (2008), pp. 131, 158, 128).
12. See, Benjamin, Work of Art.
13. Callie Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonn, Volume One
(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2006), p. 14.
14. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Mariner
Books, 1975), p. 143.
15. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (New York: Mariner Books, 1990), p. 11.
16. Richard Prince, Vito Acconci (interview), BOMB, 36 (Summer 1991), at: http://bombsite.com/
issues/36/articles/1443 [accessed September 17, 2010].
17. Simon Grant, Interview: Robert Morris, TATE ETC., 14 (Autumn 2008), at: http://www.tate.org.
uk/tateetc/issue14/interviewmorris.htm [accessed September 16, 2010].
18. Acconcis statement was reported by a blogger after he lectured at Cooper Union in 2007: I like
Richard Serra sculptures too but I wish they had a goddamn hot dog stand inside. Her editorial
comment: Needless to say, I dont think he is ever going to return to Cooper (http://www.
paperheart.org/blog/archive/2007_11_01_archive.html [accessed September 18, 2010]).
19. Vito Acconci, Vito Acconci in Conversation at Acconci Studio, New York, produced by Christine
Poggi and Aaron Levy with the 20072008 RBSL Bergman Curatorial Seminar, University of
Pennsylvania, filmed and edited by Laura Hanna (Philadelphia: Slought Books, 2008), as excerpted
here: https://mmm1932.dulles19-verio.com/slough/store/product_info.php?products_id=53
[accessed November 27, 2009].
20. Acconci Studio, UNITED BAMBOO STORE in Tokyo, a Classic by Acconci Studio, MORFAE:
The Shape of Things: Architecture, Design, Interior, Art, Style (2010), at: http://www.morfae.com/0214acconci/ [accessed September 18, 2010].
21. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007), p. 425.
22. Prince, Acconci.
23. Ibid.
24. Karen Wright, Vito Acconci, Interview Magazine, August 9, 2009, at: http://www.
interviewmagazine.com/art/vito-acconci-1/3/ [accessed August 13, 2010].
25. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed.
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002),
pp. xvii, 56.
26. Ibid., p. 22.
27. Charles Baudelaire, The Salon of 1859, in Jonathan Mayne (ed.), Art in Paris, 18451862: Salons
and Other Exhibitions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 154.
28. Alvaro Rodrguez Fominaya, Ai Weiwei and Vito Acconci: On Life, Culture, and other Matters,
Art Pulse, 2:1 (Fall 2010), at: http://artpulsemagazine.com/ai-weiwei-and-vito-acconci-on-lifeculture-and-other-matters/ [accessed September 17, 2010].
29. Quoted at end of Franco di Capuo, ACCONCI: MURINSEL, at: http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=FrUZZTLLVZo [accessed September 18, 2010].
30. In this regard, consider Foucaults analysis of Jeremy Bentham as the Enlightenments complement
to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseaus dream, according to Foucault: was the dream of a
transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing
any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of
some corporation, zones of disorder. It was the dream that each individual, whatever position he
occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that mens hearts should communicate, their
vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that the opinion of all reign over each.
4/15/2013 10:51:55 AM
Blake Stimson 269

Bentham, on the other hand, shared in both the Rousseauian dream and something that was
quite opposite to it, as can be seen in his design for the panopticon: He poses the problem of
visibility, but thinks of a visibility organized entirely around a dominating, overseeing gaze. He
effects the project of a universal visibility which exists to serve a rigorous, meticulous power. Thus
Benthams obsession, the technical idea of the exercise of an all-seeing power, is grafted on to the
great Rousseauist theme which is in some sense the lyrical note of the Revolution. The two things
combine into a working whole (Michel Foucault, The Eye of Power, in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 19721977 (New York: Pantheon, 197280), p. 152).
31. Prince, Acconci.
32. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 349.
33. Karl Marx, Critique of Political Economy (1859), at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/
works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02_2.htm [accessed September 18, 2010].
34. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Review: MayOctober 1850, at: http://www.marxists.org/
archive/marx/works/1850/11/01.htm [accessed September 18, 2010].
35. Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism, in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and
Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 357.
36. Karl Marx, Concerning Feuerbach, in Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 423.
37. Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 226.
38. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York: E.P. Dutton,
1913), p. 35.
39. Anne Barclay Morgan, Revolution is Sneakier: Conversation with Vito Acconci, Sculpture,
21:7 (September 2002), at: http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag02/sept02/acc/acc.shtml
[accessed September 18, 2010].
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
4/15/2013 10:51:55 AM
4/15/2013 10:51:55 AM
Index
4/15/2013 10:51:55 AM
4/15/2013 10:51:55 AM

Stimson, Between Inside and Out, 2013

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sculpture and the vitrine

SUBJECT/OBJECT: New Studies in Sculpture

Sculpture and the Vitrine

Edited by John Welchman

John Welchman and the contributors 2013

This publication is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.

ashgate.com copyrighted materialashgate.com

Subject/Object: New Studies in Sculpture 

Art and commodity: sculpture under glass at the Crystal Palace

Through the vitrine: Damien Hirsts For the Love of God

Magic windows: Frederick Kieslers displays for Saks Fifth Avenue,

Between Wunderkammer and shop window:

Sculpture in Fog: Beuyss vitrines

ashgate.com copyrighted materialashgate.com

sculpture and the vitrine

ashgate.com copyrighted materialashgate.com

Framed devices: Paul Theks Technological Reliquaries

Unattributed objects: the Mouse Museum, the Ray Gun Wing,

Twentieth-century display case archive

11 The transparent signifier: Hirst, invisibility, and critique

12 Between inside and out

ashgate.com copyrighted materialashgate.com

Between inside and out

Public space is the last gasp of the civilized world;

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 251

252 sculpture and the vitrine

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 252

12.2Bayeux Tapestry, unknown (British) textile artists, c. 106682. Linen, wool,

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 253

254 sculpture and the vitrine

12.3Gaston Doumergque inaugurating The Ancient Arts of America at the Pavillon de

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 254

12.4Timm Ulrichs, Erstes Lebendes Kunstwerk (Selbstaustellung), 1961. Installation at the

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 255

256 sculpture and the vitrine

ashgate.com copyrighted materialashgate.com

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 256

Blake Stimson 257

On the other hand, we can see a fiercely defensive residual attachment to

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 257

258 sculpture and the vitrine

Identifying proactively with the abstract and exchangeable interiority of the

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 258

Blake Stimson 259

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 259

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 260

Blake Stimson 261

to take whatever medium is availablewords on a page, the floor of a gallery,

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 261

262 sculpture and the vitrine

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 262

Blake Stimson 263

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 263

264 sculpture and the vitrine

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 264

Blake Stimson 265

By taking on mediation as his primary artistic concern, we might say that

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 265

266 sculpture and the vitrine

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 266

Blake Stimson 267

Benjamin, Arcades, pp. 22021.

ashgate.com copyrighted materialashgate.com

9781409435273_Welchman book.indb 267

Subject/Object: New Studies in Sculpture

Art and commodity: sculpture under glass at the Crystal Palace

Through the vitrine: Damien Hirsts For the Love of God

Sculpture in Fog: Beuyss vitrines

Framed devices: Paul Theks Technological Reliquaries

Twentieth-century display case archive

11 The transparent signifier: Hirst, invisibility, and critique

12 Between inside and out