Vito spreads seed
Apr. 26th, 2006 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusImagine you're in New York City in 1972. Nixon is in power. New York is a more violent and shitty city than it is today, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It's an obstacle course, dangeous and somewhat hysterical, and that extremity is reflected in its downtown art scene.
You enter the empty, pillared space of Sonnabend Gallery on West Broadway and witness an installation by Vito Acconci, a poet turned performance and video artist. It's called Seedbed. It consists of an angled ramp rising from the gallery floor, and Acconci hiding under it, lying full length, masturbating, and talking to you through a mic and speakers as if you were his lover. It's architecture, a sound installation, poetry, an affront, an improvisation, a performance, an act of deviance, a definition of space, a throwing-into-crisis of etiquette. It's a voice, an exhibition, an act of hidden exhibitionism. It makes Acconci's name and spreads his seed.
And here's Acconci in 2006. New York has calmed down, and Vito has become an old man, a veteran of the art world, a bit of a hero (outside on the street a sign reads "Tonite:Elvis Presley Vito Acconci"). He still has a rich, sensual, slightly stammering voice. Now, though, he's talking to us like an audience, not a lover. We're at Spoonbill & Sugar, a bookstore on Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg. Vito has a new book out, and he's talking about his unusual career path -- from concrete poetry to performance art to architecture. They sort of fit, though: the poetry works with the field of the white page, then the performance and installation art works with the field of the white cube gallery, then the architecture is semantic, a built book, quite literally concrete poetry.
Here's a sound clip I made of Vito talking about his most famous work, the piece where he lay under the floor at Sonnabend masturbating:
Seedbed (3.40 mins, mono mp3 file, 1.7 MB)
And here's a poem he made for a two channel video installation:
Gunshots (2.49 mins, mono mp3 file, 1.3 MB)
It's a long way from New York in 1972 to Tokyo in 2006, but Acconci's there too. He's the architect of United Bamboo's Daikanyama store, and an impish part of me likes to imagine the Vito of 1972 lying under the glass floor of that chic fashion boutique, crying out his sexual hunger to the well-heeled Japanese girls who come to shop there, still masturbating furiously, still spreading his seed. (In fact, Vito did propose something rather erotic: cameras behind the store mirrors, relaying photos of customers to a video monitor at the front of the store.)
You enter the empty, pillared space of Sonnabend Gallery on West Broadway and witness an installation by Vito Acconci, a poet turned performance and video artist. It's called Seedbed. It consists of an angled ramp rising from the gallery floor, and Acconci hiding under it, lying full length, masturbating, and talking to you through a mic and speakers as if you were his lover. It's architecture, a sound installation, poetry, an affront, an improvisation, a performance, an act of deviance, a definition of space, a throwing-into-crisis of etiquette. It's a voice, an exhibition, an act of hidden exhibitionism. It makes Acconci's name and spreads his seed.
And here's Acconci in 2006. New York has calmed down, and Vito has become an old man, a veteran of the art world, a bit of a hero (outside on the street a sign reads "Tonite:
Here's a sound clip I made of Vito talking about his most famous work, the piece where he lay under the floor at Sonnabend masturbating:
Seedbed (3.40 mins, mono mp3 file, 1.7 MB)
And here's a poem he made for a two channel video installation:
Gunshots (2.49 mins, mono mp3 file, 1.3 MB)It's a long way from New York in 1972 to Tokyo in 2006, but Acconci's there too. He's the architect of United Bamboo's Daikanyama store, and an impish part of me likes to imagine the Vito of 1972 lying under the glass floor of that chic fashion boutique, crying out his sexual hunger to the well-heeled Japanese girls who come to shop there, still masturbating furiously, still spreading his seed. (In fact, Vito did propose something rather erotic: cameras behind the store mirrors, relaying photos of customers to a video monitor at the front of the store.)
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 04:18 am (UTC)I was walking down the street in lower Manhattan in 1972. I was 14. I was having my third menstrual period. I was wearing overalls, and a makeshift sanitary pad. The pad was malfunctioning, because it was working itself out of my crotch and into the back of my overalls.
So I reached my hand down the back of my pants and yanked out the blood-stained pad. And with much aplomb, dropped the pad on the street. I knew no one would notice.
I love anonymity and the bravado it leads to on the street.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 04:21 am (UTC)Like dolphins can swim
Date: 2006-04-26 04:34 am (UTC)The pad was later sold on eBay as glamour rock folderol : )
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 06:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 07:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 07:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 08:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 12:33 pm (UTC)If the main thing your hero has done is masturbate under the floor, maybe it's time to reevaluate things.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 01:01 pm (UTC)Last week I was at an opening at Storefront for Art and Architecture, a building Vito designed in New York. He designed it so that the panels in the wall swivel open, making the space a continuation of the street. You don't have to look very far to see the same motif in that building that you see in "Seedbed": an intermingling of private and public.
It's the same motif you can see in the conference table that runs through a window and juts out eight feet over the street, or Vito's performance in which he lingered by Pier 17, waiting to tell strangers "something that I’m ashamed of and that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t tell a soul, something that – if it were made public – could be used against me". Same motif in 1984's Bad Dream House No. 2, "an angular building made up of three separate house-shaped parts, which Acconci describes: ‘now that the houses are collided, their privacy is made public.’" And so on. (http://www.contemporary-magazine.com/profile60.htm)
Your complaint betrays a mentality at once prudish and prurient: focus on the "dirty" stuff, don't deconstruct why society views it as dirty, and don't examine how such a deconstruction might impact other social conventions (like the arrangements of space in architecture) positively.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 01:43 pm (UTC)What you said about the artist spreading seed is interesting .. he has to deseminate information. The more powerful his statement, the bigger the reaction, the greater the focus, the impregnation of the viewer's mind ...
(a lot depends on connections and luck)
I love the early Seventies .. the dream of 68 was still around. I doubt we will ever be so bold in this generation ...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 02:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 02:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 06:00 pm (UTC)Virgil and I were speaking about how long it takes artists to establish themselves, be it with fame or notoriety, in the art world. We came to a tentative conclusion that most of the artists we like, or at least talk about frequently, are in their 40s or above.
i'm a fan of Mr. Acconci. So funny and so unafraid, with his fingers in so many pots. It's happened on several occasions that I've come up with an idea for an installation only to discover that Vito has already done something similar, and with more finesse.
Are you a fan of Maurizio Cattelan?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 07:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 07:25 pm (UTC)Thank goodness most people refrained from deconstructing social constructs during the last NYC blackout, like they did in 1977. I might have lost a few friends.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 08:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 08:25 pm (UTC)Broadjump
Date: 2006-04-26 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 09:31 pm (UTC)Damn.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-26 11:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 12:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-27 12:53 am (UTC)dluhUxSbyR
Date: 2007-06-24 02:28 pm (UTC)Thank you
Date: 2007-11-20 10:53 pm (UTC)