Vito Acconci at White Flag Projects
A 1983 interview with boundary-pushing artist/poet/designer Vito Acconci will be screened this Wednesday, January 20th, from 5-7 p.m., as the latest installment of White Flag’s DRINKS series. In addition to the video screening, which will commence at 6 p.m., the evening promises complimentary cocktails and good conversation (well, maybe).
Vito Acconci, a Bronx-born and Brooklyn-based artist, began his artistic endeavors with the written word. Though his work has since transitioned into photography, video, and performance-based installations, he never really left his passion for writing behind. Works such as Trademark (1970), where Acconci turns himself into a kind of human printing press by smearing self-induced bite marks with ink and subsequently pressing his ink-laden body parts onto paper, evidence, in one form or another, Acconci’s reverence for language.
Associated with both the conceptual art and body art movements of the late 1960’s, it’s no surprise that Acconci is known for his confrontational and often visceral performance pieces. He is perhaps most notorious for Seedbed (1972), in which he lay beneath the floor of Manhattan’s Sonnabed Gallery, masturbating and muttering his sexual fantasies about gallery go-ers through a microphone connected to a loudspeaker. The piece not only blurred the lines between public and private, removing control from Acconci and forcing it onto his unknowing subject, but also created a relationship between the artist and the public that was both intimate and disturbing. More recently Acconci has been exploring his interest in arguably more tame undertakings, such as architecture, and even founded his own architectural firm, Acconci Studio, in 1988.
Acconci received a B.A. in literature from Holy Cross College and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. He has also taught at a number of impressive academic and arts institutions including Cooper Union, Yale University, Parsons School of Design, and Brooklyn College.
DRINKS with Vito Acconci will be held Wednesday, January 20th from 5-7 p.m.; interview screening is at 6 p.m. For more details on the DRINKS series and other events at White Flag Projects, such as our current exhibition Love & Theft, visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.
- Lynna Borden, Intern
