Vito Acconci - biography
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Vito Acconci | Undertone | €992 |
Vito Acconci was born in New York on 24 January 1940. The son of Italian immigrants, he spent the majority of his life in the New York Bronx and was introduced to art early on by his father, with visits to concert halls and museums in the daily plan. After studying literature in Worcester and Iowa, he initially worked on poetry and edited the magazine 0 TO 9 which he duplicated with the help of a mimeograph, in collaboration with the poet Bernadette Mayer, whose sister Rosemary Mayer he married in the 1960s. The marriage, however, only lasted a few years.
After modest success as a poet, Vito Acconci turned to performance and video art, using his own body as the subject. In doing so, provocation and confrontation were a fundamental element of his art. For his action performance Seedbed in 1972, he lay for eight hours a day under a specially recessed wooden floor in the New York Sonnabend Gallery, masturbated, and allowed visitors to participate in his sexual fantasies over loudspeakers. Whilst Vito Acconci later complained that this Action had permanently damaged his reputation as a serious architect and impeded his further career, the Serbian artist Marina Abramović repeated the performance in 2005 in the Guggenheim Museum as part of her project Seven Easy Pieces.
In the 1980s, Vito Acconci discovered the fields of architecture and installation. In this, it was important for the artist that his projects were not simply placed as rigid, museum-like sculptures, but rather that they fit into the living environment as a corresponding component. He himself hated museums, he once said in a lecture at a museum exhibition. For Acconci, art had to be detached from its silent and apathetic contemplation. Rather, it had to be experienceable, to interact with an audience which was expressly invited to actively participate in the artist’s work.
Vito Acconci participated in Documenta three times and held teaching contracts at various institutes, including the Parsons School of Design. He pushed into the public sphere with numerous actions and projects; amongst his most famous works is the Graze Murinsel, which was conceived as a modern landmark for the city of Graz and opened in January 2003. These public architectural projects form a legacy of the artist that continues to find a fascinated audience today and, in the spirit of Acconci, invites participation. Vito Acconci has received prizes and awards for his art and was honoured twice with the New York City Art Commission Award for Excellence in Design.
Vito Acconci died in his hometown of New York on 27 April 2017.
© Kunsthaus Lempertz
Do you own a work by Vito Acconci, which you would like to sell?
Artist | Artwork | Price (incl. premium) |
---|---|---|
Vito Acconci | Undertone | €992 |
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