Movies: Vito Acconci

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)....

The artist, covered in flour, tries to blow the flour off his skin....

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 bef...

In 'Looking Around Piece', the performer stands before a fixed camera, which records his eye and head movements as he follows a moving object outside the frame. In 'Starting Piece', the performer starts too far away to be captured by the camera; as ...

In this performance based tape, Acconci uses his body to explore notions of opening and closure....

Vito Acconci...

"I walk in a circle around the camera: sometimes I'm on screen, sometimes I'm off, sometimes I change direction, leaving the screen on one side and coming back on the same side. Every five minutes or so, the location changes: my circle is continuous ...

Torn over the pressure to perform for his audience, Acconci fantasizes about "a dancing bear" who takes his place, performing in the spotlight, doing what others want, "what I always had to do."...

The final installment of the Conversions trilogy....

In Conversions II, the second in a trilogy of films interrogating the rigidity of gender binarism, the artist attempts to feminize his unquestionably male body by hiding his genitals between his legs. By casting his own masculinity into question, by ...

Contacts is one of a series of tapes in which Acconci creates a controlled performance situation to explore the limits of a private space. Applying intense mental concentration and intuition, he uses the body as a vehicle to explore perception and in...

In the late 1960s, Vito Acconci abandoned poetry in order to work with the body and its relationship with space, although he did retain a commitment to language. Influenced by the concepts proposed by the Judson Dance Theater and the Structuralist ex...

A super-8mm work documenting Acconci's audio installation piece in the Sonnabend gallery in 1972 of the same name....

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

"In another exploration of nonverbal communication, the camera moves back and forth, each time catching one of Acconci's hands in an expressive gesture. The result is a kind of narrative or dialogue of gesture." - Electronic Arts Intermix...

"In this exercise in nonverbal communication, Acconci explores facial expressions, and their psychological resonance, as a mode of performance narrative." - Electronic Arts Intermix...

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....