Vito Acconci
Also Known As: not available
Biography: Vito Acconci (January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world. His work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others. Acconci was initially interested in radical poetry, creating 0 to 9 Magazine, but by the late 1960s he began creating Situationist-influenced performances in the street or for small audiences that explored the body and public space. Two of his most famous pieces were Following Piece (1969), in which he selected random passersby on New York City streets and followed them for as long as he was able, and Seedbed (1972), in which he claimed that he masturbated while under a temporary floor at the Sonnabend Gallery, as visitors walked above and heard him speaking. In the late-1970s, he turned to sculpture, architecture and design, greatly increasing the scale of his work, if not his art world profile. Over the next two decades he developed public artworks and parks, airport rest areas, artificial islands and other architectural projects that frequently embraced participation, change and playfulness. Notable works of this period include: Personal Island, designed for Zwolle, the Netherlands (1994); Walkways Through the Wall at the Wisconsin Center, in Milwaukee, WI (1998); and Murinsel, for Graz, Austria (2003). Retrospectives of Acconci's work have been organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1978) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1980), and his work is in numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. He has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983, 1993), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979), and American Academy in Rome (1986).[6] In addition to his art and design work, Acconci taught at many higher learning institutions. Acconci died on April 27, 2017, in Manhattan at age 77.
Department: Directing
Place of Birth: New York City, New York, USA
Adult: No
Birthday: January 24, 1940
Age: 85 years old
Gender: Male
Deathday: April 27, 2017
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Known For:
You're Going to Die!
Overview: "You’re Going to Die!" is a children’s story exploring one simple idea ad nauseum bonum. This video treatment by Dennis Palazzolo adapts prose by Timothy Furstnau using original footage and clips lifted from famous movies, and features the close-mic’d muttering voiceover of artist Vito Acconci.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2006-10-22
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Chelsea on the Rocks
Overview: Chelsea on the Rocks celebrates the personalities and artistic voices that have emerged from New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. Once considered an untouchable, impenetrable tower for writers, artists, musicians and mavericks, it has been recently claimed as a boutique hotel venture for a management company that shows disregard for its formidable history. –Cannes Film Festival
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2008-05-23
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Steven Holl: The Body in Space
Overview: "Steven Holl: The Body in Space" explores the career of the innovative, highly renowned American architect. In this portrait Holl presents some of his most acclaimed works, including the Makuhari Housing Complex in Chiba, Japan and the Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle. Centered around the completion of Holl's Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the film observes his process and reasoning throughout the duration of the project
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1999-02-22
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Burden
Overview: A probing portrait of Chris Burden, an artist who took creative expression to the limits and risked his life in the name of art.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2016-04-16
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How to Fly
Overview: With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure. — Charles Ruas
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1981-01-01
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Journeys from Berlin/1971
Overview: An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1980-01-11
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Seedbed
Overview: “In this legendary sculpture/performance Acconci lay beneath a ramp built in the Sonnabend Gallery. Over the course of three weeks, he masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring things like, "You're pushing your cunt down on my mouth" or "You're ramming your cock down into my ass." Not only does the architectural intervention presage much of his subsequent work, but all of Acconci's fixations converge in this, the spiritual sphincter of his art. In Seedbed Acconci is the producer and the receiver of the work's pleasure. He is simultaneously public and private, making marks yet leaving little behind, and demonstrating ultra-awareness of his viewer while being in a semi-trance state.” – Jerry Saltz (via: http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci_seedbed.html)
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1972-01-01
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Revenge of the Mekons
Overview: Documentary about the Mekons.
Genres: Music Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-11-14
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Undertone
Overview: "In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer - the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy."
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1972-01-01
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Centers
Overview: Poet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-06-01
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Pryings
Overview: A documentation of a live performance at New York University, Pryings is a graphic exploration of the physical and psychological dynamics of male/female interaction, a study in control, violation and resistance. The camera focuses tightly on Kathy Dillon's face, as Acconci tries to pry open her closed eyes. Dillon resists, at times protecting her face or fighting to get away. Locked in a silent embrace, the couple's struggle is violent, passionate; Acconci's sadistic coercion is tinged with a sinister tenderness. The body is a vehicle for a literal enactment of the desire for and resistance against intimate contact.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-01-21
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Digging Piece
Overview: Standing alone among beach dunes, Acconci begins to kick at the sand below him. Over the course of the film's ten minutes, this repeated action displaces sand at a steady rate: as the artist sinks lower into the hole he creates, the mound of sand before him grows in correspondence.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1970-01-01
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Flour/Breath Piece
Overview: The artist, covered in flour, tries to blow the flour off his skin.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1970-01-01
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Two Takes
Overview: Acconci oftens performs controlled actions as if he had entered into a contractual agreement to test his physical limitations. In Grass/Mouth, Acconci ingests grass until he chokes; in Hair/Mouth, he fills his mouth with the hair from a woman's head.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
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Gargle/Spit Piece
Overview: The artist, sitting naked, takes water from a pot into his mouth and gargles; he spits it out onto his stomach and groin, transferring the water from one "container" (the pot) to another (his body).
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1970-01-01
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Conversions 1
Overview: In these three exercises, Acconci plays with trans-gender illusions, manipulating and altering his own body parts to suggest sexual transformations.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-09-01
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Three Adaptation Studies
Overview: Three-part short film. In 'Blindfold Catching', a blindfolded Acconci reacts, flinching and lunging, as rubber balls are repeatedly thrown at him from off-screen. In 'Soap & Eyes', he tries to keep his eyes open after dousing his face with soapsuds, resulting in a tragicomic clown face. In 'Hand and Mouth', he repeatedly forces his fist into his mouth until he gags.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1970-01-01
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Remote Control
Overview: The two-channel piece Remote Control is an exercise in manipulation and control between artist and subject, male and female. On separate channels, the viewer sees Acconci and Kathy Dillon sitting alone in wooden boxes in different rooms, each facing a static camera. Although they can only see and hear each other on separate monitors, they attempt to interact and respond to one another directly, as if their communication were unmediated. Through language and gesture, Acconci tries to manipulate Dillon's actions from his box, as though by remote control.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-01-01
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Claim Excerpts
Overview: A documentation of one of Acconci's most notorious performances, Claim Excerpts is a highly confrontational work, an exercise in self-induced, heightened behavioral states, and an aggressive psychological exploration of the artist/viewer relationship. During the three-hour performance, Acconci sat in the basement of 93 Grand Street in New York, blindfolded, armed with metal pipes and a crowbar. His image was seen on a video monitor in the upstairs gallery space. Staking claim to his territory, he tries to hypnotize himself through language into an obsessive state of possessiveness.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-01-01
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Association Area
Overview: This early performance tape is an example of what Acconci has termed his "quasi-ESP exercises," in which he explores mental concentration and intuition as a means of non-visual and non-verbal perception, interaction and communication. Blindfolded and wearing earplugs, Acconci and another man attempt to intuit and imitate each other's movements and bearing, though they can neither hear nor see.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-01-01
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My Word
Overview: In this feature-length silent film, Acconci uses hand-written title cards to present an "interior monologue" about speaking, language, and silence. The written text alternates with images of Acconci, alone in the interior of an urban loft or on a rooftop, with the skyline of downtown New York as a backdrop.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1974-01-01
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Turn-On
Overview: The back of Acconci's head is seen in tight close-up. He hums to himself, first lyrically, then aggressively, violently. Suddenly he wheels around to face the camera, his face filling the screen in extreme close-up, squinting at the viewer and speaking breathlessly. When finished, he turns and continues to hum, repeating this cycle again and again.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1974-01-01
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Willoughby Sharp Videoviews Vito Acconci
Overview: This early document is a videotaped interview ("videoview") of Vito Acconci by Willoughby Sharp during which they discuss Acconci's development as an artist. The intimate conversation addresses such concerns as Acconci's thoughts on the exhibition space, his transition from the page to the performance, and the role of video and photo documentation for performance art in general.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1973-01-01
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The Red Tapes
Overview: A three-part video epic in which avant-garde artist Vito Acconci explores the relationship between the self and national mythology. Through multiple vignettes, Acconci brings together a collage of music, photographs, diorama, experimental theater and his own profile, to tell a semi-autobiographical narrative that, in turn, becomes a critique of the alienated quality of American mythology.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1977-01-01
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14 Americans: Directions of the 1970s
Overview: The multiple means of making art after the end of illusionism led these artists to create performances, sculptures, earthworks, tableaux, furniture, shaped canvases, and more, using unusual materials. They explore the process of making forms and giving meanings to those forms. In this idea art, their focus is as often social and psychological as artistic. Some of their activities enlist engineering and construction techniques, others compose texts or scripts that are central to their art. Some cast the viewer in the role of a spectator, while the others demand active participation. The sources for their concepts and art works are equally diverse; the delicate proportions and balance of Early Renaissance painting, the exploration of the surface of the moon, the structure and inventions of vernacular architects, to name only a few.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1981-09-01
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The Golden Boat
Overview: Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.
Genres: Drama Comedy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1991-06-22
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The Art of Time
Overview: Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2009-10-10
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Body Art
Overview: Compilation film consisting of material from various artists who are involved in body art
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: nl
Release Date: 1975-11-30
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