Evolution 2004

Performing Architecture: Presentation by Vito Acconci
The Leeds Club

12.30am - 2.30pm
£5.50/£4.50

Three Adaptation Studies, Vito Acconci, video still, courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix

Since the late ’60s New York artist/architect Vito Acconci has produced provocative and often radical and confrontational performances, films, videos, writings, installations and architectural designs. Beginning with intense physical and psychological explorations of his body in space and its interaction with others and the environment - Acconci’s work has evolved into the construction of space itself: ‘I gradually realised I was more interested in the passer-by in the city. The person who stops at something not because it is labelled as art, but for some reason or another it connects with this person’s life … I was more interested in applied art than pure art.’ In his presentation Acconci will discuss his early work and more recent transition into architecture and urban design with Acconci Studio.

Eros, Outrage and the Toothless Pixel: Presentation and screening by Carolee Schneemann
Presented in collaboration with the University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies
The Leeds Club

3.30 - 5pm (programme 1)
6.30 - 8.30pm (programme 2)
£5.40/£4.50

Fuses, Carolee Schneemann, film still

Carolee Schneemann is one of the pioneers of performance, installation and film/video art. Schneemann was amongst the first to use her body to animate the relationship between the world of lived experience and the imagination, as well as issues of the erotic, the sacred and the taboo. In this series of two events Schneemann will screen early film works including the personal and intimate Autobiographical Trilogy series which features the expanded dual projection work Kitch’s Last Meal. The programme will also include a screening of the artist’s most recent video work, the double-screen Devour, which combines political disasters, domestic intimacy and enlarged detail of human and mechanical gesture. The films will be interspersed with discussions and a presentation by the artist.

Films (all Carolee Schneemann)
Programme 1: Fuses (1964-7, 22 mins, part I of Autobiographical Trilogy, 16mm, colour, silent); Plumb Line (1971, 18 mins, part II of Autobiographical Trilogy, super 8 printed to 16mm, colour, sound); Viet Flakes (1965, 11 mins, 8mm printed to 16mm, b&w/toned, sound by James Tenney)
Programme 2: Kitch’s Last Meal (1973-8, 3 x 18 min reels, part III of Autobiographical Trilogy, super 8, dual projection, colour, sound on cassette tape); Devour (2003-04, 7 mins 52 secs, DVD, )

Recommended events/exhibitions: Performing Architecture | Looking Straight In/Out | Antenna
Further Reading: Carolee Schneemann website | Imagining Her Erotics (Carolee Schneemann, 2003, MIT Press) |
Wide Angle (Volume 20, No. 1, 1998, John Hopkins University Press)