September 13, 2005

Vito Acconci: archi-arti-futurist

Part of this class is that each week two 4- or 5-person groups of students must make a 20-minute presentation in reaction to the previous week's speaker. My group (Me, Mike, Lisa and Britta) was going to have to make our presentation about Vito. So I took a lot of notes on this one.

Vito's been in New York, making art of one kind or another since the late 60s. He started out as an experimental poet, but eventually he grew to resent writing because of its limitations: It seemed to be cheating to use words signified something external, like tree. So he only used words that would refer to the processes of reading and writing, and he would try to use puns to cancel words out, to erase their meaning.

You can listen to some of his poetry online.

He moved to the street in an attempt to feel his way around the city through art. The question was, "How do I connect myself to the world around me?" (This seems to be one of the driving questions that propelled his work for over 30 years.)

In the 70s he started doing film work, and he was still interested in how the body connected with others and reacted to external events. One of his pieces was a video of him, blindfolded, trying to catch rubber balls thrown at him. In another he attempted to stuff as much of his hand into his mouth as he could; when he started to gag he would take it out and start over. In another he bit as much of his naked body as he could reach. In a piece titled "Conversions" he used a candle to burn the hair off his chest and then tried to stretch it out to make it like a woman's breast.

He soon decided that these films weren't really connecting him to anyone else. They were too private. He became interested in public space and private space -- the notion of how public space was occupied by private bodies with private thoughts, etc. He wanted to know what kept people private in public spaces. Why weren't the bodies giving in to primal urges? Vito has said, "Public space is the last gasp of the civilized world."

It was around this time that he started thinking of art as a kind of exchange. He started to get bothered that his installation type pieces required people coming to him. He didn't want people to have to struggle to get to him, and if they did so maybe he was only advancing the idea that an artist (and art) is on a pedestal, difficult for the common people to "get" (to).

So he asked himself, what if he becomes part of the space?

In one seminal (lit. pun) piece in 1972, called "Seedbed", Vito is lying underneath a gradually inclined ramp in one corner of the room, spying on people walking overhead, and trying to masturbate the whole time.

Vito told us a little bit about how art spaces used to be entirely different: they used to have pastel walls and carpeting, kind of like a rich person's living room. Then in the early 70s they changed to minimalist spaces with white walls, concrete floors. Even the new type of gallery space can't get away from the fact that it is an influence on the art, though: it reminds one now of an industrial space.

After Seedbed, Vito wanted to break the frame so you didn't know exactly where the art was. He figured this would make it more easily approachable, so that everyday people would have less trouble seeing the art. He told us that he likes Art as a verb, but not as a noun.

This is when he really started doing more installation pieces, but he decided that he didn't like how they needed to be housed in galleries. He thought that this kind of art is only a rehearsal and he wanted to take it out into the real world.

In the mid-80s he started working with architecture. He wanted to change the spaces that people experienced. He did this so he could bring art outdoors, to people, and he wanted them to be part of it, able to touch it, interact with it, be part of it. I think Vito would almost be happiest if the people didn't consider it as art at all.

He built a house using cars. He also created an outdoor garden that was in the shape of a big smiling face. Around this time he decides to start collaborate and starts a studio. He then really gets into larger "public art" types of architectural things.

He wanted people to stand next to the art (or sit on it, etc.) not because they viewed anything he created as "art" but because they felt connected to it.

He is currently moving into clothing, what he called the original architecture.

Vito ended by telling us he was always trying to be learning and seeing new things, and he told us about some of the music he is listening to these days: Aphex Twin, Plastikman, etc. He said that those are the sounds of the new city, and if he can understand those, he thinks he'll be able to make good art.

Posted September 13, 2005 12:27 PM. Categories: Week 2 | Permalink