Pioneer of performance art, Vito Acconci takes us through his influential and dynamic career, from his beginnings as a poet, through performance and media, to the world of design and architecture. "I never liked art. I never wanted to do art. I wanna have some effect on the world. I want to do projects I never really seen before"
Vito Hannibal Acconci (b. 1940) is an American poet, designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.
Acconci began his career as a poet, editing 0 TO 9 with Bernadette Mayer in the late 1960s. In the late 1960s, Acconci transformed himself into a performance and video artist using his own body as a subject for photography, film, video, and performance. Most of his early work incorporated subversive social comment.
His performance and video work was marked heavily by confrontation and Situationism. In the mid-1970s, Acconci expanded his métier into the world of audio/visual installations.
One installation/performance piece from this period is Seedbed (January 15-29, 1971). In Seedbed Acconci lay hidden underneath a gallery-wide ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the visitors walking above him on the ramp. One motivation behind Seedbed was to involve the public in the work's production by creating a situation of reciprocal interchange between artist and viewer.
Acconci has taught at many institutions, including the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax; California Institute of the Arts, Valencia; Cooper Union; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Yale University; University of Iowa, Pratt Institute; and the Parsons School of Design.
He currently teaches at Brooklyn College in the Art Department and Performance and Interactive Media Arts programs and is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Pratt Institute in the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design Department.
CREDITS
Vito Acconci | filmed by Out of Sync | NYC Sept 2015
Interview | Jesper Bundgaard
Camera and edit | Per Henriksen
Producer | Out of Sync
Artworks courtesy | Vito Acconci
© Out of Sync 2016