Vito Acconci

Examines the varied and provocative works of the influential artist, including his 1970s performance pieces and his lighthearted and sculpturally complex pieces of the 1980s

The highly diverse body of work produced by Acconci, an American visual artist best known for his darkly comic, masochistic performances and installations of the 1970s, is usefully surveyed in this comprehensive mid-career retrospective. Much of Acconci's work turns on a confrontation between the artist and the viewer. In his notorious exhibit, Seed Bed (1972), he hid under a ramp built into the gallery floor and masturbated while an audio speaker transmitted his onanistic fantasies about the spectators above. In Untitled Piece for Pier 17 (1971), he invited viewers to an abandoned pier in lower Manhattan where he revealed secrets-which are not, however, revealed in these pages-about himself. Linker (Love for Sale: The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger) examines Acconci's efforts to define the vagaries of the contemporary self in light of critical theory by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and others. She also shows how Acconci's work since the '70s displays his penchant for lighthearted fun: he has constructed play houses with furniture shaped as pastoral landscapes, giant brassieres with seats for the viewer and public works resembling miniature golf courses with sliding floors, seesaws and vast stretches of Astroturf.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Linker, an independent critic whose work appears frequently in Artforum, does a commendable job of elucidating the concepts behind the varied but consistently provocative work of Vito Acconci, one of the most influential artists of the last 20 years. As Linker vividly describes Acconci's startling 1970s performance pieces, she explains how they relate to his ongoing effort to define the "nature of the self." Acconci's tactics include breaching the boundary between self and society, emphasizing the self as a repository for experience, and objectifying the body. His early works include documentation of the artist trying to catch a ball blindfolded, making marks in his flesh, and, in Seedbed, masturbating beneath a ramp on a gallery floor, an example of his willingness to takes puns to unsettling extremes. Acconci shocks his viewers to incite thought: he doesn't want empathy, he wants action. This desire for action inspired his more playful and sculpturally complex works during the 1980s, including his clever mobile units, "self-creating architecture," and the wonderfully disorienting Bad Dream House series. A philosophical confrontationist with a keen sense of the dramatic and the kinetic, Acconci has altered and expanded our perceptions of art and its role in our increasingly fractured culture. Donna Seaman