From 1993 to 1997, Acker developed her interest in the capacity of the artwork to offer new modes of literary experiment. Acker's essays, ‘Running through the World: On the Art of Kiki Smith’ (1995) and ‘From Psyche's Journal’ (1997) are testimony to the writer's engagement with the work of contemporary women artists, whose primary medium is sculpture. Acker explores the relation between writing and sculpture within the context of the work of Kiki Smith, Cathy de Monchaux, and the late modernist artists who influenced them, Eva Hesse, Louise Nevelson, Lee Bontecou, and Louise Bourgeois. Acker's later compositions reveal an imbrication of the practice of ekphrasis with the reappropriation of mythology, as a means to represent the unrepresentable. Murray Krieger, in his work Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (1992), examines at length the relation between the visual and the verbal in the practice of ekphrasis. For Krieger, ekphrasis has an intrinsic relation to the impossibility of representation. ‘Ekphrastic ambition’, Krieger argues, ‘gives to the language art the extraordinary assignment of seeking to represent the literally unrepresentable.’

The ekphrastic impulse enables Acker to access the materiality of sculpture in language. This chapter draws conceptual links between Acker's ekphrastic experiments in her later essays and her experiments with writing and bodybuilding. Krieger reveals the relation between ekphrasis and the crisis of the referent when he sketches varying modes of ‘doubleness in language as a medium of the visual arts’. One of these modes of ‘doubleness’ Krieger conceives as follows: ‘language in poems can be read as functioning transparently, sacrificing its own being for its referent; and it can be viewed as functioning sensuously, insisting on its own irreducible there-ness’. This study has traced the production of opacity as a means to preserve the materiality of language in a number of Acker's works. Acker's move towards abstraction evidently emerges from her experimentation with linguistic opacity, as a counter to linguistic transparency. Krieger's sensuous ‘irreducible there-ness’ of language is comparable to opacity as it has been taken up in Acker's works in previous chapters.