Problematizing the concept of privacy in Vito Acconci's work

Artist as an individual and audience as a community are influenced by the conditions of setting in which sensitivity becomes an opportunity for artistic practice as well as criticism. It is not the artist who deals with social issues that matters, it is all about the creater and the receiver who is inevitably affected by the social environment. The relation of proximity and distance between art and life has placed a new language of creation in the centre of art by means of transforming the problem of representation when the first traces of conceptional art appeared in the early 20th century. This transformation was conducted from within testimonies that were a part of artist's own fiction. This new language was the utilization of body. The relation between interaction and reciprocity has helped the framework of art shape through the openness of the concepts of space and place. Thus the correlation of private and public attracts attention because of the performances carried out in 1960s. While the use of privacy in public space as a content points to the direct utilization of privacy, the artists, on the contrary, considered their bodies as part of public space such as furniture, lines, colours etc. and perceived themselves as direct part of this concept. While problematizing the concept of privacy, Vito Acconci invites the audience to the stage set by himself and he renders them to be part of it which he called confrontation. In fact, he has made use of this confrontation in all of his artistic works and placed the community in the centre of the problems. The conception of convention was used as a language of expression and thought along with its usual sense. What is interesting about Acconci is that he directed the tension between refusal and espousal not from himself towards the audience but from the audience towards himself keeping his body at the threshold point. He depicted his privacy indirectly in his early performance yet later he started to directly criticize architecture taking out the setting out of galleries. He also criticized political issues placing the building units into the perception of limit of privacy. Key Words: Performance Art, Body, Public Place, Private Place, Privacy.