Arm Bending Piece, 1969

Currently an architect interested in working in the public sphere, Vito Acconci started out as a poet, using the space of the page as a place for words to perform. He shifted his activity from the realm of writing to that of three-dimensional reality in the late 1960s and developed a series of performances and related works in photography, film, and video, where he is both the subject and the actor. In certain cases he attempts to modify his own body, studying how it adapts to or opposes resistance to possible stimuli. In this process, vulnerability is understood as an element allowing him to open himself up to viewers. [...]