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Leah Tschumper
Metro State University
4D
Mario Sanchez
Vito Hannibal Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci was born in The Bronx, New York on January 24, 1940. He is best known for his landscape architecture, performance art, and installation art. He went to the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Iowa. He started his career as a poet but later began to do video pieces, installations, and photography using his body as the subject. “Seedbed” was a piece that was created in 1971. In this piece, he had a wooden ramp that he laid beneath and he had viewers walk over while he masturbated about them, exclaiming his fantasies with them. In this work he wanted to incorporate the viewer into the work but he also wanted to feel the pleasure of his work. Much of his work has caused quite a bit of controversy throughout the years. By the 1980s, he primarily focused on permanent sculptures and installations. One of these pieces was ”Instant House,” which was created out of flag, wood, springs, pulleys. He also created some pieces while focusing on architecture and landscapes. One of his commission pieces was for Frontier Airlines Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This piece was called “Walkways Through the Walls.” It intertwines the private space of the Frontier Airlines Center space with the public in order to symbolize how the airlines is seen as a continuous plaza. He also had a work in Colorado at the Arvada Center for Arts and Humanities called “Dirt Wall.” This piece is made out of glass and steel as well as volcanic rock and red sand and other minerals. This piece is 24 feet tall and starts inside the building and rises out in order to symbolize bringing what is underground up and what is outside, in. Some of his other works include “Face of the Earth #3,” (1988), “City of Words lithograph” (1999), “Murinsel”, and “Crash” (1985). Much of his work was based around confrontation and situationism. He married an artist named Rosemary Mayer in the 1960s and passed away on April 27, 2017 from a stroke possibly. His work is pretty interesting to me because I think much of it has to do with shock value and I think that it is an interesting way of going about being an artist. I personally like some of his sculpture pieces but I do not like his performance pieces because I feel they are pretty plain and only gain interest because of the shock value.