Poetry, performance, photography, film and video, a selection of installations, models and architectural projects of Vito Acconci from the mid sixties to the early eighties.
Like artists such as Allan Kaprow, Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham, Vito Acconci (b. 1940, New York) acquired his reputation in the 1960s for his performances and the photography and video art derived from them. Generally a direct confrontation with the viewer, in a very intrusive manner, is central to these performances. He followed passers-by to their destination, or masturbated under the floor of a gallery and let visitors hear the sound of him doing so through speakers. He enjoyed his greatest notoriety for the performances in which he explored the boundaries of his own body and its capacity to endure pain: biting himself, falling on the ground, or pulling out a square decimetre of his own body hair. A famous work from this period is Blindfold Catching (1970), in which, while blindfolded, he tries to catch rubber balls thrown at him with great force. In Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio – Word / Action / Architecture an almost complete survey of this performance work is to be seen.
Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art Web Site
|