Publication

  • The Sound Works of Vito Acconci
    Vito Acconci
    Author
    Ryan Haley and James Hoff
    Editors
    Primary Information, 2016
  • GRANTEE
    Primary Information
    GRANT YEAR
    2013

Vito Acconci, THE PEOPLEMOBILE, installation view, detail, 1979. Courtesy of the Artist and Primary Information.

The Sound Works of Vito Acconci is a two-part investigation into the artist's installations that involved sound components from 1972–79. The publication provides a narrative of these works, which were his first interactions with architecture and spatial arrangement and they provided the basis for much of Acconci's interest in architecture and provided the basis of much of his early concern with the field. The first of these two parts is an online archive that collects the artist's audio works from this period and makes them available for free download. The second is an extensive publication that collects the transcriptions, instructions, and ephemera from all of Acconci's installations that included sound.

The influential, provocative, and often radical art-making practices of Vito Acconci have earned him international recognition. Acconci has been a vital presence in contemporary art since the late 1960s; his confrontational and ultimately political works have evolved from writing through conceptual art, bodyworks, performance, film, video, multimedia installation, and architectural sculpture. Since the 1980s, Acconci has focused on architecture and design projects. Acconci's work has been widely shown internationally, in one-person exhibitions at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kolnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has also been shown in numerous group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Documentas 5, 6, and 7, Kassel, Germany; several Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibitions, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Ryan Haley is the photography bibliographer and a librarian in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs at the Stephan A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library. Beginning in 2008, he served on the organizing committee for the New York Contemporary Artists Books Conference. Since 2002, he has also been an editor and designer at Ugly Duckling Presse, where he has worked on titles by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, Eugene Guillevic, Ernst Herbeck, Gabriel Pomerand, Paul Scheerbart, and Su Shi, among others.

James Hoff is the cofounder and director of Primary Information. Along with Miriam Katzeff, he has produced and/or edited dozens of books by artists such as Vito Acconci, Lutz Bacher, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, Sarah Crowner, Destroy All Monsters, Dan Graham, Florian Hecker, Allan Kaprow, Lee Lozano, John Miller, and Aram Saroyan, as well as facsimile editions of the Great Bear Pamphlet Series and Avalanche magazine.

Tim Barnes is an internationally-known percussionist, sound designer, producer, and founder of Quakebasket Records. Barnes has performed with seminal artists such as Jim O'Rourke, Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori, Marina Rosenfeld, Zeena Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, John Zorn, Henry Flynt, Glenn Kotche, La Monte Young, and Steve Dalachinsky. In 1999, Barnes collaborated with Ira Cohen to publish the first recorded works of Angus MacLise. Barnes's work has also been utilized by corporations such as Nike, Starbucks, Merrill Lynch, Cadillac, and American Express. Barnes serves on the Board for ArtxFM and is the artistic director of the performance/visual arts venue Dreamland.

Primary Information is a non-profit organization founded in 2006 devoted to printing artists' books, artists' writings, out-of-print publications and editions. Our period of focus is from the early Sixties to the present, with a particular emphasis on the strategy of using and conceptualizing publications as a distributable exhibition space. As part of this educational mission, Primary Information freely distributes art-historical documents and publications online (with full permission from copyright holders) as pdfs