Fall 1 (Los Angeles 1970)
Fall II (Amsterdam 1970)
I'm Too Sad To Tell You (1971)
Broken Fall (Geometric) [West Kapelle - Holland]
Broken Fall (Organic) [Amsterdamse Bos - Holland]
Nightfall
Bas Jan Ader intrigues me. A man of many pursuits — a conceptual artist, performance artist, photographer and filmmaker according to The Wikipedia alone — he was in 1975 lost at sea and presumed dead while attempting a solo east-west Atlantic crossing. The journey was itself part of a performance piece entitled In Search of the Miraculous. I realize this sounds like a fate you'd actively avoid, but at least it was something, and as the years have passed, somethingness has become all I care about.
The first evident quality of this compilation is that there's something wrong with the sound. A reedy static blankets everything, rendering the films silent by forcing me to hit mute. Though I don't think this was intentional, it's unclear which link in the chain failed. Bad production audio? Glitchy film-to-video transfer? Faulty video export? I should e-mail Ubuweb about this, but probably won't. Maybe they already know. Maybe it is intentional.
Thus silenced, Ader comes off in these films as something of a conceptual Buster Keaton, his wiry, distant frame subjected to several stripes of physical turmoil. In 1970's Fall I (Los Angeles) and Fall II (Amsterdam), he takes a couple spills, the former in slow-motion off a roof, the latter on a bicycle straight into one of those urban rivers they're supposed have in the Netherlands. In Broken Fall (Geometric), Ader teeters for a while in a striking down-the-road shot before collapsing into something stting on a tripod. In Broken Fall (Organic), he hangs from the limb of a tree, wriggling and wriggling until ultimately accepting his fate: that of dropping into the river below.
In the middle comes I'm Too Sad to Tell You, Ader's most famous piece. Despite its renown, I can summon sadly little to say about it. He cries on camera for a while — too sad to tell us anything, presumably — which, I can already tell, was a popular artistic endeavor back in the 70s. It actually took me back to those old days of Acconci.
I found Nighfall, which ends the collection, considerably more interesting. It at first appears to be an Abu Ghraibish tableau, with Ader perched on a block as wires run across the ground. But on closer inspection, it's nothing of the sort. Ader was simply one of those unbelievably tall-and-skinny 70s art guys, and he's standing behind the block, not on it. The wires lead to two lightbulbs on the floor, which provide the barn's (or garage's) only illumination. He considers lifting the block, slowly hoists it, then manages to let it drop right onto one of the bulbs, leaving his surroundings half in shadow. It's a surprising, intriguing visual effect.
Though I enjoyed these small films and would watch them again, I get the feeling that they provide only a small, unrepresentative glimpse into what seems to have been the wholly artistic life of Bas Jan Ader. To the library!
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"Here is the challenge of media democracy: to change the way information flows, the way we interact with the mass media, the way meaning is produced in our society. This DVD - a collection of television spots and video clips produced over the years by regular culture jammers - is proof that anyone can seize the media reins and begin producing real meaning." A compilation video from Adbusters contributors. Presented as montage.
I guess I knew I'd encounter this sort of strident advocacy stuff when I started the Ubuweb project. Nonetheless, I have always wondered what gears turn beneath the mindset of an organization like Adbusters. Stunty graphic design has drawn me to its eponymous magazine for numerous flippings-through, but I can't claim to have gained any insight into the greater enterprise of "culture jamming."
The Production of Meaning doesn't clarify anything either. Set to ominous music and peppered with faux film-damage effects, it comprises a series of clips on Adbuster-y subjects: the presence of corporate logos, the percentage of calories from fat in a Big Mac, the shortsighedness of CEOs, "consumerism." The usual suspects.
It's not so much that I disagree with the grievances of material like this — though I can't point to any advertisement-inflicted pain of my own — but that this means of expression is so juvenile and inarticulate. If the villains in your cosmology are as abstract as the crassness of business and the commercial inclinations of the American public, you can simply bat them around in perpetuity, never knowing if you've accomplished or even made progress on your goal — if you can even articulate your goal in the first place.
What's more, most of these stances appear premised on the fact that those taking them have somehow avoided the brainwashing — industrial, cultural, governmental, military, corporate, what have you — that has thoroughly hoodwinked all the sheep with whom they're surrounded. The sheep, of course, can only morally salvaged by having their culture jammed by a bunch of middle-class youngsters in blackspot sneakers.
I could forgive a lot of this if the videos had aesthetic value, but nah, they don't.
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The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a "topography of the self," constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space.
The final third of Acconci's tripartite epic is as different from its predecessors as its predecessors are from one another, retaining a similar sensibility but containing different stuff. The first part has Acconci creating a series of increasingly messy sketches before our eyes — it's like the nuttiest public television how-to-draw show ever shot. The second has repeated left-right-left-right pans over Acconci and a few associates rehearsing some sort of theatrical performance. The third echoes both previous parts by first blindfolding some blonde and then placing a head-covering sheet over the blindfold, then an American flag over that whole getup. The fourth part is an impressive shot of Acconci standing under some overhead lights as chants of "we're young" "we're ready" and "we found it" run over each other, shifting in and out of phase.
If I were to articulate one overarching theme to The Red Tapes, it would be as follows: America... something something. Many of the words said seem to have to do with America. Some actually are "America." Certainly American iconography pops up more and more frequently — and more and more boldly — as the minutes pass. Whether the piece's perspective is anti-America, neutral-to-America, America-disappointed or America-questioning I couldn't say. (It probably isn't pro-America. What video artist is?)
It occurs to me that I've approached much of The Red Tapes' narrative as nonsense, but I wonder: how much of that is a function of expectation? Did I assume, based on what I'd seen from Acconci before, that nothing would make sense? Did that assumption prompt me to not even try to make sense if it? Certainly no work that springs from the human mind can be devoid of meaning and pattern, yet I found it all too tempting to view this one as if it was. Perhaps I've missed out on some enjoyment as a result. If I intend to watch every experimental video on Ubuweb, I certainly shouldn't act as if they're going to come right on over to me.
(The score was by Charles Ives, though, so that's pretty neat. And right at the end, Acconci dedicates the tapes to Lizzie Borden.)
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Blake Williams is a Texas-born, Toronto-based video artist, installation artist and critic. When I first stumbled upon his cinema blog, R and G and B, I instantly understood that he was a pretty sharp character. While most bloggers on film simply write about whatever they happen to see, Williams' posts cover primarily the most interesting names in the medium: Terrence Malick, Alan Zweig, Sangsoo Hong, Miklos Jancsó, Werner Herzog. You know, the ones worth, like, talking about. When I found out that this unsually smart critical perspective accompanies actual art-making skill, I knew I had to engage the man in a conversation.
Colin Marshall: Because what initially hooked me about your blog is the particular selection of pictures you choose to cover, we might first want to establish what we can of your — as people often call this hazy, amorphous quality — "critical perspective." But I can't simply ask you what your critical perspective is, since that doesn't even provide the barest framework within which to answer, so let's reveal it this way: could you name a few of the filmmakers who most frequently and most fully satisfy your viewing sensibilities? Who can you rely on to turn out the movies most closely aligned with your taste?
Blake Williams: My semi-recent spike in film-watching (and, recently, blogging) began as a research tactic for my own video work. Though what I make still rests snugly in the 'fine art' category, I've easily been more inspired by certain films than art in gallery exhibitions. The best film to my taste, then, is one that has an aspect of it that I respond to intensely enough that it evolves into something that I can, without any feelings of plagiarism, call my own. I've probably gotten just as much use from "bad" cinema as the "good."
If I were having a massive idea and productivity strike, I might first turn to the oeuvres of guys like James Benning, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Lynch and Jacques Tati (though, if we're strictly talking good cinema for good cinema, I've yet to be anywhere near disappointed by Mr. Kiarostami).
Colin Marshall: Kiarostami has never disappointed me either. But as a friend once told me, "I mentally divide the people I know into two groups: those who get Kiarostami and those who don't." While I wouldn't quite make it an issue of "getting" his work, I do sense a pretty stark divide between his appreciators and the rest of the filmgoing world. I've tried to introduce my own friends to his pictures, and those disinclined to enjoy them don't tend to give an inch. What would you say Kiarostami does right that other filmmakers don't? What about his work do you think puts off some people?
Abbas Kiarostami: the coolest man alive?
Blake Williams: I'm clearly living in a delusional bubble where everyone loves Kiarostami! Especially living in Toronto, where the Cinematheque Ontario's best of the 90s poll last decade had all four of Kiarostami's films in the top twelve or something ridiculous. He's no Almodóvar, for sure, who appeals to anyone willing to read subtitles, but I've never understood the occasional complaint of pretension that A.K. gets called out on. It's like once he stopped making didactic kids' films (very good ones though, to be sure) and started playing with narrative and postmodern twists, people finally found something to criticize him for.
I think Kiarostami's films can be very clever, but what really gets me is all of the hidden emotion in the veins of his work. Whether I'm watching one of his early shorts or his Koker trilogy or his award-winning 90s stuff, its obvious that he understands the most basic elements of human happiness and sorrow, and pulls them out at just the right moments. I'm still waiting for my first Kiarostami experience in a theatre, which I expect will change the way I see his films once again, for the better.
Colin Marshall: A bubble where everyone loves Kiarostami? Jeez, where might this bubble be located? I wouldn't mind moving in myself.
As much as I'd like to spend this entire interview discussing A.K. — either the Iranian one or the Japanese one, really — I should do a little more exploration of the other names you've dropped. You happened to name another one of my own very favorite filmmakers, Thailand's Apichatpong Weerasethakul. (I even devoted an entire 3Quarksdaily column to Syndromes and a Century.) Either surprisingly or totally unsurprisingly, I've encountered the same problem with his work: I love it more than almost anything else on celluloid, yet when I show it to friends it flops more often than it flies.
And so the exercise in revealing critical perspective continutes: what about Weerasethakul's cinema fires you up? What has he mastered that most filmmakers haven't? When you're about to watch a Weerasethakul film, what about it do you most look forward to savoring?
The greatest moment of 21st-century cinema
Blake Williams: With Apichatpong there's definitely no bubble, unfortunately. When Strand released their DVD of Syndromes and a Century at the beginning of 2008, I told all of my art school friends to anticipate a movie night when I got the disc in the mail. Well, the disc came, and so did the people. I had about fifteen people over and I showed them the film. There was respectful silence throughout, but when it ended three or four of them just went off, criticizing the film's lack of plot, incoherence, emptiness, "pretty pictures and nothing more." That negative tone overshadowed the general mood, and I think everyone ended up leaving feeling pretty ambivalent about it. I was very disturbed by this, because I thought that it was a film above all skepticism and cynicism, but that proved to very much not be the case.
I certainly don't anticipate Apichatpong's films for an emotional response like I do with Kiarostami's, but it's not an intellectual one either. There's an intuitive satisfaction that is beyond my comprehension that floors me in his work. I wouldn't know where to begin if I tried to convince anyone that the vacuum in the steam room at the end of Syndromes is potentially the best cinematic moment of the 21st century, but I believe it to be the case. Likening his work to hypnosis feels cheap, and it isn't merely spiritual or ethereal. I don't think I've learned the adjective to describe the best quality of his work, but when I do, that's my answer to your question.
Colin Marshall: Indeed, despite all I've written — er, tried to write — about his work, I fall just short of conveying the element you're talking about. Suffice to say that I heartily agree about that steam pipe representing the current high point of 21st-century cinema. I do admit to more than a little surprise, though, that your art student compatriots couldn't get with it. I'd have thought that the sort of person interested in pursuing an entire art education would be more than open to an experience like Syndromes.
Before I ask more about your own art education and art career, though, I must spend some time on the first favorite filmmaker you named, who I would bet also happens to be the least known of them all: James Benning. He's currently talked about for what are called his "landscape films," RR, Casting a Glance, 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, which you wrote a post reviewing in April. What do Benning's films express to you that others' — even Weerasethakul's and Kiarostami's — don't?
James Benning's RR (representative still)
Blake Williams: Benning is more of a visual artist in the traditional sense than the other two, never addressing or showing an interest in narrative, using film as an art medium like video art uses video; I guess avant-garde filmmaking is how it's categorized. He tackles two of my favorite subjects in his work, landscape and duration, and does it quite well. I've only scratched the surface of durational filmmaking (Snow, Warhol, Ono, and Benning), but Benning's work is the most welcoming and "pure" that I know. (Though I hate using that word when discussing cinema, Benning is the most deserving.) But more than addressing the most basic formal and structural characteristics of the medium (the temporal length of the reel, the successive, forward motion it is locked into, etc.), he's documenting the American landscape during one of the most rapidly transitional periods it has seen, both industrially and meteorologically. It's all so simple, but heavily weighted with beautiful ideas.
Colin Marshall: And this brings me to what I've come to consider one of the most important issues of perspective in filmgoing. When you think of cinema, what form do you consider it the primary descendant of? I was just reading an old interview with Peter Greenaway, probably the most well-known of the painter-turned-filmmakers, wherein he explains his view that cinema is a descendant of visual art, and that it only produces anything of value when considered that way. This is, I guess, opposed to cinema's being a descendant of a more necessarily narrative-driven form, like live theater. Which branches do you see as the most relevant of film's family tree?
Blake Williams: This assumes that live theatre isn't visual art, which I think it is. In that sense, then, film was just an evolution of that medium. If they (theatre and visual art) are different, I'd say that it's a descendant of visual art, and was a mainstay because of its close relationship to theatre. Like most new technologies (video, internet, HD), they're embraced by the masses and incorporated into forms that are more useful to "them" before they are in the price range of the artists, who then make use of the technologies in their work. Film seems to have been invented and then quickly utilized as a storytelling medium after the very early developmental, experimental years in which the Lumiere bros. were playing around with it — before it was used for more "fine art" purposes by the dadaists and surrealists. There are always some visual artists who are able to sneak in — usually because of wealth acquired from an already established, commercial body of work — and utilize these newer technologies while they're still brand new (for the HD boom, Bill Viola was an early bird), and I think this work has its pluses and minuses (respectively, its ability to be created without influence, and its gimmicky, novelty qualities).
Personally, I am drawn towards filmmaking that rides a line between visual art and theatre (narrative).
Colin Marshall: And this brings us to your career in visual and video art, of which readers can get a pretty solid idea on your site. Reading your statement, one comes away with the notion that your sensibility as a filmgoer and your sensibility as a visual and installation artist are inextricable from one another. Could you describe a bit about how the cinema you view and the art you make influence one another? I imagine you draw plenty of inspiration from filmmakers, but do your art experiences double back and shape how you select and view movies?
Blake Williams: I don't think my art-making influences my movie watching. Rather, I make things that I like, and I watch things that I think I'll like based on my taste, so there will be similarities I suppose. Although I've been working primarily with video in the last few years, I consider myself more of a "light sculptor," if I have to choose one medium. Sometimes I will build these sculptures, but, lately, I've ended up imagining these sculptures in the video world, in works that are fictionalized documentations of the would-be sculptures and installations. This will only happen if the idea for the sculpture/installation is too ambitious for me to realize it in real space, either because of my limited budget, or, more likely, that it's not really possible for it to be built.
In these video incarnations, I've certainly tended toward a more cinematic display of the ideas, which could be extraneous to the point — that, being, to document a sculpture that doesn't, and never will, exist — and I think that that comes from the fact that almost all of my art heroes and influences are from cinema history rather than art history. I'm only recently diving into the dense art history that I've been missing out on (I nixed all of my art history courses in undergrad for film history courses), so I'll see where that goes.
Blake Williams' "The Storm" (2009)
Colin Marshall: Well, hey, the practice documenting entities that don't actually exist has a respectable history. I mean, what Borges wrote alone...
But your desire to commit nonexistent sculpture to video notwithstanding, I can't help but watch a piece like "The Storm" and see cinema at its core. I view it and think, "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie." It's got a sensibility I wish more full-length films had. I daresay that I appreciate some of its moments in the same way that I'd appreciate an Apichatpong Weerasethakul view of the manmade world meeting the natural. So do you have any interest, even an inkling, in making what could be called "movies," as opposed to what's normally called "video art"?
Blake Williams: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," do you mean that it feels like an opening chapter, maybe even unfinished? Or is it that you want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities?
I don't see myself ever making anything that could be described as a feature film, but I could see myself extending my work to over the hour mark in a few years if the project warrants it. Most of the work feels like sketches to me anyway, so I can't justify drawing it out just because I love features. There's also this fear that I have of working with actors, or pretty much anyone else. Right now I have to have complete control of every single facet of a production — the camera, sound, subject, editing, et al — so I wouldn't trust an actor unless it was myself. I like the cinema crowd more than I like the art crowd in general, though, so I'm not through with trying to find a way to become more associated with that somehow. I submit my videos to short film festivals more often than I submit to art galleries, for what it's worth.
Colin Marshall: By saying "Damn, I want to see the rest of that movie," I don't mean that the piece feels unfinished — it feels like a coherent whole — but that, indeed, I'd want to see a feature with similar interests and sensibilities, especially aesthetically speaking. While it stands on its own, I can also watch it as something of a "trailer" for a nonexistent feature-length experience.
Oh, I totally know what you mean about the whole fear-of-working-with-actors thing. On one hand, I realize full well that collaboration is an engine of all manner of artistic innovation and surprise, but on the other hand... I don't really get along with actors that well.
Since you've worked and interacted in both artistic and cinematic circles, then, what perspective do you have on the difference between them? What sort of qualities of their people lead you to prefer the "cinema crowd" to the "art crowd"?
Blake Williams: Just a slight edge in modesty, I guess. All of my good friends are "art people," but then they are my friends. When I talk to curators, art critics, academics, established artists, regardless of how they feel about my work, there is almost always more condescension than there has a right to be. I think I've worked my way into a corner though, because I'm remembering that it's the same way with many film guys I've met too, I just don't know as many personally. I think good guys are hard to find in most fields of creativity.
The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a "topography of the self," constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space.
The Red Tapes' second act is, geometrically speaking, pretty damn fascinating. Though the project itself remains less than coherent, part two offers a host of neat visual constructions to look at. It must be said that I hadn't expected such a stark, appealing use of angular shadow and light from the same guy who spent almost an hour squeezing man-boobs.
The most striking images in this particlar 57 minutes and 51 seconds include a series of slow fades in on sharp, obsidian-looking minimalist structures, lonely hallways with walls that rise and fall in odd ways, shafts of light escaping through abstract openings, a view upward through a fire escape and a trapezoidal "island" around which Acconci roams, delivering a monologue about starting up a new civilization himself.
That's just one of several one-man set pieces Acconci puts on in this part, the most amusing being the extended middle sequence wherein he darts back and forth across an architecturally confused, ladder-strewn living room and acts out both halves of a meandering, indirect domestic dispute as phones ring, clocks tick and alarms buzz. Unease sets in during several of these scenes, as when Acconci paces up and down the hall, compulsively checking inside the door at the end of it, or when he circles around an ever-panning camera in what looks like a brick loft, trying and failing to explain himself.
So, yeah — The Red Tapes makes no sense, and quite frankly, I'm not holding out for everything to fall together in the final hour. But would I want it to? That I'm looking forward to watching tape three ‐ it loads even as I type — should say all that needs be said.
If you like my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, tweet about it or something! Here's a short URL linking to the archive for your convenience: http://bit.ly/8xs7rq
The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic aspirations of the previous decade. Acconci maps a "topography of the self," constructing scenes that suggest both the intimate video space of close-up and the panoramic landscape of film space.
Here it is: the final Vito Acconci piece of my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project. A near-two-and-a-half-hour triptych, it also appears to be something of a magnum opus. Perhaps it gave the last hurrah before Acconci jumped the good ship video for public architecture. While I can't say I'm super-saddened to reach the bottom of Ubuweb's Acconci archive — there's some names down the list I'm rarin' to get to — I'd be lying if I claimed the fellow hasn't grown on me, at least a little bit. Will I never hear this Bronx accent again?
Red Tapes part the first consists chiefly of word pictures delivered in Acconci's voice — sometimes vivid ones indeed — and still images that are only revealed as physical objects after a slight delay. A few beats after fading in on a landscape, Acconci's hand will flip the page it turns out to be printed on, or he'll walk through the frame, casting a flat shadow on what initially appeared to be a real background.
The imagery is mostly non-charged stuff: cars, towers, maps, gargoyles. (Could this be his fascination with the built environment emerging?) Acconci's words, however, when they move past absurdism or geographical free association along the lines of "New Mexico, New Jersey, Old South, Bleeding Kansas, Boston Massacre," are significantly more charged. One can't help but retain the segment when the artist, in silhouette, rambles about a fantasy where in he has sex with Kennedy's dead head, or the one where he discusses pulling out his own nose and lips.
There's some strangely compelling cinematic technique here. I like the periodic fades to gray — expect to see gray faded to in some of my own future work, since I now find pure black and white creatively bankrupt fading shades — and the final sequence where Acconci slaps down a series of cards bearing images of American historical figures while saying "boom, boom, boom" delivers a certain impact. I even laughed at the opening, when he becomes a blindfolded revolutionary but keeps having to cut, revise and restart his big statement to the nation. But what, if anything, all this adds up to presumably cannot be known until the end of part three.
If you like my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, tweet about it or something! Here's a short URL linking to the archive for your convenience: http://bit.ly/8xs7rq
Wonderful early interview with performance artist Vito Acconci from 1973 during the height of his importance as a performance artist (ie., before he began moving into sculpture and, eventually, architecture.) Video quality is poor - there's an interference line running though the picture for much of this, but the expressions and the all-important audio are fine. Acconci is captivating as always. Lots of smoking and drinking in this informal session.
I've looked forward to this one for a few reasons. First, since we've thus far watched only pieces by Vito Acconci, it's refreshing to see something that's just about Vito Acconci. Second, it's an interview, and I'm very much into interviews. Third, having been immersed in the video compartment of Acconci's world but knowing little about him not found on The Wikipedia, I actually wanted a peek into his thought process, despite having been less than won over by his work itself.
The conversation is conducted by the late avant-garde figure Willoughby Sharp, who was also a video artist, publisher, writer, gallerist, etc. Obtaining access to San Jose State's television studios in the early 70s, Sharp produced this Videoviews series of artist interviews with his trusty Sony AV-3400 Porta-Pak, one of those early "prosumer" jobs where you wore a VCR on a shoulder strap and plugged the camera into it. Other guests included Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden and Bruce Nauman, and I'm sure we'll run across at least one or two of them down the road in this video journey.
There's much to appreciate in the conversation's tone and aesthetic, as it distinctly captures one particular subculture in one particular historical moment. The other edge of this sword is that Sharp and Acconci's talk is pretty inside baseball, and I'm not sure I possess the tools to determine how much of it makes sense. Not that I can fault the two guys' passion for their subjects, especially Sharp's — he pitches questions with admirable enthusiasm, though the weary-looking Acconci sometimes seem to struggle with them.
Near as I can tell, most of the interview concerns the integration between Acconci's public work and personal life, especially as regards a triangular relationship he once maintained with two women. Despite all the confessions and the soul-barings and the public masturbation and such, Acconci doesn't initially believe his pieces release all that much information about himself. "I guess I don't feel that I'm revealing anything tremendously personal," he argues, claiming that the spaces he creates would disclose the very same stuff about anyone who happens to occupy them. "These generalized personal elements say very little about me."
This sounds cliché, but Acconci appears to have lived life itself as a piece of performance art, and as early as 1973 the life-art slippage was apparent. "You'd like to be able to get away with what you do in private," Sharp offers, "but it becomes public. But you want it to be public." The conversation periodically swings, as it were, back toward the artist's three-way cohabitation. About this he staged a performance piece at, bizarrely, a "computer convention in Atlantic City." He describes much of his work as either an "attack" on himself for his lifestyle or as an experiment to see how much force and control he could exert on spaces and people: for example, "two girls who like each other would be forced into a competition — and it'd be competition over me."
Sharp, of the mind that Acconci's work is actually quite personal indeed, gets Acconci to admit that he does allow his "life space" to pass through his "museum space." This leads into chatter about exhibitionism, voyeurism, "art" verus "art context," the relative freedom of artistic, sociological and psychological frameworks and how to move away from typical uses of gallery space. "I... guess there's a question there," Sharp observes upon arriving at the end of a mini-monologue of his own in response to one of Acconci's answers.
Abstraction gives way to concreteness toward the end, when Acconci discusses his childhood. The son of an impoverished bathrobe manufacturer who, standing, attended the opera every night, he recalls staging small performances that made his grandmother weep, holding drawing contests in the kitchen and receiving letters in college importuning him to "please study seriously." Growing up in an art-loving Italian family, he didn't at first realize that one could be involved with art and yet not be Italian — when he started enjoying Wagner, his dad wouldn't speak to him for a full two weeks.
Ubuweb is right about the smoking, drinking and casualness, all of which are definitely present. (Acconci appears to be drinking Pepsi out of an old-school can, but still.) I'm reminded both of the interview sensibilities of times gone by and of interview sensibilities that never were. I'm inspired to act on them. Perhaps a series of video interviews, shot with similarly unconventional framing and camera motion, where the only rule is that both host and guest must smoke and drink? That's what I call conceptual art.
If you like my Ubuweb Experimental Video Project, tweet about it or something! Here's a short URL linking to the archive for your convenience: http://bit.ly/8xs7rq
The dynamic tension between 'I and you,' artist and viewer, is perhaps most brilliantly realised in 'Theme Song', a pivotal work. Here he uses the close-up to extraordinary effect, constructing a charged confrontation with the viewer. Acconci is 'face to face,' his head looming onto the screen. With a disquieting intimacy, he shifts between vulnerability and manipulation, candour and seduction, in a pop song driven 'come-on' to the viewer. While Acconci's monologues often refer specifically to women, 'Theme Song' is effective precisely because the 'you' here is un-gendered, non-specific, universal: 'You could be anybody out there.' Describing a relationship of trust and deception, Acconci ultimately acknowledges that the notion of being 'face to face' is, after all, a rather pathetic illusion: 'I can feel your body right next to me...I know I'm only kidding myself...You're not here'
This one's more amusing, or at least more so than the previous Acconci pieces I've covered. It's retains the signature sexual creep-out factor, sure, but it plays with it in a way that I could almost, if I squint, find parodic. People will disagree about whether this sort of thing can sustain 33 minutes, but I chuckled.
The video fades in to the extreme close-up mentioned above, although that description fails to mention that, in it, Acconci assumes a pose most often associated with teenage girls who yammer ceaselessly into see-through phones (which, yes, wouldn't be invented for like a decade) on their bedroom floors. He sprawls toward the camera, puffing on a cigarette and leering into the lens like some sort of amorous troll doll.
I can't help but feel that, were the Acconci of 1973 here today, posting these videos on Youtube, he'd become a cult sensation. Controversy would swirl among his thousands of subscribers: is this guy serious? Does he think his hamfisted, circling, pick-up talk is erotic, or is it a satire of come-upstairs-and-see-my-etchings artist's eroticism? Ambiguity breeds fandom, after all — just ask J.K. Rowling.
Additionally, Acconci's tape player, hidden just out of frame but rarely unheard, provides that outsider-musician sensibility that's proven oh so viral for the likes of the Back Dorm Boys to Tay Zonday. He puts on a new pop song every so often and performs something of a sprechstimme to each, spouting stream-of-consciousness "lyrics" that take every angle to get his unseen interlocutor into bed: "I just need a body next to me. That's all I need." "We're both adults. I need it. You need it." "I don't have to know what you look like — I'll take anything I can get." "I'm ready to take you any time, any time you want." "What can convince you?" "Look how I can wrap myself around you!" "You're starting to get a little afraid of me, right?"
I get the impression that all the songs Acconci employs as backing tracks are super-popular, but the only one I can readily name is The Doors' "People Are Strange" (and I had to look even that up on The Wikipedia to get its title right). In this and other ways, Theme Song is actually something of a time capsule. From all I've pieced together about the early 70s, I imagine enduring the extended, scattershot come-ons of a randy, smoking performance artist as he continually fiddles with the background music was an all too common scenario.
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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.
At long last, the chance to see this piece of Acconci's that everybody seems to know. As it happens, though, there's not much to see, and even less to hear — the video's silent which, given the centrality of Acconci's vocalized fantasies to the piece, seems like either a perverse choice or a technical problem.
But, sheez, eight hours a day. That's commitment to a concept. I imagine medical professionals pleading him not to do it, insurance professionals denyng him coverage, legal professionals advising him to prepare his will. But art is its own cruel mistress. Here, the specific mistress is less video or film art than performance art that just so happens to have been briefly captured on film. And not well-captured, either; the muddy, discolored and indistinct image renders the gallery a grimy void and its visitors indistinct silhouettes.
To be fair, Seedbed isn't particularly well-suited to this medium in the first place. It's much better material for bizarre first-hand experience and/or scandalously whispered memory than the moving image. It might have been neat to watch various gallerygoers walk past the camera and with each one hear Acconci's accompanying improvised masturbatory fantasy, but the time has passed.
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