Project 3: Interactivity
ARTIST RESEARCH

S. Natasha Mercado
4/14/2014
ART308
Artist Research: Vito Acconci

            During the past five decades Vito Acconci has experimented with different types of art, from the art of poetry to performance pieces and video recordings, his diverse interests and capacities have manifested through his works from the beginning of the 60’s. Vito Acconci worked with language and repetitive performances where he would question society. He left the world of the institutionalized gallery and museum in order to explore design and architecture due to his interest in the audience becoming participants or users of his work. Aside from the role of the viewer Acconci was also interested on exploring the realms within the public and private space. Both his famous Where we are now, Who are we anyway? (1976) installation and his Following Piece (1969) performance piece explored and traversed the public and private space as well as allowed the public to become participants rather than a passive viewer.

            In his Where we are now, Who are we anyway? installation piece Vito Acconci painted a room black inside the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo and then designed a 50 feet long wooden plank that had feet and contained stools at both sides of the table. Although the wooden plank appeared as a table, its length continued on out through the window. From the outside the plank was viewed as a divider or “high-diving board”w. The extension of the table to the outdoors changed both the private (inner) and public (outer) perspective of it. In his performance Following Piece, Vito Acconci followed individuals at random with a camera until they entered a private space. The individual person chosen to be a participant becomes the controller of the piece while the “agent becomes passive…of the space and time around him…the space and time of another” (Acconci, par. 2).  Both of Acconci’s pieces compare the isolation of the private space against the public space and explore the role of the viewer as the user or participant.

             In his Where are we now, Who are we anyway? installation, Vito Acconci transformed the gallery space by painting the room inside the gallery and adding a 50 feet long wooden plank portrayed as a table with stools at either side. What started as a place to rest in the gallery became an instrument to leave the walls of the gallery. The context of the gallery implies ownership over the wooden plank table until the table steps out of the private into the outside public domain. Inside the private space this is both an art work and a common architectural form that invites the user, while on the outside, the audience sees the plank as a divider or “high-diving board”. Once the piece reaches the outdoors it is no longer treasured or valuable. Instead, it becomes a regular wooden plank sticking outside the window interacting with the rest of its environment.

            In Following Piece Vito Acconci chose random individuals in the streets to follow until they reached a private space. The clips would range from 2-3 minutes to 6-8 hours depending on where the individual was going and provided a way for Acconci to move into the different spaces around him. The decision of time and space were no longer his but up to the individual being followed. He could become “tied into another person’s time and space…could be almost literally dragged along by another person” . The fact that Acconci could not enter the public space of the participant enhanced the barrier between the public and private domain. Both works demonstrate the metaphorical wall between the public and the private space, the context the work is given based on the space, and the role change of the audience from being the viewer to a participant. 

http://archrecord.construction.com/features/interviews/0718acconci/abridged/0718Acconci-1.asp

Where are we now, Who are we anyway?
1976
50 feet long wooden plank and wooden stools

http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/conceptual-artacconcis-following-piece.html

Following Piece
1969
Photograph of video performance

Works Cited

Acconci, Vito. “The Meaning of Place in Art and Architecture.” Walker Art Center. Pp. 4-5. Accessed: 21/09/2009. Print.

McMahon, Jp. “Vito Acconci’s Following Piece.” Smarthistory. Creative Common Attribution. 2009. Web.

Rousseau, Bryant. “The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci.” Architectural Record. Pp. 1-7. Nd. Web.

S. Natasha Mercado
4/25/14
ART308
Artist Research Interactivity: Judy Baca

            Judy Baca, a Mexican-American artist and activist working primarily in Los Angeles, has dedicated her career creating partnerships with community members in order to influence social change. Most of her public art have been representational murals that address the identities and concerns of underrepresented populations such as women, immigrants, and the economically disadvantaged. These mural installations are located in the neighborhoods in which the participants live where the work becomes a joint ownership based on its contributing creation. As one of Baca’s main goals, she urges a specific crowd to get together to express their hidden voices as one voice and to speak to the injustices of society, “I want to use public space to create a public voice for, and a public consciousness about people who are, in fact, the majority of the population but who are not represented in any visual way.”(Baca)

            Her collaborative public murals are not only a representation of the togetherness between the people of the community she is working with and their social class, gender or race but it opens up to the larger picture including the historical reference that brought these groups of people together. Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles engaged hundreds of culturally and economically diverse 14-21 year olds, historians, gang members, artists, scholars, and community members(Baca) . Completed over the course of five years, it served as a narrative of centuries of California history. Baca brought the community together of people with various interests and talents in order to create a piece that symbolized their history, experiences, and the integrating of different classes, race and genders. A few years later, Baca started working on a larger project called the World Wall: A Vision of the Future without Fear where she teamed up with 45 students and artists to communicate an international message of peace for humanity. Both pieces serve as a narrative that assesses the socio-political and cultural nature of the work by bringing a single community or the international sphere together to share their own historical context and beliefs.

            The mural titled, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” is the longest mural in the world. The content with the huge mural begins with the prehistoric times and portrays California’s past by depicting the historical periods and events of groups such as “its indigenous peoples, Spanish colonialism, the Mexican Republic, and the U.S. conquest and its rule to the present time” (Franco) . The wall became a place where people expressed their rights and thoughts on the negative aspects of society and its history. The various panels designed by Judy Baca depicted the struggles of people who played a significant role in building the state; the walls contained people whose contributions had been previously ignored. One of the main reasons why Baca designed this mural was to utilize its artistic content as a means to educate people and instill a sense of pride and meaning to the lives of their families and communities. This hidden and neglected history was brought to the eyes of the public by bringing the community together, share their voices, and educate younger generations. Another example of how Baca exemplifies this is through her international The World Wall mural where she tries to portray “A Vision of the Future Without Fear”.

            In the World Wall Baca takes the same principles developed in the Great Wall of Los Angeles and applies them to international communities. The goal was for the panels to travel around the world where artists would paint and portray peace and change in their own countries. Baca states the World Wall is a “message of hope, a wake up call to action for those who cherish the unbridled fury of the human spirit and the hope of all people for a future without fear”(The World) , a place where others would be educated and would become aware of all the misfortunes and unfair treatment around the globe. This public piece, with each panel traveling around the world, brings not only communities together but connects nations as well. The scales of The Great Wall of L.A. and The World Wall embrace all cultures and combine the voices of those unheard. It brings the public back to reality to realize the things that actually matter. These murals might be considered political art because of its entire political, social, and historical context as well as the placement and its surrounding environment.

http://inter_twine.typepad.com/the_divide/2004/02/the_great_wall_.html                                  

The Great Wall of Los Angeles
1974

http://www.judybaca.com/now/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=154&Itemid=95

The World Wall

 Works Cited

Baca, Judith F. “Marking Territories”. Quotes. OJOS. 2008. Web.

Baca, Judith F. “Artist Statement.” The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear. Nd. Web.     

Franco, Jimmy Sr. “The Great Wall of Los Angeles: A View of California’s Past”. Latino Point    of View. July 29, 2011. Web.

“Judith F. Baca: Artist, educator, activist”. OJOS. Smithsonian Institution. 2004. Par. 4. Web.

“The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear.” Judy Baca. UCLA SPARC. 2012. Web.