Movies: Vito Acconci

A super-8mm short from Vito Acconci...

A super-8mm document (blown up to 16mm) of Acconci's performance of the same name where he laid flat on his stomach blindfolded on a wood platform in the middle of an arts event at a Rhode Island university as students watched videos, listened to mus...

A super-8mm document (blown up to 16mm) of Acconci's performance of the same name in which he covered almost the entirety of the gallery space with a tarp (except about a two feet perimeter around the tarp where visitors could awkwardly make their wa...

Using extreme close-ups and amplified sound to force the viewer into the space of his body, he experiments with his mouth as a container for saliva, holding it in as long as possible, trying to catch it in his hands....

Acconci's face is seen in close-up. His eyes trace, in real time, the movement of the hands of an off-screen clock....

The screen is empty: the artist stands off-screen — he breathes in and out, his stomach moving into and out of the frame....

Acconci imitates the sounds of war, gunfire and explosion; he thrusts his face, stomach or penis onto the screen. His childlike battle sounds are interrupted with monologues in which he defines himself as an American, with ironic references to cultur...

In Face of the Earth, Acconci's face becomes a metaphorical theater for a narrative drama of the mythic American landscape. Eyes closed, his face filling the screen in extreme close-up, the camera looking up from his chin, he inhabits a dreamlike, in...

"Recording Studio From Air Time is a personal confessional in which video is both a mirror and a mediating device. Alone in an "isolation chamber" in the gallery every day for two weeks, Acconci sat with the camera focused at his reflection in a mirr...

Acconci lies naked on a gurney-like table, rocking back and forth as a tape-loop of his voice describes his anxieties about exposing his body and his artwork. Writes the artist: "My voice functions as a scenario that keeps me confined to the bed: onc...

"Visions of a Disappearance is a newly restored performance tape that was recorded in Naples, Italy, in 1973. Crouched in a corner, hemmed in by the video camera and a closed-circuit monitor showing him the scene as it is recorded, Acconci attempts t...

"A long narrow corridor, leading to the camera—at one side, a window—sun streams in, splotches of light and dark, the corridor shimmers. I'm at the far end—walking back and forth, humming, biding my time. Then I talk to the viewer—rather, to a specif...

Vito Acconci chokes himself with a white cloth multiple times, his face turns red....

"Acconci caresses his torso, then crushes cockroaches into his stomach and rubs them into his skin." - Electronic Arts Intermix...

"Unavailable until recently, Corrections is Acconci's first single-channel video. Back to the camera, with only his head and bare shoulders visible, Acconci lights a match and brings it around to the nape of his neck. The lights dim as the flame near...

A three and a half minute Super-8mm piece on concentration/contemplation by Vito Acconci....

"In Scene Steal, Acconci, fully clothed, tries to shield a nude woman from the camera. In Container, he wraps his nude body around a cat as if to totally enclose it." - Electronic Arts Intermix...

"In one of his earliest films, Acconci performs a series of actions — running in a circle, jumping, pushing another man — in which the physical limits of the action refer to the boundaries of the film frame itself." - Electronic Arts Intermix...

"Super-8 camera held out before him as shield and surrogate, Acconci pushes through a landscape of dense reeds and overgrowth. Break-Through records this search for a pause or clearing in what, for the viewer, amounts to an abstracted and scarcely di...

Acconci's body-based performances are often willfully provocative in their testing of physical limits and controlled actions. Here, as the camera frames Acconci's stomach in close up, he painstakingly pulls out each hair from the skin around his nave...