Poems and other texts from the 1960s by a pioneering conceptual artist that show a continuity with his subsequent work in performance and video art.
Pioneering conceptual artist Vito Acconci began his career as a poet. In the 1960s, before beginning his work in performance and video art, Acconci studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop and published poems in journals and chapbooks. Almost all of this work remains unknown; much of it appeared in the self-produced magazines of the Lower East Side's mimeo revolution, and many other pieces were never published. Language to Cover a Page collects these writings for the first time and not only shows Acconci to be an important experimental writer of the period, but demonstrates the continuity of his early writing with his later work in film, video, and performance.
Language to Cover a Page documents a key moment in the unprecedented intersection of artists and poets in the late 1960s―as seen in the Dwan Gallery's series of "Language" shows (1967-1970) and in Acconci's own journal 0 to 9. Indeed, as Acconci moved from the poetry scene to the art world, his poetry became increasingly performative while his artwork was often structured and motivated by linguistic play.
Acconci's early writing recalls the work of Samuel Beckett, the deadpan voice of the nouveau roman, and the jump cuts and fraught permutations of the nouvelle vague. Poems in Language to Cover a Page explore the materiality of language ("language as matter and not ideas," as Robert Smithson put it), the physical space of the page, and the physicality of source texts (phonebooks, thesauruses, dictionaries). Other poems take the space of the page as an analogue to performance space or implicate the poem in a network of activity (as in his "Dial-a-Poem" pieces). Readers will find Acconci's inventive and accomplished poetry as edgy and provocative as anything published today.

Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci (Writing Art)

Arts & Photography

Acconci, Vito

Individual Artists

The MIT Press

Dialogues in Public Art

By the 1990s, public art had evolved far beyond the lonely monument on an open plaza. Now public artists might design the entire plaza, create an event to alter the social dynamics of an urban environment, or help to reconstruct a neighborhood. Dialogues in Public Art presents a rich blend of interviews with the people who create and experience public art—from an artist who mounted three bronze sculptures in the South Bronx to the bureaucrat who led the fight to have them removed; from an artist who describes his work as a "cancer" on architecture to a pair of architects who might agree with him; from an artist who formed a coalition to convert twenty-two derelict row houses into an art center/community revitalization project to a young woman who got her life back on track while living in one of the converted houses. The twenty interviews are divided into four parts: Controversies in Public Art, Experiments in Public Art as Architecture and Urban Planning, Dialogues on Dialogue-Based Public Art Projects, and Public Art for Public Health. Tom Finkelpearl's introductory essay provides a concise overview of changing attitudes toward the city as the site of public art. Interviewees: Vito Acconci, John Ahearn, David Avalos, Rufus L. Chaney, Mel Chin, Douglas Crimp, Paulo Freire, Andrew Ginzel, Linnea Glatt, Louis Hock, Ron Jensen, Kristin Jones, Maya Lin, Rick Lowe, Jackie McLean, Frank Moore, Jagoda Przybylak, Denise Scott Brown, Assata Shakur, Michael Singer, Elizabeth Sisco, Arthur Symes, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Robert Venturi, Krzysztof Wodiczko

Finkelpearl, Tom

History & Criticism

Mit Pr

During the late 1960s and 70s, a paradigm shift occurred within visual culture: photography and the moving image were absorbed into critical art practices. In particular, these mediums were used to record ephemeral or performative events and to render visible conceptual systems or to question the supposed objectivity of representation itself. This volume focuses primarily on artworks from the last decade and proposes that the extensive use of reproducible mediums in today's art has its roots in an earlier formative period. By the end of the 70s, many artists turned to photography as a vehicle through which to critique photographic representation and to subvert an art system premised on the notion of the original. While this practice came to define much of the 80s postmodern art, its legacy for the 90s was essentially the license to indulge in photographic fantasy, image construction, and cinematic narrative. Artists working today freely manipulate their representations of the empirical world or invent entirely new cosmologies. They process their subject matter through conceptual systems or use digital processes to alter their images. Some directly intervene in the environment, subtly shifting components of the found world and establishing their quiet presence in it; others fabricate entire architectural environments for the camera lens. This current state of the arts and its recent history are represented via more than 150 works by 55 artists, including Nam June Paik, Kara Walker, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Ana Mendieta, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle, Fischli &amp; Weiss, Ann Hamilton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annette Messager, Cindy Sherman, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Elger Esser, Andreas Gursky, Candida H fer, Thomas Ruff, J rge Sasse, Thomas Struth, Olafur Eliasson, Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Matthew Barney, Gregory Crewdson, Anna Gaskell, Sam Taylor-Wood, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere, Thomas Demand, Vanessa Beecroft, Wolfgang Tillmans, Patty Chang, Trisha Donnelly, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, John Pilson and Gillian Wearing.

Moving Pictures: Contemporary Photography and Video from the Guggenheim Collection

Abramovic, Marina

Walker, Kara

Nauman, Bruce

GURSKY, ANDREAS

Gonzalez-Torres, Felix

Hanhardt, John G.

Smithson, Robert

BARNEY, Matthew

Paik, Nam June

Young, Joan

Villaseñor, Maria-Christina

Guggenheim Museum

Photography has become an increasingly pervasive medium of choice in contemporary art practice and is even employed at times by artists who do not necessarily consider themselves to be photographers. How did this come to be? The Last Picture Show will address the emergence of this phenomenon of artists using photography by tracing the development of conceptual trends in postwar photographic practice from its first glimmerings in the 60s in the work of artists such as Bernd &amp; Hilla Becher, Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman, to its rise to art-world prominence in the work of the artists of the late 70s and early 80s including Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman. Intended as a major genealogy of the rise of a still-powerful and evolving photographic practice by artists, the checklist will include a wide array of works examining a range of issues: performativity and photographic practice; portraiture and cultural identity; the formal and social architectonics of the built environment; societal and individual interventions in the landscape; photography's relationship to sculpture and painting; the visual mediation of meaning in popular culture; and the poetic and conceptual investigation of visual non-sequiturs, disjunctions and humorous absurdities. Bringing together a newly commissioned body of scholarship with reprints of important historical texts, The Last Picture Show seeks to define the legacy that has produced a rich body of photographic practice in the art world today.

The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982 (WALKER ART CENT)

WEISS, David

Graham, Dan

Beuys, Joseph

Baldessari, John

Dibbets, Jan

Flood, Richard

Anselmo, Giovanni

Gronnert, Stefan

Lee, Pamela

Batchen, Geoffrey

Fischli, Peter

Bochner, Mel

Charlesworth, Sarah

Export, Valie

Ader, Bas Jan

Boltanski, Christian

Broodthaers, Marcel

Kruger, Barbara

Oppenheim, Dennis

Lewitt, Sol

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Walker Art Center

The catalogue for an exhibition that is the first major examination of the "second half" of Vito Acconci's career, a period characterized by works that are, in their own fashion, every bit as startling, provocative, and influential as those of his "classic" period of the 1960s and 1970s

Vito Acconci: Acts of Architecture

Sobel, Dean

Kwinter, Sandford

Architecture

Milwaukee Art Museum

In 1993, the artist Vito Acconci and the architect Steven Holl were invited to redesign the facade of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Addressing the site's urban environment and its function as an art space--the gallery is located on the ground floor of a low building on the outskirts of Soho--Acconci and Holl created a versatile facade which may be opened up in different ways depending on the season, or function as an optical screen separating the inner space from the street. These diverse functions--responding to considerations of both inner and outer space, creating links and transparencies as well as establishing borders--provide for a constant flux of local and spatial relationships for both the interested viewer and the casual passerby. This striking and significant new book, part of Hatje/Cantz's Werkdokumente series, documents Acconci and Holl's collaborative project with photographs by Paul Ott.

Vito Acconci/Steven Holl: Storefront Gallery

Reference

Holl, Steven

Ritter, Arno

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Hatje Cantz Publishers

As a critic, stalwart nonconformist and champion of utopian architecture, Austrian architect Raimund Abraham (1933-2010) made one of the most significant contributions to contemporary architecture in 2002, with the construction of the Austrian Cultural Forum Buildingin New York. Following his tragic death in 2010, that year's Vienna Architecture Conference was held in his honor. In the Absence of Raimund Abraham documents the keynote lecture, speeches and discussions held throughout the conference given by architects and artists such as Vito Acconci, Peter Cook, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Kubelka, Andrea Lenardin Madden, Thom Mayne, Jonas Mekas, Eric Owen Moss, Peter Noever, Wolf D. Prix, Alexis Rochas, Michael Rotondi, Elfie Semotan and Lebbeus Woods. The publication also includes a DVD of Abraham's now-famous last lecture, "The Profanation of Solitude," given at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, only hours before his untimely death.

In the Absence of Raimund Abraham: Vienna Architecture Conference 2010

Hatje Cantz

From his radical performances at the beginning of the 70s to the unusual architectural designs he's created since the end of the 80s, Vito Acconci has more often than not concerned himself with the definition of the public via the body. Courtyard in the Wind, created for the Munich architectural department's new home, was the first permanent structure by Acconci to be realized in a public space. A revolving ring of landscapes set in the building's courtyard, the sculpture moves with the help of the wind power plant Acconci built on top of the building's tower. The book at hand is the first to document this project and also the first to consider the paradigm of architectural designs created by Acconci Studio. Also included are texts by Acconci about the body, architecture and public space, and an instructive essay by Heinz Schtz which reviews Acconci's works from the last decades and opens up the horizon against which Courtyard in the Wind is set.

Vito Acconci: Courtyard in the Wind

Schütz, Heinz

Now in Paperback Everyone is an artist....I am really convinced that humankind will not survive without having realized the social body, the social order, into an artwork. --Joseph Beuys Few topics in the visual arts in recent years have created such controversy as the debate surrounding the significance and potential of public art. In this massive book, over 50 authors take a critical look at the theme; the result is a fascinating compendium of opinions and statements, experiences and reports. The wide-ranging material by curators, art historians and artists--including Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Ilya Kabakov, Kasper Konig, Joseph Kosuth, Richard Serra, Harald Szeemann, Lawrence Weiner and many more--is divided into sections entitled "Art and the City," "Art and Architecture," "Art and History," "Art and Society" and "Art and the Public." First published in 2001 in a bilingual German/English hardcover edition, and now available in an English paperback, Public Art presents an unprecedented abundance of both written and visual information on a vital topic in contemporary art.

Public Art

KOSUTH, Joseph

Kabakov, Ilya

Weiner, Lawrence

HAACKE, Hans

Buren, Daniel

Rückriem, Ulrich

Between 1969 and 1973, Vito Acconci's creative output was focused on body pieces and performances, many of them seminal works now firmly lodged in the art historical canon of the time. Whether he was transforming space by masturbating under a platform extension of the gallery floor or transforming the body by tucking his genitals between his legs, Acconci promoted a radical, corporeal method of working with the human presence that has remained relevant in these less performative times. This publication traces the development of Acconci's early work through his own writings and documentations from that time. Rather than a critical study, it offers invaluable primary source materials: For each of the approximately 200 performances/works included, Acconci drafted meticulous notes, mapping out his ideas and describing the specifications of each piece. Many of the artist's works were ephemeral performances and actions, and these primary source materials are now the only extant artifacts from the work. Thus the book's contents come directly from Acconci's personal archives, and include his notes and documentations, plus photographs, where available. An introduction by Gregory Volk provides historical context and addresses the issues of body art and performance still relevant today.

Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969 -1973

Volk, Gregory

Charta

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