Vito Hannibal Acconci is an American designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist.
For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960's and 70's, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exi ...
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A three-part video epic in which avant-garde artist Vito Acconci explores the relationship between the self and national mythology. Through multiple vignettes, Acconci brings together a collage of music, photographs, diorama, experimental theater and his o ...
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Acconci's open mouth is framed by the camera in an extreme close-up, bringing the viewer uncomfortably close. A desperate sense of strained urgency comes across as Acconci gasps, "I'll accept you, I won't shut down, I won't shut you out.... I'm open to you ...
Watch NowIn this feature-length silent film, Acconci uses hand-written title cards to present an "interior monologue" about speaking, language, and silence. The written text alternates with images of Acconci, alone in the interior of an urban loft or on a rooftop, ...
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The back of Acconci's head is seen in tight close-up. He hums to himself, first lyrically, then aggressively, violently. Suddenly he wheels around to face the camera, his face filling the screen in extreme close-up, squinting at the viewer and speaking bre ...
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In Face of the Earth, Acconci's face becomes a metaphorical theater for a narrative drama of the mythic American landscape. Eyes closed, his face filling the screen in extreme close-up, the camera looking up from his chin, he inhabits a dreamlike, intensel ...
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Acconci imitates the sounds of war, gunfire and explosion; he thrusts his face, stomach or penis onto the screen. His childlike battle sounds are interrupted with monologues in which he defines himself as an American, with ironic references to cultural cli ...
Watch Now"I walk in a circle around the camera: sometimes I'm on screen, sometimes I'm off, sometimes I change direction, leaving the screen on one side and coming back on the same side. Every five minutes or so, the location changes: my circle is continuous while ...
Watch NowIn Theme Song, Acconci uses video as close-up to establish a perversely intimate relation with the viewer, creating a personal space in which to talk directly to (and manipulate) the spectator. He is face to face with the viewer, his head close against the ...
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Face-Off is an ironic collusion of private and public, of exposure and masking, a tense ritual wherein Acconci divulges and then censors his self-revelations. Acconci turns on a reel-to-reel audiotape recorder and bends down to the speaker to listen to it, ...
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"Visions of a Disappearance is a newly restored performance tape that was recorded in Naples, Italy, in 1973. Crouched in a corner, hemmed in by the video camera and a closed-circuit monitor showing him the scene as it is recorded, Acconci attempts to disa ...
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Acconci lies naked on a gurney-like table, rocking back and forth as a tape-loop of his voice describes his anxieties about exposing his body and his artwork. Writes the artist: "My voice functions as a scenario that keeps me confined to the bed: once I've ...
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"A long narrow corridor, leading to the camera—at one side, a window—sun streams in, splotches of light and dark, the corridor shimmers. I'm at the far end—walking back and forth, humming, biding my time. Then I talk to the viewer—rather, to a spec ...
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"Recording Studio From Air Time is a personal confessional in which video is both a mirror and a mediating device. Alone in an "isolation chamber" in the gallery every day for two weeks, Acconci sat with the camera focused at his reflection in a mirror. To ...
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"In this legendary sculpture/performance Acconci lay beneath a ramp built in the Sonnabend Gallery. Over the course of three weeks, he masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring things like, "You're pushing your cunt down on my mouth" or "You're ramming ...
Watch Now"In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera ...
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"In this exercise in nonverbal communication, Acconci explores facial expressions, and their psychological resonance, as a mode of performance narrative. ...
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"In another exploration of nonverbal communication, the camera moves back and forth, each time catching one of Acconci's hands in an expressive gesture. The result is a kind of narrative or dialogue of gesture. ...
Watch NowA super-8mm work documenting Acconci's audio installation piece in the Sonnabend gallery in 1972 of the same name. ...
Watch NowIn these three exercises, Acconci plays with trans-gender illusions, manipulating and altering his own body parts to suggest sexual transformations. ...
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Poet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor. ...
Watch NowA documentation of a live performance at New York University, Pryings is a graphic exploration of the physical and psychological dynamics of male/female interaction, a study in control, violation and resistance. The camera focuses tightly on Kathy Dillon's ...
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In Two Track, Acconci experiments with direct and peripheral perception of information in the context of communication and interaction. He sits with a man and a woman in front of a microphone. The man and woman each read a different text (a Mickey Spillane ...
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The two-channel piece Remote Control is an exercise in manipulation and control between artist and subject, male and female. On separate channels, the viewer sees Acconci and Kathy Dillon sitting alone in wooden boxes in different rooms, each facing a stat ...
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This early performance tape is an example of what Acconci has termed his "quasi-ESP exercises," in which he explores mental concentration and intuition as a means of non-visual and non-verbal perception, interaction and communication. Blindfolded and weari ...
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A documentation of one of Acconci's most notorious performances, Claim Excerpts is a highly confrontational work, an exercise in self-induced, heightened behavioral states, and an aggressive psychological exploration of the artist/viewer relationship. Duri ...
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The screen is empty: the artist stands off-screen — he breathes in and out, his stomach moving into and out of the frame. ...
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Acconci's face is seen in close-up. His eyes trace, in real time, the movement of the hands of an off-screen clock. ...
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Using extreme close-ups and amplified sound to force the viewer into the space of his body, he experiments with his mouth as a container for saliva, holding it in as long as possible, trying to catch it in his hands. ...
Watch NowA super-8mm document (blown up to 16mm) of Acconci's performance of the same name in which he covered almost the entirety of the gallery space with a tarp (except about a two feet perimeter around the tarp where visitors could awkwardly make their way thro ...
Watch NowA super-8mm document (blown up to 16mm) of Acconci's performance of the same name where he laid flat on his stomach blindfolded on a wood platform in the middle of an arts event at a Rhode Island university as students watched videos, listened to music, et ...
Watch NowContacts is one of a series of tapes in which Acconci creates a controlled performance situation to explore the limits of a private space. Applying intense mental concentration and intuition, he uses the body as a vehicle to explore perception and interact ...
Watch NowIn Conversions II, the second in a trilogy of films interrogating the rigidity of gender binarism, the artist attempts to feminize his unquestionably male body by hiding his genitals between his legs. By casting his own masculinity into question, by perfor ...
Watch NowVito Acconci chokes himself with a white cloth multiple times, his face turns red. ...
Watch NowIn this performance based tape, Acconci uses his body to explore notions of opening and closure. ...
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Acconci's body-based performances are often willfully provocative in their testing of physical limits and controlled actions. Here, as the camera frames Acconci's stomach in close up, he painstakingly pulls out each hair from the skin around his navel. ...
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"Acconci spars with his close-up image in a mirror. He then breaks the mirror, destroying his image. ...
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A woman kisses Acconci's body, covering him in red lipstick traces. Acconci then rubs his body against another man (Dennis Oppenheim), transferring the stains onto him. ...
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Three-part short film. In 'Blindfold Catching', a blindfolded Acconci reacts, flinching and lunging, as rubber balls are repeatedly thrown at him from off-screen. In 'Soap & Eyes', he tries to keep his eyes open after dousing his face with soapsuds, re ...
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"Super-8 camera held out before him as shield and surrogate, Acconci pushes through a landscape of dense reeds and overgrowth. Break-Through records this search for a pause or clearing in what, for the viewer, amounts to an abstracted and scarcely differen ...
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"A view of a brick wall: the artist enters and walks from one side to the other, back and forth, row after row. ...
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"In one of his earliest films, Acconci performs a series of actions — running in a circle, jumping, pushing another man — in which the physical limits of the action refer to the boundaries of the film frame itself. ...
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"In Scene Steal, Acconci, fully clothed, tries to shield a nude woman from the camera. In Container, he wraps his nude body around a cat as if to totally enclose it. ...
Watch NowA three and a half minute Super-8mm piece on concentration/contemplation by Vito Acconci. ...
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"Unavailable until recently, Corrections is Acconci's first single-channel video. Back to the camera, with only his head and bare shoulders visible, Acconci lights a match and brings it around to the nape of his neck. The lights dim as the flame nears his ...
Watch Now"Acconci caresses his torso, then crushes cockroaches into his stomach and rubs them into his skin. ...
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In the late 1960s, Vito Acconci abandoned poetry in order to work with the body and its relationship with space, although he did retain a commitment to language. Influenced by the concepts proposed by the Judson Dance Theater and the Structuralist experime ...
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Standing alone among beach dunes, Acconci begins to kick at the sand below him. Over the course of the film's ten minutes, this repeated action displaces sand at a steady rate: as the artist sinks lower into the hole he creates, the mound of sand before hi ...
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The artist, covered in flour, tries to blow the flour off his skin. ...
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The artist, sitting naked, takes water from a pot into his mouth and gargles; he spits it out onto his stomach and groin, transferring the water from one "container" (the pot) to another (his body). ...
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In 'Looking Around Piece', the performer stands before a fixed camera, which records his eye and head movements as he follows a moving object outside the frame. In 'Starting Piece', the performer starts too far away to be captured by the camera; as he wal ...
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A probing portrait of Chris Burden, an artist who took creative expression to the limits and risked his life in the name of art. ...
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The tradition of modernism and neo-avant-garde are faced in the project, in which Radziszewski is confronting both – Polish and Western – narratives of art history. Starting from the subversive work of Natalia LL, Radziszewski raises a series of questi ...
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Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society. ...
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Chelsea on the Rocks celebrates the personalities and artistic voices that have emerged from New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel. Once considered an untouchable, impenetrable tower for writers, artists, musicians and mavericks, it has been recently claimed ...
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"Steven Holl: The Body in Space" explores the career of the innovative, highly renowned American architect. In this portrait Holl presents some of his most acclaimed works, including the Makuhari Housing Complex in Chiba, Japan and the Chapel of St. Ignati ...
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Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive ass ...
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The multiple means of making art after the end of illusionism led these artists to create performances, sculptures, earthworks, tableaux, furniture, shaped canvases, and more, using unusual materials. They explore the process of making forms and giving mea ...
Watch NowWith HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television's hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, ...
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An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia. ...
Watch NowA three-part video epic in which avant-garde artist Vito Acconci explores the relationship between the self and national mythology. Through multiple vignettes, Acconci brings together a collage of music, photographs, diorama, experimental theater and his o ...
Watch NowIn this feature-length silent film, Acconci uses hand-written title cards to present an "interior monologue" about speaking, language, and silence. The written text alternates with images of Acconci, alone in the interior of an urban loft or on a rooftop, ...
Watch NowThe back of Acconci's head is seen in tight close-up. He hums to himself, first lyrically, then aggressively, violently. Suddenly he wheels around to face the camera, his face filling the screen in extreme close-up, squinting at the viewer and speaking bre ...
Watch NowThis early document is a videotaped interview ("videoview") of Vito Acconci by Willoughby Sharp during which they discuss Acconci's development as an artist. The intimate conversation addresses such concerns as Acconci's thoughts on the exhibition space, h ...
Watch Now"In this legendary sculpture/performance Acconci lay beneath a ramp built in the Sonnabend Gallery. Over the course of three weeks, he masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring things like, "You're pushing your cunt down on my mouth" or "You're ramming ...
Watch Now"In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera ...
Watch NowIn these three exercises, Acconci plays with trans-gender illusions, manipulating and altering his own body parts to suggest sexual transformations. ...
Watch NowPoet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor. ...
Watch NowA documentation of a live performance at New York University, Pryings is a graphic exploration of the physical and psychological dynamics of male/female interaction, a study in control, violation and resistance. The camera focuses tightly on Kathy Dillon's ...
Watch NowThe two-channel piece Remote Control is an exercise in manipulation and control between artist and subject, male and female. On separate channels, the viewer sees Acconci and Kathy Dillon sitting alone in wooden boxes in different rooms, each facing a stat ...
Watch NowThis early performance tape is an example of what Acconci has termed his "quasi-ESP exercises," in which he explores mental concentration and intuition as a means of non-visual and non-verbal perception, interaction and communication. Blindfolded and weari ...
Watch NowA documentation of one of Acconci's most notorious performances, Claim Excerpts is a highly confrontational work, an exercise in self-induced, heightened behavioral states, and an aggressive psychological exploration of the artist/viewer relationship. Duri ...
Watch NowThree-part short film. In 'Blindfold Catching', a blindfolded Acconci reacts, flinching and lunging, as rubber balls are repeatedly thrown at him from off-screen. In 'Soap & Eyes', he tries to keep his eyes open after dousing his face with soapsuds, re ...
Watch NowStanding alone among beach dunes, Acconci begins to kick at the sand below him. Over the course of the film's ten minutes, this repeated action displaces sand at a steady rate: as the artist sinks lower into the hole he creates, the mound of sand before hi ...
Watch NowThe artist, covered in flour, tries to blow the flour off his skin. ...
Watch NowThe artist, sitting naked, takes water from a pot into his mouth and gargles; he spits it out onto his stomach and groin, transferring the water from one "container" (the pot) to another (his body). ...
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