Election Tape '84

Directed by Vito Acconci

Steeped in black humor, this concise political critique is Acconci's contribution to artist Jenny Holzer's collaborative Sign on a Truck project, which was presented on a Diamond Vision Screen in New York in response to Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign in 1984. Acconci portrays Reagan as a ventriloquist's dummy, a two-dimensional puppet's head that is a mouthpiece for the ideology of the Right. Smiling like a TV evangelist or the host of a children's TV show, the Reagan puppet intones a litany of "Family Values" that is at once comic and chilling.