Vito Acconci (b. 1940, Bronx, d. 2017, New York) was an American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design.
Acconci was one of the pioneering artists who used video as a new medium, introducing a sociocultural dimension into the arts in the 1970s. He emerged as an artist during politically turbulent times when artists sought alternatives to creating and selling objects. They turned to using their bodies, ideas, and actions as the currency of a new artistic realm. By the late 1960s, Acconci had transitioned into a performance and video artist, often using his own body as subject matter. Much of his work was highly confrontational and involved subversive social commentary. In 1969, he began using photography to document various actions – this exhibition includes four examples of these photographs.
In 1976, Acconci left the gallery world and reinvented himself as an architect and designer, a practice he continued until his passing. As a visual artist, his work encompassed installation pieces, performance art, and photographic pieces, through which he made subversive social comments on society. His work dealt with critical, and sometimes playful, aspects of identity politics – the ‘self’ as a social construct. It is characterized by self-motivated research into the relationship between artist and viewer and the interconnectedness of individual and social space. Acconci’s conceptual, performance-based videos and audio works centred around an intense dialogue between his body and psyche, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, and the public and private space, often taking the form of stream-of-consciousness monologues.
His groundbreaking body of work, marked by its unusually psychodramatic intensity, often featured graphic transcriptions of audio works and poetry. In these works, the physical materialization of language is central, achieved through syntactical experiments and typographical permutations. In the 1980s, Acconci’s practice shifted towards sculptural interventions and urban projects, deepening his interest in the human body and its relation to public space.
Following his first solo show in 1969, at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Acconci participated in numerous exhibitions. Retrospectives have been organized by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1978) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1980). Print retrospectives have been mounted by Landfall Press in New York (1990) and the Gallery of Art at the University of Missouri in Kansas City (1994). Acconci’s achievements have been recognised with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983, and 1993), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1979), and American Academy in Rome (1986). He also received the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1997) and two New York City Art Commission Awards for Excellence in Design (1999 and 2004). He was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 2000.
The touring programme Video and Performance: Vito Acconci, was curated by Film and Video Umbrella with funding from Arts Council England.
