Vito Acconci
Encyclopedia
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
-born, Brooklyn-based designer
Designer
A designer is a person who designs. More formally, a designer is an agent that "specifies the structural properties of a design object". In practice, anyone who creates tangible or intangible objects, such as consumer products, processes, laws, games and graphics, is referred to as a...
, landscape architect
Landscape architect
A landscape architect is a person involved in the planning, design and sometimes direction of a landscape, garden, or distinct space. The professional practice is known as landscape architecture....
, performance
Performance
A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers behave in a particular way for another group of people, the audience. Choral music and ballet are examples. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience...
and installation art
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
ist.
Education
Acconci attended Regis High SchoolRegis High School (New York City)
Regis High School is a private Jesuit university-preparatory school for academically gifted Roman Catholic young men located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Annual class enrollment is limited to approximately 135 male students from the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state area...
in New York City. He received a B.A. in literature from the College of the Holy Cross
College of the Holy Cross
The College of the Holy Cross is an undergraduate Roman Catholic liberal arts college located in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA...
in 1962 and an M.F.A. in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa
University of Iowa
The University of Iowa is a public state-supported research university located in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. It is the oldest public university in the state. The university is organized into eleven colleges granting undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees...
.
Works
Acconci began his career as a poetPoet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, editing 0 TO 9 with Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer
Bernadette Mayer is a poet and prose writer. In 1967 she received a BA from New School for Social Research. She has since edited the journal 0 TO 9 with Vito Acconci and the United Artists Press with Lewis Warsh...
in the late 1960s. In the late 1960s, Acconci transformed himself into a performance and video art
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
ist using his own body as a subject for photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
, film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
, video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
, and performance
Performance
A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which a performer or group of performers behave in a particular way for another group of people, the audience. Choral music and ballet are examples. Usually the performers participate in rehearsals beforehand. Afterwards audience...
. His performance and video work was marked heavily by confrontation
Confrontation
Confrontation is a tactical fantasy miniature wargaming in which the combatants are represented by metal figures in 28 mm scale. For comparison purposes, the system's figures are slightly larger than those of Games Workshop or The Foundry....
and Situationism. In the mid 1970s, Acconci expanded his metier into the world of audio/visual installations.
One installation/performance piece from this period is Seedbed
Seedbed (performance piece)
Seedbed is a performance piece first performed by Vito Acconci on 15–29 January 1972 at Sonnabend Gallery in New York.In the piece, there is a low wooden ramp merging with the floor...
(January 15–29, 1971). In Seedbed Acconci lay hidden underneath a gallery-wide ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the visitors walking above him on the ramp. One motivation behind Seedbed was to involve the public in the work's production by creating a situation of reciprocal interchange between artist and viewer.
In the article "Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism", Rosalind Krauss refers to aspects of Narcissism apparent in the video work of Acconci. “A line of sight begin Acconci’s plane of vision ends on the eyes of his projected double”. Krauss uses this description to underline aspects of narcissism in the Vito Acconci work "Centers." In the piece Acconci is filming himself pointing directly at himself for about 25 minutes, by doing so Acconci makes a nonsensical gesture that exemplifies the critical aspects of a work of art through the beginning of the 20th century. Krauss also goes on to explain the psychological basis behind the actions of video in comparison to discussions of object art.
In 2008, in an interview with Brian Sherwin
Brian Sherwin
Brian Sherwin is an American art critic, writer, and blogger with a degree from Illinois College in 2003. Sherwin is the Senior Editor for the artist social networking site myartspace, where he has written an extensive interview series with emerging and established visual artists...
for Myartspace, Vito discussed Seedbed at length. Vito discussed the title Seedbed and the connection it had to the performance, stating, "I knew what my goal had to be: I had to produce seed, the space I was in should become a bed of seed, a field of seed – in order to produce seed, I had to masturbate – in order to masturbate, I had to excite myself."
During the 1980s he invited viewers to create artwork by activating machinery that erected shelters and signs. He also turned to the creation of furniture and to prototypes of houses and gardens in the late 1980s. The artist also founded Acconci Studio in 1988 focusing on theoretical design and building. Acconci has designed the United Bamboo store in Tokyo in 2003 and collaborated on concept designs for interactive art vehicle Mister Artsee in 2006 among others.
More recently, the artist has focused on architecture and landscape design that integrates public and private space. One example of this is "Walkways Through the Wall," which flow through structural boundaries of the Midwest Airlines Center
Midwest Airlines Center
The Frontier Airlines Center is a convention and exhibition center located in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The center is part of a greater complex of buildings which includes the U.S...
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and provide seating at both ends.
Another example of his work is Dirt Wall (1992) at the Arvada Center Sculpture Garden in Colorado. The wall begins outside the Arvada Center and extends inside, rising from ground level to a height of 24 feet. The glass and steel wall contains a mixture of volcanic rock, various types of sand, red dolomite, and topsoil which are visible through the glass panels, and represents an attempt to bring what is underground up, and what is outside in.
Academic career
Acconci has taught at many institutions, including the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax; California Institute of the ArtsCalifornia Institute of the Arts
The California Institute of the Arts, commonly referred to as CalArts, is located in Valencia, in Los Angeles County, California. It was incorporated in 1961 as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States created specifically for students of both the visual and the...
, Valencia; Cooper Union
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, commonly referred to simply as Cooper Union, is a privately funded college in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, United States, located at Cooper Square and Astor Place...
; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
University; Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
; and the Parsons School of Design. He currently teaches at Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
in the Art Department and Performance and Interactive Media Arts
Performance and Interactive Media Arts
Brooklyn College offers two graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts, also known as "PIMA" or "Interactive Arts."The M.F.A...
programs.
Articles
- Alessandra Orlandoni "Interview with Vito Acconci" - The Plan 020, June 2007
- Frederic Maufras - Parachute 118, April-June 2005
External links
- Oral history interview with Vito Acconci, 2008 June 21-28 from the Archives of American ArtArchives of American ArtThe Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 16 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C...
- Acconci video art in the Video Data Bank.
- Guide to the 0 TO 9 archive from the Fales Library at NYU.
- Artist's page in Artfacts.Net with actual major exhibitions.
- An appreciation of Acconci by critic Jerry Saltz.
- 2 pieces of Sound Poetry on UBUWEB.
- Art videos directed and performed by Vito Acconci on UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...
- An interview with Acconci by designboom
- http://www.ubuweb.com/film/acconci_sharp.htmlWilloughby SharpWilloughby SharpWilloughby Sharp was an internationally known artist, independent curator, independent publisher, gallerist, teacher, author, and telecom activist. In 1968, Sharp co-founded Avalanche magazine with writer/filmmaker Liza Béar...
Videoviews Vito Acconci (1973) on UbuWebUbuWebUbuWeb is a large web-based educational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It offers visual, concrete and sound poetry, expanding to include film and sound art mp3 archives.-Philosophy:...
] - Public artwork at the West 8th Street-New York Aquarium subway station, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit
- Public artwork at the 161st Street-Yankee Stadium, commissioned by MTA Arts for Transit
- Vito Acconci, Mediateca Media Art Space
- Vito Acconci Interviews, Conceptual Paradise, Leuphana University Lueneburg
- TateShots: Vito Acconci The artist talks about his famous show at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, 1972