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This
exhibition at MACBA focuses on Acconci's career from
the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, including his early
poetry (from before 1968), his performance, film,
video and sound works of the late 1960s and early
1970s, the corresponding phototext
panels, and a selection of the installations of the
mid to late 1970s. The exhibition further contains
three newly produced lecture-performances by Vito
Acconci on the first twenty years of Acconci Studio.
These lecture-performances will be produced in DVD
and shown projected in the exhibition space. For the
exhibition, MACBA will further produce a databank
that contains over thirteen hours of sound works from
the 1970s, among which many unpublished materials.
These sound works will be accessible for the public
through eight sound stations throughout the exhibition.
The artistic development of Vito Acconci seems uncommon
and natural at the same time. Starting as a poet under
the name Vito Hannibal Acconci in the mid-1960s, he
treated the page as a space in which to act, defining
words as props for movement and the page as a thing,
a container, a map, and a field for movement.
His last works done in a poetry context were poetry
events in which he used props (an audio recorder,
the walls of the room or the chairs in that room)
while his attempt was not to read from a page but
to read the room. These first pieces in an art context
got him from the page into the gallery space.
By 1969 Acconci started an experimental period of
performative works in exhibition spaces, revolving
around his own physical and psychological being as
highlighted by self-imposed activities of different
kinds. These activities proposed a new definition
of the material object by erasing traditional lines
between an artist and his or her audience, a thing
and a temporal event, and a work of art and its existence
within a spatial and/or social context.
In his installation pieces of the early 1970s, Acconci
was audibly, if not always visibly, present. The sound
of his voice penetrated the exhibition space as he
verbally engaged with the visitor in order to make
his space and viewer space come together, more coincident
with each other. By the mid-1970s Acconci had further
realised that a work could as well use the exhibition
space as a kind of model for overall cultural space.
His installations of those years are physical interventions
in mixed media that focus on the characteristics of
the space. By the early 1980s, when he founded Acconci
Studio, these concerns with space were further developed
into interventions of an environmental and architectural
scale. The power of the
proposals of Acconci Studio lies in their proposition
to drastically rethink the definitions of public space
and its use.
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“Open
Book”, 1975.
Vito
Acconci “Conversions (Part II)”, 1971.
Vito
Acconci "Remote Control", 1971.
Vito Acconci “Hands Down / Side by Side”,
1969.
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