Vito Acconci's Seedbed: Performance Art Analysis

Performance art was created in the late 1950’s with its precedents being Futurism and Dada in the 20th century. It was often associated with issue-based politics – feminism, ecological and anti-nuclear issues and time-based and processed art practised by some of the conceptualists. Performance provided a means through which the geography and events of ‘found’ sites could be approached outside the representational means of painting and sculpture. Allan Kaprow’s Yard and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed represent the ever-changing nature of performance and installation art through the decades. Reinventions, documentation, audience participation with the use of the body are key factors to these performances. One could almost say that Acconci was the generation

Allan Kaprow was considered to be the father of the Happenings, the precursor to performance art. The Happenings were intellectually rigorous site-specific, impermanent works that defied commoditization and gave birth to performance and installation art. Happenings incorporated improvisation and public participation within and beyond the traditional museum and gallery context. The key contributors included Carolee Schneemann, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. The artwork Yard was originally a sculpture made in the sculpture garden of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. It consisted of hundreds of used tires covering the ground in no particular order. Five tarpaper mounds emerged from the tires. Visitors were encouraged to walk on the tires, and to throw them around as pleased. Its main concept was to create an

For him the modernist practice of art is more than the production of artworks; it also involves the artist’s disciplined effort to observe, engage, and interpret the processes of living, which are themselves meaningful as most art, and certainly more grounded in common experience. In “The Education of the Un-Artist, Part III” (1974) Kaprow was concerned about how and what we communicate in modern society, what happens to us in the process and how it may connect people with natural processes beyond society. For Kaprow the contents of everyday life – eating strawberries, sweating, shaking hands when meeting someone new – are more than merely the subject of art. They are the meaning of life. He sees the art as a convention, by which the meanings are framed, intensified, and interpreted. The audience in his performances were involved physically (by being required to walk, eat, drink, etc.), mentally (by being required to follow directions), emotionally (by the darkness and strangeness of the interior of the cave), and mystically. He attends as an artist to the meanings of experience instead of the meanings of