Vito Acconci | Four Book

Vito Acconci
Four Book
New York City, USA: 0 To 9 Books, 1968
[unpaginated], 28 x 22 cm., staple-bound
Edition size unknown

Acconci's second publication (and first artists' book) consists of typographical poetry, photocopies of the Manhattan phonebook and the type of reader-as-writer projects that Kenneth Goldsmith would later pursue to their logical conclusion. Some of the works had a kinetic quality and shortly afterwards Acconci abandoned writing for performance:

"When I was writing, what interested me was the space of a page, how you move from left margin to right margin, how you turn from one page to the next. I treated the page as a kind of field over which I, as writer, traveled, just as you, the reader, traveled. Once I realized I was so interested in movement, it seemed unnecessary to restrict that movement to an 8.5-by-11 piece of paper."

Four Book was published under the umbrella of 0 To 9, the mimeographed magazine Acconci produced with Bernadette Mayer. A copy signed by the artist in 1974 is available at Granary Books, here, for $1850.00 US.

Acconci was born on this day in 1940. He died on April 28, 2017, at the age of 77.