Open Book, 1975. Photograph, pastel, and chalk on board, 60 x 40 inches. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. VITO ACCONCI In 1969, already a published poet, Vito Acconci made his first visual artworks by combining photographs with texts to document task-oriented activities that he performed specifically for the lens. In Grasp (1969), he acknowledges the archival capabilities of photography—"camera as grasp, photo as storage"—but foregrounds the performative act of picture taking, of physically seizing an image. This project announced the dialogue between camera and body that would become an essential aspect of Acconci's subsequent work, particularly the series of Super-8 films and videos made between 1969 and 1974 in which he obsessively contemplates his own body as a (gendered) site. These privately filmed performances, which are also documented in photo-and-text panels, involves intense corporeal manipulation. In Conversions II: Insistence, Adaptation, Groundwork, Display (1971), for example, the second in a trilogy of films interrogating the rigidity of gender binarism, the artist attempts to feminize his male body by hiding his genitals between his legs. In the video and related panel Open Book (1975), the body again becomes an intimate performance site: Acconci's unnaturally open mouth is shown in an extreme close-up as he paradoxically attempts to speak to the viewer. The inability to articulate and the breakdown of language—which give rise to Acconci's repeated pleadings and apologies to the viewer—enable the mouth itself to communicate as a representation of openness.