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facilitate new forms of scholarship.Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at. It was a commonplace of criticism in the 1960s that a strict applicati symmetry allowed a painter “to point to the center of the canvas” and, in to invoke the internal structure of the picture-object. Thus “pointing to the c was made to serve as one of the many blocks in that intricately constructed ar which the criticism of the last decade sought to connect art to ethics thr “aesthetics of acknowledgement.” But what does it mean to point to the ce t.v. screen?

In a way that is surely conditioned by the attitudes of Pop Art, artists’ video is largely involved in parodying the critical terms of abstraction. Thus when Vito Acconci makes a video tape called Centers (1971), what he does is literalize the critical notion of ‘pointing’ by filming himself pointing to the center of a television monitor, a gesture he sustains for the 20-minute running time of the work. The parodistic quality of Acconci’s gesture, with its obvious debt to Duchampian irony, is clearly intended to disrupt and dispense with an entire critical tradition. It is meant to render nonsensical a critical engagement with the formal properties of a work, or indeed, a genre of works-such as ‘video’. The kind of criticism Centers attacks is obviously one that takes seriously the formal qualities of a work, or tries to assay the particular logic of a given medium. And yet, by its very mis-en-scene, Centers typifies the structural characteristics of the video medium. For Centers was made by Acconci’s using the video monitor as a mirror. As we look at the artist sighting along his outstretched arm and forefinger towards the center of the screen we are watching, what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci’s plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double. In that image of self-regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre. Yet, what would it mean to say, “The medium of video is narcissism?”