Vito Acconci

by Ward, Frazer; Taylor, Mark C; Bloomer, Jennifer

• ISBN13: 9780714840024
• ISBN10: 0714840025
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-17
• Publisher: Phaidon Press

Summary

Vito Acconci is a key late twentieth-century pioneer of performance, video, installation and the exploration of architectural space. His work has expanded art's boundaries, moving beyond the gallery or museum into shared public spaces. Initially a poet, Acconci began making Conceptual art in the late 1960s. He devised actions, enacted them and documented them with texts, photographs or video. In 1972 he produced the most famous performance installation of its time, Seedbed. In an empty gallery he built a low ramp, concealed beneath which he stimulated himself with sexual fantasies about viewers walking above, speaking his fantasies into a microphone linked to loudspeakers. Startled spectators found themselves implicated in an intimate power relationship between artist and viewer. Since the mid 1980s his work has turned towards experimental architectural projects. In 1988 he set up the architectural practice Acconci Studio, which has public commissions around the world and was featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2001. Acconci's work remains of vital importance not only to Conceptual art and performance, but to contemporary architectural theory and practice.

Author Biography

Frazer Ward is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore. He has taught at a number of other institutions including Bryn Mawr College, Stanford University, and the University of Western Sydney. He is a member of the editorial board of Documents, and writes for such journals and magazines as Frieze, October and Parkett.

Mark C. Taylor is Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College, Massachusetts, and the co-founder of the Global Education Network. His books include Disfiguring: Art, Architecture and Religion (1992) and The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (2001). He contributes regularly to journals and books on philosophy, religion, art, architecture and technology.

Jennifer Bloomer is a Principal of Jennifer Bloomer/Robert Segrest architecture in Athens, Georgia. She is the author of Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (1993), and has been published widely in journals of art, architecture and critical theory. She has written for numerous catalogues including Louise Bourgeois: Memory and Architecture (2000) and Cristina Inglesias (2000).