Vito Acconci

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: once I've exposed my fears and shames publicly, then I might be able to face them in private."

An epic meditation on psychoanalysis, the Baader-Meinhof, feminism, and pre-revolutionary Russia.

A probing portrait of Chris Burden, an artist who took creative expression to the limits and risked his life in the name of art.

Compilation film consisting of material from various artists who are involved in body art

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.

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 often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given performance. The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, November 9 –15, 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibilities of representing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Documentary about the Mekons.

In these three exercises, Acconci plays with trans-gender illusions, manipulating and altering his own body parts to suggest sexual transformations.

"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 while the background shifts: bare walls—a corner with a window on one wall—outside, on a roof, with sky as the ground—outside, on a terrace, with other buildings and windows as the ground—inside, in a living room, bookcase and couch in the background. I'm silent; there's a voice-over, it's my voice: on screen, I'm talking about circling you, wrapping myself around you, as I did around 'her,' a person from my past: a kind of trap. When I go off screen, the talk shifts, becomes dreamier—fantasy talk, quasi-hypnotic—it's as if we're on a beach, we're covered by sand—it's as if we're in a field, we're rolling down a hill."

A ten minute super-8mm work from 1970 by Vito Acconci.

Acconci's open mouth is framed by the camera in an extreme close-up, bringing the viewer uncomfortably close. A desperate sense of strained urgency comes across as Acconci gasps, "I'll accept you, I won't shut down, I won't shut you out.... I'm open to you, I'm open to everything.... This is not a trap, we can go inside, yes, come inside...." Acconci continues to plead in this way for the length of the tape, his mouth held unnaturally wide open. The pathological psychology of such enforced openness betrays a desperate struggle to accept and be accepted by others. The sustained image of Acconci's open mouth also evidences a sinister, vaguely threatening streak that is more or less evident in much of Acconci's work.

"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 Intermix