Navel gazing of the mostly video kind
Vito Acconci really into himself Space-filling focus tonight at MOCCA
Vito Acconci is one of those rare artists responsible for an artwork almost everyone has heard about, many have discussed and yet very few ever seen.
In Seedbed, the New York artist is shown mostly prone underneath a specially made floor in New York’s Sonnabend Gallery floor, endlessly masturbating. A10-minute silent Super8 film shot in 1972 — part of an allAcconci show at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) tonight — Seedbed has garnered much interpretation over the years.
At the time, Acconci embodied the committed artistic response to the Me Decade ’ 70s, where porn and other private practices became part of the public parade of personal excess. To him, the gallery was “ a place where a kind of community could form. I tried to use it as if it was a town square.”
Acconci likes the idea of people congregating, of spaces filling.
Tonight begins with “ Interiors, Buildings, Parks,” a survey of some of his studio’s design and architectural work.
It includes the Mobius Bench, designed for sitting in Southern California mall. The show is a meditation of how spaces affect our lives. Just as Acconci was a central figure to the culture of self- centredness, he’s now central to the new culture of containment.
His “ acts of architecture” grow directly out of his early gallery pieces. Some of the Super8 work being shown at MOCCA, with Acconci in attendance, is discussed in Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissim, by Rosalind Krauss. To her, Acconci’s early genius was in his understanding of video’s inherent psychological bias, in its ability to get inside the artist’s head — and the viewer’s head, too — while seemingly focusing on the face or body. Of the early work on view tonight, Reception Room (19732004) rolls out the artist’s selfcentredness as if it were a patient in an operating room.
Covered in a white sheet in an Italian gallery, with only his buttocks and part of one leg bare, the artist rolls and twists like someone having a nightmare while surrounded by onlookers.
In one sense, the exhibition is therapy that begins with an admission of failure. “I should have been here,” goes his voiceover, “ I should have been able.”
Acconci has suggested that Reception Room
was a means for him to come to terms with his own uncertainties.
“ Once I’ve exposed my fears and shames publicly,” he says, “ then I might be able to face them in private.”
Early in Reception Room, Acconci addresses “ you.” This may or may not be gallery- goers, the video’s viewers or a woman named Cathy he may or may not want to remain close to. Whoever “ you” is, everything’s really about him.
This being Vito Acconci, the artist gets really up- close and personal with himself for a lengthy discussion about everything, down to “ the pimples on my leg” and “ on my ass.”
There’s a lot of Woody Allen in Acconci.
Like Allen — similarly a product of the self- absorbed ’ 60s and ’ 70s — Acconci in the early ’ 70s made himself the subject of a stand- up routine.
Another Allen parallel exists, with the voice. In the way that Allen’s smirky whine brings everything together, Acconci’s resonant, rich Bronx- y accent connects the surface of his art — the design work or the surfaces of his body — with a whole lot of soul beneath.
It’s a classic American voice, part precinct detective reminiscing about a case and part actor filling a roll as if it were a cathedral and the sound of his voice was an entire choir. pgoddard@thestar.ca Just the facts What: Vito Acconci: Interiors, Buildings, and Parks, from the Acconci Studio (7 p.m.). Early Super8 Films 1969-1973 (9 p.m.) Where: Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 952 Queen St. W. When: Tonight Extra: Acconci lectures at 5 p.m. today at the University of Toronto’s Earth Sciences Auditorium, 5 Bancroft Ave.