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.