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Fresh Acconci

Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley

This video is no longer available

Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelly, Fresh Acconci (still), 1992.

e-flux presents Me, You, and Everyone We Know Fresh Acconci
Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley
1992

45 Minutes
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Date
Repeat screening Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley, Fresh Acconci (1992), streaming from Wednesday, July 7 through Tuesday, July 20, 2021.

Following a conversation about the physical beauty of performance artists, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy collaborated on Fresh Acconci, a restaging of early works by the New York-based artist Vito Acconci that explored questions of social interaction, the distinctions between public and private behavior, and the objectification of the human body. Using Hollywood film actors, Kelley and McCarthy set the video in a Spanish-style home in the Hollywood Hills, an area known as a locus of communal living and cult compounds in the 1960s and 1970s. Fresh Acconci collapses performance art with Hollywood movies and the private rituals of countercultural collectives, conflating multiple contemporary mythologies from otherwise unrelated sectors of the culture.

Fresh Acconci is presented here as one of five films and videos in Part Two | Gendering, Disgendering, Transgendering, the second of four programs in the online series Me, You, and Everyone We Know: Interrelationality, Alterity, Globalization programmed by Irmgard Emmelhainz for e-flux Video & Film. The series will run in four thematic parts from June 23 through August 18, 2021. Each part will include a two-week group screening, and a live discussion.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Category
Performance, Sexuality & Eroticism, Bodies
Subject
Video Art, Community, Art Collectives, Queer Art & Theory, Transgender
Return to Part Two | Gendering, Disgendering, Transgendering

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums—from performance, photography, film, and video, to sculpture, drawing, and painting.

Mike Kelley (1954-2012) was an American artist regarded as one of the most influential members of the Conceptual Art movement. Concerned with abjection, youth, class, and the divide between high and low culture, Kelley’s work was often both playful and grotesque, using found objects like stuffed animals, knickknacks, and child-like drawings in its skeptical investigation of societal norms.

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