Vito Acconci

I've decided to do my project on Vito Acconci because in past video classes I've seen his video work, and found him creepy and disturbing. When I saw him on the list I thought I'd see what kind of performance works he's done.

VITO ACCONCI

Vito Acconci, born in in 1940, started his art career as a poet. He is quoted in the book American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980, saying: "I think that when I started doing pieces, the initial attempts were very much oriented towards defining my body in a space, finding a ground for myself, an alternative ground for the page ground I had as a poet." Even though he had started as a fiction writer, Acconci crossed over to poetry after seeing a painting by Jasper Johns, which was a piece that started with something normal and forgettable and then was manipulated, and the art critic Kenneth Burke, who mentioned the importance of the viewer in any art piece and how they influence the outcome (Jackson). After this, Acconci chose to persue poetry, and in so doing, learned the value of space on a page. He become more interested in the space than the words, creating finally a piece called "DROP (ON THE SIDE/OVER THE SIDE)" which is a page of a thesarus, but with the words removed from the center, focusing the viewer onto the space within it instead of the words on the page. (pictured below)

(Jackson)
From his poetry, Acconci began moving more and more into performance works, feeling restrained as he did by the size of the page. As he says in The Believer, "I was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I’m making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I’d driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don’t have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it." Once he realized that writing was restrictive, he began branching out into performace, but still using his poetry. In one piece he read lines of the poem while following a person with a typewriter, who wrote what he said, and another time he did a poetry reading where he said one word at a time, crossing the room once per word read. More and more his art inched off the page and into the spaces of the world itself (Jackson).
One of Acconci's first performances that truly broke from poetry into real space was "Following Piece". In this work, Acconci followed passers-by in New York, without them knowing he was doing it. The idea was to show the relation between public and private space, since although he was on a busy street in New York, he was singling out one certain person, following their every whim and making it his own. He was in a sense, showing how each person, though part of the masses, has their own life, their own agenda, and their own separate thoughts and feelings which drive them. All these separate lives are usually lost in the bustle of crowds, but Acconci was pointing them all out again. He followed people every day for a month, recording the events through photographs and writings and then sending them to artists in his area (Zbikowski). (Pictured below)
(Jackon)
Acconci's work did not stop with "Following Piece." His many performances after it were all based around the tumultuous times, and many of his works were controversial. One piece, called "Pull" consisted of himself and a woman, and all he did was circle her while eyeing her, and she him. The idea was to reflect the rise of feminism during his era, and how the male figure is threatening to women even though he is just a man sexually drawn to a woman and it should be a normal thing to be expected (Larson). Works like "Seedbed" in which he masterbated under a bridge while speaking out loud his sexual desires about and to the audience, continued to observe the difference in public and private spaces (Larson).
Vito Acconci has proven himself to be an extremely versatile artist. Starting off as a fiction writer, branching into poetry, and finally deciding to observe different spaces, he has made himself into a well-known and respected artist. He now works with installation pieces and architectural spaces, making as he says, "alternate worlds." (Jackson)



WORKS CITED
1.Johnson, Ellen H. American Artists on Art from 1940 to 1980. Westview Press, 1982. Pg. 232.
2. Jackson, Shelley. The Believer. "Shelley Jackson Talks with Vito Acconci." Dec 2006-Jan2007 ed. Sept 17 2008.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200612/?read=interview_acconci.
3. Zbikowski, Dorte. Ctrl[space]. "[text]Vito Acconci."
http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/d/texts/01?print-friendly=true.
4. Larson, Kay. The New York Times. "ART IN REVIEW; Vito Acconci -- 'Performance Documentation and Photoworks, 1969-1973'." 9 Feb 2001. 17 Sept 2008.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2D71531F93AA35751C0A9679C8B63