It's Monday night and Scott, Corey, Mikaela and I are finishing up the preparation for tomorrow's presentation.
A bit of background:
Last week, Vito Acconci spoke to our class about his career - the transitions and ebbs and flows, where he thinks he has suceeded and where he thinks he didn't quite make the mark. He was a pleasure to watch and to listen to and I'm so glad he was our first speaker. I think what I appreciated most was his earnestness.
Key themes:
The viewer as voyeur
Apatability of space/adapting to space
the ideas of viewer/agent/object
the public v. the private and where they intersect
transformation (of body, space)
trust
fluidity
Things he said that resonated with me:
Wanted words to be material
How do you move from the left margin to the right margin -- an integer - an indicator of movement
wanted to write himself onto the street
art was a field into which you could import from other fields
For a period he did voyeurism based work - following a person each day until they entered a private for anywhere from 2/3 minutes to 7/8 hours. For that time he was the receiver of someone else's action. His aim was to key himself into that world. He wanted to focus on himself as the instrument - use whatever medium was available to him at that time.
Subservient to an external scheme,
I a person (an agent)
attends to (it)
can i start to attend to me? how do i prove that i am concentrating on myself?
conversions -- viewer/agent/object (trying to avoid the object)
viewer ends up being the outsider - pieces couldn't be so isolated
in 1971 he did security zone which depicted his dependence on someone he couldn't trust. [in an attempt to gain said trust]
circularity --> the pieces didn't get rid of enclosure. viewer is always voyeur.
Vito spoke of art as an exchange system - a meeting between artist and viewer
meeting should be between equals - started to think about art as religion/artwork as alter -- his work seemed to be enhancing this, and not debunking it as he had hoped.
his thoughts turned to "what if i was a part of the space" (then came seedbed)
--take a neutral space and fill it with a person--
decided not to concentrate on self anymore - site specificity
art makes sense maybe at this particular time, in this particular space
1976 - where are we now (who are we anyway)
didn't know how to get rid of himself
trying to look at art space as if it were a town square
houses/architecture caused by a body/person
games of architecture
community house
mid 80s
wanted to deal with public space
stopped being interested in art, wanted things to be used
users/inhabitants/participants rather than viewers / public comes out of a conversation/collision
created acconci studio -- you can't do public stuff from a position of singularity
gallery in own house
make a world
poke a whole
architecture of perferations // actions and operations
methods that make openings
a building that changes shape / can grow
Tomorrow we will present our reaction, as a group, to the first year class.
posted by Amanda @ 9/10/2007 06:30:00 PM,