vito acconci 1988

Vito Acconci

Original Contact Photos & Hand Written Notes of Major Performances

Cirrus 1988

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Curated by Steven Leiber & Jean Milant

Original Contact Photos & Hand Written Notes of Major Performances

Cirrus 1988

Mar 19 - May 141988

Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci’s handwritten notes of performance pieces demonstrate INTENT with a clarity sorely lacking in today’s media climate of triggerfinger reactionism and Babel-esque iPhone autocorrects. Value and time are entwined here as “the direction” of 21st century art and culture becomes more clear (and clearly becoming totally more vague).

Performance and conceptual art can fail in certain markets because it attacks vagueness with more vagueness. Even if it is direct, and even if it forcibly involves the audience, it requires dedicated thought and provides no instant utility – two attributes which would sink most products in 2012.

At the time of their presentation, Acconci’s performances established him as a frontrunner in transgressive, conceptual

art. And his handwritten notes, available here, present the aim of his performances with blueprint precision, translating the art into a pseudo-scientific nomenclature. They are the Cliff Notes and the answers in the back of the book, crossing creator-audience boundaries to deliver the seed of thought in a condensed, direct manner.

Where before we might have seen a man with a camera on a New York side street, or a man in black following strangers down Christopher Street, now we see a man radioing back his findings from a solipsistic world – one we all have access to. The question becomes / contains the subquestion: does he/anyone have access out?

Acconci’s canary flew into the coalmine, and, fortunately for us, kept a journal.

VITO ACCONCI Cirrus 1988

By Matt Zbrog

“In any other context what I was doing needed a gallery or a museum in order to be justified. Probably many people in the world were doing what I was doing, but they were doing it in an insane asylum, in a mental hospital and I was doing it under the auspices of a gallery or a museum so it got a kind of validity. But there’s a funny time lag with art.”

Blinking Piece (Detail)19693 parts: 1 page 8.5” X 11”, 9@ 4” X 6”, 12 photos 3.5” X 3.5

Blinking Piece (Installation view)19693 parts: 1 page 8.5” X 11”, 9@ 4” X 6”, 12 photos 3.5” X 3.5

BLINKING PIECE (1969)An introduction to Acconci’s mind and approach to art. After years of writing, he transitioned into performance art, acting out ideas he would have previously only described or written down. His early work was very self-centered – at the time seen as narcissistic by some – but reading such critiques today, on a phone, while wearing headphones, makes his work seem all the more prescient.

“The late 60s and the early 70s probably thought of the self as this is something with which you withdraw to a kind of meditation chamber.”

The project was simple. Walk in a straight line, holding a camera. Every time he blinked, he would stop, and take a picture. Endearing in its earnest curiosity, Blinking Piece shows an urgency to save the unperceived, the missed – an optimism in the potential of any moment at all.

HAND AND MOUTH (1970)In Hand And Mouth, the audience witnesses a battle with the fear and anxiety which go in hand with self-expression. His notes are cryptic when parceled – coping with alarm reactions, preparing for surprises or fear. The cursive reads like instructions as to how he plans to handle a panic attack in public.

In the picture, we see him swallowing his fist. One might be inclined to draw references to Ouroborus, self-reflexivity – and in today’s world, that seems ‘relevant’. How is he going to text anyone if he’s chewed off his hand? But he continues. And continues. He gags himself. He accepts what he’s doing and takes it to “a point of exhaustion”. He continues. What does he find? What do we find?

“The idea of the individual hand was something I think probably all of us tried to avoid, because the individual hand meant the individual artist’s signature, meant this makes something commercially, monetarily valuable. We wanted to, a lot of us wanted to do things that anybody could do.”

Hand and Mouth (Installation view)19704 parts: 1 super 8 film, 3 photos 10” X 3”, 9 pages 8.5” X 11”, 1 photo 4” X 1”

“A lot of us had the illusion that we were going to destroy the gallery system. Because of the kind of stuff we did galleries had no reason to exist anymore. But of course galleries were stronger and bigger than we were. Conceptual art needed reproduction, needed distribution in order to exist, but that distribution meant documentation. That documentation could very easily be turned into a saleable by a gallery. So in some ways our need or desire for distribution totally subverted what I think a lot of us wanted to do.” --Acconci

Hand and Mouth (Detail)1970

Room Piece (Detail)1970

ROOM PIECE (1970)Here, Acconci relocates objects from room to gallery to extend his environment/world to other places, and, in turn, other people.

“I think a lot of us were struck by the fact that when many people talk about a work of art they [...] haven’t necessarily seen the actual work of art, they’ve seen reproductions. If that's true then you can ask the question: where does the art reside?”

The questions of context, of space, of physical-location are apropos in a social media world. Room Piece succeeded in 1970. It also succeeds today, as his room finds its way into a PDF, onto the internet, social media, and ‘beyond’.

Room Piece (Installation view)19706 parts: 2 pages 8.5” X 11”, 6@ 11” X25”, 3@ 11” X 22”, 8 photos 12” X 16”, 2 photos 7.5” X 9”, 8” X 10”, 8@ 8.5” X 11”

Overtaking Piece (Installation view)19704 parts: 7 photos 3” X 3”, 1 page 8.5” X 11”, 1 photo 8” X 10”, 11@ 6” X 9”

Overtaking Piece (1970)In this piece, we see a topical conflict —battles with context, preconceptions, and past performances. Using prior performances as venue, Acconci sought to replay his own performances, replay them, represent them, and eventually, overtake them. Creating something new out of something old is no new idea today, but what we see here was an earnest confrontation between the artist and the art—and, simultaneously, a confrontation between the audience and the audience’s expectations.

Today, audiences and artists alike are confronted by their past selves, by their actions, re-delivered by news feeds, webpages, and a google’s worth of email storage. As we search our archives for something as innocuous as ‘ice cream cones’ in our Gmail, we run the risk of bringing up a non-sequitur email to an ex lover, a short story written by our 18 year old selves, a hateful message to a high school rival.

Can we overcome, or overtake, or surpass our old capabilities, our old decisions?

In his own hand, we see a passionate declaration – I have to go back in order to go forward in order to go beyond…

So… Did he “go beyond?”

Overtaking Piece (Detail)1970

Overtaking Piece (Detail)19704 parts: 7 photos 3” X 3”, 1 page 8.5” X 11”, 1 photo 8” X 10”, 11@ 6” X 9”

Pull (Detail)1971

4 parts: 5@ 8” X 10”, 4@ 9” X 12”, 3 photos 8” X 10”, 2 photos 14” X 10”

Pull (1971)Paper with the appearance of a scatterpoint graph—a series of ‘randomly’ arranged dots. The dots are labeled ‘Others’. One dot, circled, is labeled ‘Kathy’. The only other label appears next to a dot on the line of the circle—labeled as “Me (I choose her, separate her from others)”.

Under the circle is written: Private Circle: closed circle. ( action combines the performers—separates us from the audience): performance as withdrawal.

A loneliness runs through Acconci’s work, a desperate calling out, earnestly hinted at here – and vocalized later in 1974’s Open Book with the words, “I’ll accept you, I won’t shut down, I won’t shut you out.... I’m open to you, I’m open to everything.... This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside…”

In Pull, he attempts to bring someone else into his reality, pulling her from the audience, and, in his own romantic observation, giving her a role to play.

Pull (Detail)19714 parts: 5@ 8” X 10”, 4@ 9” X 12”, 3 photos 8” X 10”, 2 photos 14” X 10”

OTHER PEOPLE COMMENTING ON SOMEONE COMMENTING ON THEMSELVES Some audiences and critics have, in the past, called his work stubborn, narcissistic, and inward. While not necessarily positive or negative attributes, there was another question written inside ofthem: Could Acconci see past the line of himself?

"Everybody uses labels: they give you a handle on things – an over-simplified handle, sure, but without labels, without ads, without words, the world would be an indistinguishable mass, a blur. You canhope, maybe, that people ascribe so many labels to you that none wins out." -- Acconci

Rosalind Krauss, in "Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism" (1976) even went so far as to claim, in critique of one Acconci's video pieces (Centers) : "A line of sight that begins at Acconci's plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double (…) In that image of self-regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre," and then went on to refer to another piece as "autonomous intercourse between Acconci and his own image."

Amelia Jones, in Body Art / Performing (1998), held up Acconci as an embodiment of masochism and self-encapsulation. These labels might have been, or still be, considered pejorative when read, skimmed, or repeated non-contextually -- but these labels are important qualities in the context of Acconci’s later work, or, at the least, defacto attributes in the 21st century. The ‘masturbatory’ work of his iconic SEEDHEAD is where many young artists and non-artists find themselvestoday. Marina Abramovic, most recently of The Artist Is Present, paid homage to Acconci in her Seven Easy Pieces (2005). Perhaps the real question is and was: Can new artists see past the line of Acconci?

vito acconci 1988

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