Kate Bauer

Seedbed
Vito Acconci
1972, 10 min, color, silent, Super 8 film

This film features rare documentation of Acconci’s seminal 1972 performance/installation Seedbed. In this famous piece, Acconci lay hidden underneath a ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating. The artist’s spoken fantasies about the visitors walking above him were heard through loudspeakers in the gallery.

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- Experimental poet, pioneer of conceptual & video art, dedicated to architecture
- How to travel over a page vs. how to travel within a city
- Concentrating on self/ body changes, adapts to stress

“a public space is occupied by private bodies… public space is the last gasp of the civilized world”

- Art as a kind of exchange between people
- Viewers have to struggle to “get” art
- Question habvits/ conventions
- Gallery/ Museum- always a private place; never public?
- Re-invent architecture/ body as a cause of architecture

“studio works bext when people argue a lot”

- If something starts out private, can it later become public?
- Viewer adapting to art, rather than art adapting to you
- How do we attach to a specific building?
- Architecture from the bottom up; inside out

“People’s lives don’t change by standing in front of art.”

Writer > Performance Artist > Architect

Architecture as Operation:
Operation I: push & pull
Operation II: split/ separate (an architecture of strips and strands)
Operation III: stretch (architecture of landscape)
Operation IV: twist/ warp/ morph

Art as:
a.) verb
b.) noun

Tradition of art as “do not touch”

Art as isolation

Notion of things being available to everyone

When you’re designing a space, you’re inherently designing people’s interactions within a space.