"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 differentiated visual field." - Electronic Arts...
"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 specific viewer: 'So you're finally...
"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...
Face-Off is an ironic collusion of private and public, of exposure and masking, a tense ritual wherein Acconci divulges and then censors his self-revelations. Acconci turns on a reel-to-reel audiotape recorder and bends down to the speaker to listen to it, his face barely visible in the frame. The...
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 cultural cliches and stereotypes. "Yeah, I'm an...
For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960's and 70's, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exists from this critical early period and one...
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 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...
In Two Track, Acconci experiments with direct and peripheral perception of information in the context of communication and interaction. He sits with a man and a woman in front of a microphone. The man and woman each read a different text (a Mickey Spillane novel and a Raymond Chandler novel)...
A woman kisses Acconci's body, covering him in red lipstick traces. Acconci then rubs his body against another man (Dennis Oppenheim), transferring the stains onto him.
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.
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 way through) that was maybe two feet off the ground...
"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 nears his body hair, which briefly flares in the...
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...
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 interactive communication. Acconci stands...
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 performing its absence, Acconci problematizes the...
"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
