Vito Acconci

"Vito Hannibal Acconci (born January 24, 1940) is a Bronx, New York-born, Brooklyn-based designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist."

I first came across him in a lecture last week on Matthew Barney. In this lecture, looking at The Cremaster Cycle, Barney mentioned Acconci as an influence and showed a short clip. His work immediately appealed to me so I decided to do more research on him. "Undertone" was the first video of his I came across, I immediately liked the fuzzy quality and the long-haired man as soon as he spoke. The video tells a sort of narrative of a man and his masturbating fantasies. Despite the sexual undertones, there is something very gentle, caring and loving about this video. This man is trusting us with an intimate fantasy, letting us, the audience, into his subconscious and dream world. The trust between the audience and the narrator grows as he seems desperate not to be judged but just to be listened to. And with a voice like his, it's hard not to.

This video has given me various ideas for my own work, it has made me think I need to strip my work back quite a bit. I need to slow down, I am too eager to produce feature lengths films with complicated technical effects when I should be relishing the basic idea of filming: capturing an emotion, a movement, a voice.

To do this, I am going to start filming on my phone, not too sure how i am going to transfer the films but i will find a way. I want to capture daily things; toilet flushing, opening the curtains in the morning, getting into bed at night. I need to film things with just myself, no other help. See how I manage. This will be my project for next week, film as much as I can and then try and then edit it next week to create a journey of my films.

Sounds good huh?

Thanks Vito!