In the Following Following Piece (Montreal, July 8, 2008 to June 2, 2010), Thérèse Mastroiacovo has extensively researched instances in which images of Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) have appeared in print. She then drew these items, rendering the iconic images, following the layout, keeping text indicators such as page numbers, titles and captions but excising any text extraneous to Acconci’s own.1 The drawing hand follows the performer's footsteps. The translation is meticulous, yet still idiosyncratic and replete with anomalies. This artistic take on bibliographic research opens a discussion on the legacy of conceptual art broadly stated. The current field of conceptual art practices is densely populated with an ever-widening scope of hyper-referential tactics that deny origin, abrogate expression and swallow its source materials whole. In Following Following Piece, the transpositions from furtive performance to photographic document to historicizing print and finally to framed fac-not so-simile durational drawing for exhibition are all at play as they each inflect their unique alterations on the mimetic process. The drawing series obviously required the deft hand of a human scanner to activate. But more crucially, it required a willingness to pass through the referenced work. When the dissemination of the reference has produced an ample bibliography, the digestive process will be considerable—the Following Piece has propagated in publications on performance art, as well as in other disciplines, including predictably, surveillance. The theoretical and the technical method deployed by Mastroiacovo to produce the series of fifty-three drawings is a muted hermeneutic blended with a mimetic mechanics. 30
Current conceptual practices often favor such nuanced and fine-tuned projects; projects following tactics that don't push, but nudge. They are panegyric acts also intended to prick lineage, to deflate aura, and debunk artifice. One step forward and backward at the same time. In its gallery presentation, Following Following Piece formally resembled a straight line, but not a clean one for it was charged with static. The kind of static that is parasitical and noisy—it was an endlessly recombinant line, a followed line to follow. The line drawn is a noisy affair. Saturated and suffused, it goes as far against the grain of honed perfection as to include unfinished followings, thwarted drawings. They were left hanging along with the rest in order to further distort the replay. In time, the line circles back onto itself. Following Following Piece is a work tuned in re-, the prefix of return, rewind, repetition. - Christof Migone, curator
1 The excision tactic extends one step further to the mode of presenting it in this publication. The drawings are absent, muted, the bibliography is thereby foregrounded. Whether this is an artistic, editorial or curatorial conceit (or combination thereof ) is left deliberately dangling in echo of some of the other content here where similar spurious strategies have held sway.