Kickstarter

For this project I plan to recreate a famous performance from the 1960's called "Following Piece." The "Following Piece" is composed of a series of documented performances made over the course of a month in 1969 by the artist Vito Acconci. In this work Acconci picked, each day, a random stranger (unbeknownst to them) to follow around the streets of New York until he or she entered a private location.

 In this reiteration I plan to hire a professional Private Investigator to follow Acconci around New York for one day and document, through photography and notation, his activities. The private investigator will only observe and notate, there will never be an interaction with Acconci. These documents, both photographic and written, will compose a new work made over 40 years after the original work entitled "The Following Piece." I have titled this work to connote an obvious connection to the activities of the original work (i.e. following), but also in the sense of a sequence, in that, this work follows Acconci's work, it is the next in the sequence.

 Over the course of the day the Private Investigator will, as closely as possible, notate the details of Acconci's activities, behaviors, expressions and characteristics. The Private Investigator will abide by the same rules as Acconci in that he will never follow him into a private location, but only observe Acconci, as best as he can, from a safe distance. One of my central interests in pursuing this project is exploring and extrapolating the notion of the document-as-artwork, which was a dominant motif within the ephemeral, experimental and performative practices of the 1960's and 70's Conceptual Art movement. Most of these art documents, to me, feel like crime scenes, they are poetic and cryptic and allude to events the documents represent, but they never summarize them. This led me to the idea of creating an artwork-as-document that exists through a very particular and non-artistic, but precise lens: that of the private investigator.

 The Private Investigator I plan to use is certified and professional and because of this he is quite expensive. He will charge $75.00 an Hour (plus expenses) and I will need to employ him for at least 10 hours, so I am hoping to raise at least $800.00 to fund the making of this work.

 If funded, this performance will occur within the next two months so participants should expect to receive their gifts by early to mid-august.

 

Thank you for your time and interest!

 

xoxo,

Kevin