 |
My PhD research examines the work of performance and conceptual artist Vito Acconci (b.1940). Acconci’s work is important for contemporary art for a number of reasons, in particular expanding our definition of what we consider art to be (both materially and intellectually) and also in the ways that he has shown us that single works can be reconfigured many times to not only produce other new works, but to show how an art object develops over time. This latter point is perhaps the most important as we now, as art histories, how to take into account the temporality of the work, as opposed to its singular instance. What I mean by this is that we all know when and where Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa (date) but the work itself has a history and its meaning is not tied to the originary moment of the artist’s conception or production of the work. When the King of France hung the painting is his bathroom it meant something very different to its current status behind bulletproof glass in the Louvre.
Acconci’s work is typical of art made during this period in the way that he uses his body as the object of his art in order to explore some specific idea. Following Piece is a good example of this. It was an activity that took place every day on the streets of New York, between October 3rd and 25th, 1969. It was part of other performance and conceptual events sponsored by the Architectural League of New York that occurred during those three weeks. The terms of the exhibition “Street Works IV” were to do a piece, sometime during the month, that used a street in New York City. So Acconci decided to follow people around the streets and document his following of them. But why would he do this? Why would Acconci follow random people around New York? In essence, Following Piece was concerned with the language of our bodies, not so much in a private manner, but in a deeply public manner. By selecting a passer-by at random until they entered a private space, Acconci submitted his own movements to the movements of others, showing how our bodies are themselves always subject to external forces that we may or may not be able to control.
In terms of the art work, rather than being just another object that we look at in the gallery, Following Piece was part of the revolution that took place in the art world in the late 1960s that tried to bring art out of the gallery and into the street in order to explore real issues such as space, time, and the human body. Many artists, such as Acconci, used their bodies as their chosen medium. All of these ideas were influenced by Acconci’s readings. As many other artists of the period, Acconci wanted to get away from specific art problems and engage with social problems. Acconci read books such as Edward Hall’s The Hidden Dimension (1969), Erving Goffmann’s The Presentation of the Self in Every Day Life (1959), and Kurt Lewin’s In Principles of Topological Psychological (1936/1966). All of these books explored the ways in which the individual and the social are interlinked in terms of complex codes that structure the way we act and live every day.
Ironically, for all the effort to get out of the gallery, much of Acconci’s documentation of Following Piece, for example, the texts, photographs (which were taken after the event!), and diagrams, now constitutes a work of art in its own right. MOMA owns several of the photographs of Following Piece and other “versions” of this work are also in existence. So, even though Acconci’s Following Piece was a performance that occurred in a very specific period (3rd to 25th October, 1969), the reproduction and circulation of the work continues. As I said in my opening, this fact not only teaches us important things about the nature of performance art and its relationship to the art world, but also how the context of the art work is also never exactly fixed and each time it is presented something new occurs with the work itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment