When I visited Vito Acconci last year at his studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, the artist known as the Godfather of Transgression lamented that his legacy would be the breakthrough performance art works, completed in the late 60’s to the mid-70’s, that shocked the art world and made his name, rather than the design and architecture upon which he trained his restless energies for much of the rest of his life.
Today, it was announced that Acconci died at the age of 77 (according to Artnet News, due to a stroke), and it turns out he was not deluding himself: his obituaries so far have focused largely on the early years of his very long career, which were also the subject of a recent survey at MoMA PS1. His frustration last June was understandable—his talents were endlessly protean (he was also an accomplished poet and fiction writer)—but it is for good reason that Acconci will remembered for his prodigious work during these few years. His performance pieces, most of which involved his own lithe body, were radical, discomfiting, and cracked open the art scene of the day, influencing generations of artists to come. As he told me, “I didn’t like art. I wanted stuff to be alive.” Here, five of his most (in)famous works that will continue to live on.
Far and away his most famous work, Acconci lay beneath the angled, raised ramp in Illeana Sonnabend’s New York gallery, masturbating while staring up through the floorboards. Speakers broadcasted his autoerotic fantasies about each gallery visitor as they walked overhead. It was in part an early theoretical inquiry into the nature of architecture—what does it mean to become part of the gallery?—but, as always, sex overshadows everything else. It’s the type of gonzo provocation that has made misled fans out of the likes of Shia Laboeuf, who has called Acconci an influence.
Vito Acconci And The Body As Medium
Is a New Yorker’s nightmare. Acconci stalked pedestrians around Manhattan—following one random stranger for an entire day—and only letting up his stealthy pursuit after they’ve entered a private building. The work is outright uncomfortable, but also served to bring the artist out of his enclosed studio and into the world.
In this haunting video, Acconci takes a match to his chest hair, singeing it off in an attempt to make his body more like that of a woman’s. He then tried to push his own chest together to resemble breasts in an early exploration of transgender art.
Here, Acconci bites his own body so hard, so violently, that he broke the skin, leaving teeth marks as a kind of semi-permanent scar/tattoo. As he says in the instructions for the performance, he was “biting as much of my body as I can reach.”
Arte FÃsico: 5 Obras De Body Art. A Continuación, Relacionamos 5 Obras En…
Acconci spends the majority of this 22-minute video, which is mostly a close-up of his own head, in verbal self-flagellation: “It’s me. I have no conviction anymore. It’s me. It’s all in me now. I can’t believe it … I can’t find any more reason to do art. I don’t understand it anymore. I have no idea what I’m doing anymore.” It was yet another example of how he really used himself as raw material, without pity.Elise Archias’s new book, The Concrete Body: Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, examines the 1960s performance work of these three New York artists who adapted modernist approaches to form for the medium of the human body, finding parallels between the tactility of a drip of paint and a body’s reflexive movements. In this excerpt from the book, she explores several works by Vito Acconci.
When viewing documentation of the many works Acconci made between 1969 and1971, one repeatedly sees performances of either adaptation or desire: Acconci’s body flinching, sweating, gagging on the one hand; his body moving or gesturing toward an unknown, but always somehow particularized and specified, person or group of people on the other. One logical method for interpreting the confluence of these two threads has been to view Acconci’s series of works through the lens of poststructuralism, as performances of constraint and coercion. There are good reasons to see in many of his individual performances metaphorical demonstrations of himself as either the victim or the perpetrator of the softly violent structures that poststructuralism claims determined subjectivity in modernity, reminding their audience, like Michel Foucault’s
That the body is not outside such constructions, but is the site where power realizes the bulk of its most deeply penetrating manipulations.
Vito Acconci:el Artista Que Se Masturbaba Mientras Recitaba Sus FantasÃas
Is nothing if not disciplined, going through the motions of an impossible task, nearly defenseless against its senseless abuse. Meanwhile, the administrative voice that comes through
’s officious missives could be seen to perform an operation similar to the reductive but irresistible “‘Hey, you there!’” called out in Louis Althusser’s account of us all as “individuals [who] are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, ” published in the same year. On many levels, these works convey Foucault’s understanding that “the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used.” An argument about Acconci that leaned heavily on Foucault might eventually decide that Acconci’s works were leading away from the body, that like Foucault, Acconci discovered that “nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.”
Alternatively–although ultimately not what I will argue–we might see Acconci’s performances as agreeing with Butler that “thebody is not a substance, not a thing, not a set of drives, not a cauldron of resistant impulse, but precisely the site of transfer for power itself. Power happens to this body, but this bodyis also the occasion in which something unpredictable happens to power; it is one site ofits redirection, profusion, and transvaluation.” Butler’s insights in hand, we could arguethat structure in Acconci’s work is being forced to take the body into account through the body’s refusal to comply. Rather than offering a self-martyring critique through imitation, a Butlerian version of body and structure would offer the body and its failures as a site of thetransformation of power. In Acconci’s performances, the structuremay be understood to repeatedly adapt to the body’s limits and needs, but the transformation comes at the price of the human actor’s collapse or his being halted at limits. As a model for a transformative critique of everyday life, such an understanding is grim at best.
Vito Acconci, Whose Poetic, Menacing Work Forms Bedrock Of Performance, Video Art, Dies At 77
To find primarily critique in Acconci’s works would be in accordance with the harsher notion of structure and culture circulating in the conceptual art movement that embraced his work in its galleries and journals and in the leftist consensus generally that emerged in the wake of 1968. The antiwar movement had swelled worldwide in 1968 and brought New Yorkers to the streets, not least among them artists, for whom it was a uniting cause across multiple differences; Martin Luther King had been shot; and the radical feminist movement was just beginning. Acconci was motivated by his sympathy with the growing critical consciousness that Shulamith Firestone attributed to the disastrous “result” of the traditional family structure in Western culture and named “the power psychology.” Firestone defined this tendency as “an aggressive chauvinism now developed enough to destroy us, ” but it was evoked perhaps no more economically than by the period catchphrase “the system.” Carl Andre articulated the artists’ version of this shared sensibility on the back of an issue of
A contemporary art journal out of Germany, in which Acconci’s work also appeared—“Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us”—and then, more rousingly, on the following issue’s back cover: “What could culture do to us if art is what we didn’t do?” As Acconciexplained much later, “In thelate 60s, art and artists were authority figures of a kind. The idea was to attack this value system, in the same way that you had to attack the American government’s war on Vietnam, attack patriarchy, or the mercantile system that ruled art galleries. There were these pedestals that had to be knocked down, and in order to do that, they had to be demystified. Brought down to the level of perfectly ordinary activities. . . . It was around then that I read my first feminist writing, for example.”
The broad emphasis on structure in an art world informed by conceptual art ensured that abstract ideas were given priority over sensuous pleasure, making clear the artist’s critical awareness of art’s complicity with the current spectacular hegemonic culture. In an article on the new category of “body art” that included Acconci’s work, for example, the critic Cindy Nemser readily volunteered her understanding that “the body artists . . . are attempting to give us a message about the frightening and dangerous aspects of our society.” The systems addressed by this broadly sweeping critical understanding in 1970 were understood to oppress on levels less conscious than the level of public struggle over rights that had been the emphasis during the previous decade of protest and social movements.
Vito Acconci: Works For Sale, Upcoming Auctions & Past Results
Is nothing if not disciplined, going through the motions of an impossible task, nearly defenseless against its senseless abuse. Meanwhile, the administrative voice that comes through
’s officious missives could be seen to perform an operation similar to the reductive but irresistible “‘Hey, you there!’” called out in Louis Althusser’s account of us all as “individuals [who] are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, ” published in the same year. On many levels, these works convey Foucault’s understanding that “the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina, its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used.” An argument about Acconci that leaned heavily on Foucault might eventually decide that Acconci’s works were leading away from the body, that like Foucault, Acconci discovered that “nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.”
Alternatively–although ultimately not what I will argue–we might see Acconci’s performances as agreeing with Butler that “thebody is not a substance, not a thing, not a set of drives, not a cauldron of resistant impulse, but precisely the site of transfer for power itself. Power happens to this body, but this bodyis also the occasion in which something unpredictable happens to power; it is one site ofits redirection, profusion, and transvaluation.” Butler’s insights in hand, we could arguethat structure in Acconci’s work is being forced to take the body into account through the body’s refusal to comply. Rather than offering a self-martyring critique through imitation, a Butlerian version of body and structure would offer the body and its failures as a site of thetransformation of power. In Acconci’s performances, the structuremay be understood to repeatedly adapt to the body’s limits and needs, but the transformation comes at the price of the human actor’s collapse or his being halted at limits. As a model for a transformative critique of everyday life, such an understanding is grim at best.
Vito Acconci, Whose Poetic, Menacing Work Forms Bedrock Of Performance, Video Art, Dies At 77
To find primarily critique in Acconci’s works would be in accordance with the harsher notion of structure and culture circulating in the conceptual art movement that embraced his work in its galleries and journals and in the leftist consensus generally that emerged in the wake of 1968. The antiwar movement had swelled worldwide in 1968 and brought New Yorkers to the streets, not least among them artists, for whom it was a uniting cause across multiple differences; Martin Luther King had been shot; and the radical feminist movement was just beginning. Acconci was motivated by his sympathy with the growing critical consciousness that Shulamith Firestone attributed to the disastrous “result” of the traditional family structure in Western culture and named “the power psychology.” Firestone defined this tendency as “an aggressive chauvinism now developed enough to destroy us, ” but it was evoked perhaps no more economically than by the period catchphrase “the system.” Carl Andre articulated the artists’ version of this shared sensibility on the back of an issue of
A contemporary art journal out of Germany, in which Acconci’s work also appeared—“Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us”—and then, more rousingly, on the following issue’s back cover: “What could culture do to us if art is what we didn’t do?” As Acconciexplained much later, “In thelate 60s, art and artists were authority figures of a kind. The idea was to attack this value system, in the same way that you had to attack the American government’s war on Vietnam, attack patriarchy, or the mercantile system that ruled art galleries. There were these pedestals that had to be knocked down, and in order to do that, they had to be demystified. Brought down to the level of perfectly ordinary activities. . . . It was around then that I read my first feminist writing, for example.”
The broad emphasis on structure in an art world informed by conceptual art ensured that abstract ideas were given priority over sensuous pleasure, making clear the artist’s critical awareness of art’s complicity with the current spectacular hegemonic culture. In an article on the new category of “body art” that included Acconci’s work, for example, the critic Cindy Nemser readily volunteered her understanding that “the body artists . . . are attempting to give us a message about the frightening and dangerous aspects of our society.” The systems addressed by this broadly sweeping critical understanding in 1970 were understood to oppress on levels less conscious than the level of public struggle over rights that had been the emphasis during the previous decade of protest and social movements.
Vito Acconci: Works For Sale, Upcoming Auctions & Past Results
