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Undertone (1972)
Character: Vito Acconci
"In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer - the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy."
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Three Adaptation Studies (1970)
Character: Himself
Three-part short film. In 'Blindfold Catching', a blindfolded Acconci reacts, flinching and lunging, as rubber balls are repeatedly thrown at him from off-screen. In 'Soap & Eyes', he tries to keep his eyes open after dousing his face with soapsuds, resulting in a tragicomic clown face. In 'Hand and Mouth', he repeatedly forces his fist into his mouth until he gags.
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Pryings (1971)
Character: N/A
A documentation of a live performance at New York University, Pryings is a graphic exploration of the physical and psychological dynamics of male/female interaction, a study in control, violation and resistance. The camera focuses tightly on Kathy Dillon's face, as Acconci tries to pry open her closed eyes. Dillon resists, at times protecting her face or fighting to get away. Locked in a silent embrace, the couple's struggle is violent, passionate; Acconci's sadistic coercion is tinged with a sinister tenderness. The body is a vehicle for a literal enactment of the desire for and resistance against intimate contact.
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My Word (1974)
Character: Himself
In this feature-length silent film, Acconci uses hand-written title cards to present an "interior monologue" about speaking, language, and silence. The written text alternates with images of Acconci, alone in the interior of an urban loft or on a rooftop, with the skyline of downtown New York as a backdrop.
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The Red Tapes (1977)
Character: Himself
A three-part video epic in which avant-garde artist Vito Acconci explores the relationship between the self and national mythology. Through multiple vignettes, Acconci brings together a collage of music, photographs, diorama, experimental theater and his own profile, to tell a semi-autobiographical narrative that, in turn, becomes a critique of the alienated quality of American mythology.
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14 Americans: Directions of the 1970s (1981)
Character: Himself
The multiple means of making art after the end of illusionism led these artists to create performances, sculptures, earthworks, tableaux, furniture, shaped canvases, and more, using unusual materials. They explore the process of making forms and giving meanings to those forms. In this idea art, their focus is as often social and psychological as artistic. Some of their activities enlist engineering and construction techniques, others compose texts or scripts that are central to their art. Some cast the viewer in the role of a spectator, while the others demand active participation. The sources for their concepts and art works are equally diverse; the delicate proportions and balance of Early Renaissance painting, the exploration of the surface of the moon, the structure and inventions of vernacular architects, to name only a few.
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America Is Not Ready for This (2012)
Character: Self
The tradition of modernism and neo-avant-garde are faced in the project, in which Radziszewski is confronting both – Polish and Western – narratives of art history. Starting from the subversive work of Natalia LL, Radziszewski raises a series of questions on issues such as gender, feminist art, conceptual art, queer and East-West relations and their impact on the art world in the context of the Iron Curtain. America Is Not Ready For This is an open archive in search of parallels between the artistic experiences of Natalia LL and Radziszewski, as well as an attempt to examine the rules of the positioning of artists in the art world, both at that time and today.
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How to Fly (1981)
Character: N/A
With HOW TO FLY, Bowes abandoned plot entirely, finding other forms of structure. He wanted to show that stories do not have to obsessively organize and explain data, and that television’s hundreds of simultaneous, fragmented narratives – news, fiction, commercials, sports, etc. – had prepared audiences for this new type of structure. — Charles Ruas
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Digging Piece (1970)
Character: Self
Standing alone among beach dunes, Acconci begins to kick at the sand below him. Over the course of the film's ten minutes, this repeated action displaces sand at a steady rate: as the artist sinks lower into the hole he creates, the mound of sand before him grows in correspondence.
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Gargle/Spit Piece (1970)
Character: Self
The artist, sitting naked, takes water from a pot into his mouth and gargles; he spits it out onto his stomach and groin, transferring the water from one "container" (the pot) to another (his body).
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You're Going to Die! (2006)
Character: Narrator
"You’re Going to Die!" is a children’s story exploring one simple idea ad nauseum bonum. This video treatment by Dennis Palazzolo adapts prose by Timothy Furstnau using original footage and clips lifted from famous movies, and features the close-mic’d muttering voiceover of artist Vito Acconci.
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Chelsea on the Rocks (2008)
Character: Self
Chelsea on the Rocks celebrates the personalities and artistic voices that have emerged from New York’s legendary Chelsea Hotel. Once considered an untouchable, impenetrable tower for writers, artists, musicians and mavericks, it has been recently claimed as a boutique hotel venture for a management company that shows disregard for its formidable history. –Cannes Film Festival
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Seedbed (1972)
Character: N/A
“In this legendary sculpture/performance Acconci lay beneath a ramp built in the Sonnabend Gallery. Over the course of three weeks, he masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring things like, "You're pushing your cunt down on my mouth" or "You're ramming your cock down into my ass." Not only does the architectural intervention presage much of his subsequent work, but all of Acconci's fixations converge in this, the spiritual sphincter of his art. In Seedbed Acconci is the producer and the receiver of the work's pleasure. He is simultaneously public and private, making marks yet leaving little behind, and demonstrating ultra-awareness of his viewer while being in a semi-trance state.” – Jerry Saltz (via: http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci_seedbed.html)
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Centers (1971)
Character: Self
Poet and artist Vito Acconci points his finger towards the camera and his own reflection in an offscreen video monitor.
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Conversions 1 (1971)
Character: Himself
In these three exercises, Acconci plays with trans-gender illusions, manipulating and altering his own body parts to suggest sexual transformations.
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Remote Control (1971)
Character: Himself
The two-channel piece Remote Control is an exercise in manipulation and control between artist and subject, male and female. On separate channels, the viewer sees Acconci and Kathy Dillon sitting alone in wooden boxes in different rooms, each facing a static camera. Although they can only see and hear each other on separate monitors, they attempt to interact and respond to one another directly, as if their communication were unmediated. Through language and gesture, Acconci tries to manipulate Dillon's actions from his box, as though by remote control.
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Association Area (1971)
Character: Himself
This early performance tape is an example of what Acconci has termed his "quasi-ESP exercises," in which he explores mental concentration and intuition as a means of non-visual and non-verbal perception, interaction and communication. Blindfolded and wearing earplugs, Acconci and another man attempt to intuit and imitate each other's movements and bearing, though they can neither hear nor see.
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Claim Excerpts (1971)
Character: Himself
A documentation of one of Acconci's most notorious performances, Claim Excerpts is a highly confrontational work, an exercise in self-induced, heightened behavioral states, and an aggressive psychological exploration of the artist/viewer relationship. During the three-hour performance, Acconci sat in the basement of 93 Grand Street in New York, blindfolded, armed with metal pipes and a crowbar. His image was seen on a video monitor in the upstairs gallery space. Staking claim to his territory, he tries to hypnotize himself through language into an obsessive state of possessiveness.
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Willoughby Sharp Videoviews Vito Acconci. (1973)
Character: Himself
This early document is a videotaped interview ("videoview") of Vito Acconci by Willoughby Sharp during which they discuss Acconci's development as an artist. The intimate conversation addresses such concerns as Acconci's thoughts on the exhibition space, his transition from the page to the performance, and the role of video and photo documentation for performance art in general.
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Turn-On (1974)
Character: Himself
The back of Acconci's head is seen in tight close-up. He hums to himself, first lyrically, then aggressively, violently. Suddenly he wheels around to face the camera, his face filling the screen in extreme close-up, squinting at the viewer and speaking breathlessly. When finished, he turns and continues to hum, repeating this cycle again and again.
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The Art of Time (2009)
Character: Self
Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.
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Steven Holl: The Body in Space (1999)
Character: Self
"Steven Holl: The Body in Space" explores the career of the innovative, highly renowned American architect. In this portrait Holl presents some of his most acclaimed works, including the Makuhari Housing Complex in Chiba, Japan and the Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle. Centered around the completion of Holl's Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, the film observes his process and reasoning throughout the duration of the project
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Aktionskunst International. Dokumente zum Internationalen Aktionismus (1989)
Character: Self
A comprehensive documentation of new art movements from 1945 to the present day. Beginning with the "Internationale Situationniste," "Cobra," "Spur," and "Wiener Gruppe" groups in Europe, and moving on to the international Happening and Fluxus movements, including the Viennese Actionists, and from 1970 onward to international Body and Performance Art, which also encompassed media art—film and video—the documentary presents film and photographic material from these art movements.
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Burden (2016)
Character: Self
A probing portrait of Chris Burden, an artist who took creative expression to the limits and risked his life in the name of art.
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The Golden Boat (1991)
Character: Swiss assassin
Inspired in form by American police TV shows and soap operas, The Golden Boat is a madcap, surreal dash through the streets of New York city, telling the mysterious and often hilarious story of an aged street-person named Austin, a comically compulsive assassin, as he joins up with a young rock critic and philosophy student named Israel Williams. In the course of their adventures, Austin pursues his object of desire - a Mexican soap opera star - and along the way engages a host of TV characters and bit players, whose repartee range from gangsterish insults to the question of God's existence.
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Body Art (1975)
Character: Self
Compilation film consisting of material from various artists who are involved in body art
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