Annette Fierro is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her recent book, The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle, Paris 1981-98 (MIT, 2003) focused on the transparent civic monuments built as part of François Mitterrand's Grand Projets. She is currently working on a book that speculates on the influence and extension of 1960's and 70's countercultural architectural movements into London's contemporary sphere of architecture and urban infrastructure.

Liz Kotz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of California, Riverside. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University. She writes on contemporary art and on interdisciplinary avant-gardes of the postwar era. Her book Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art was recently published by MIT Press.

Alan Licht is a guitarist who over the past two decades has worked with a veritable who's who of the experimental world, from free jazz legends (Rashied Ali, Derek Bailey) and electronica wizards (Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke) to turntable masters (DJ Spooky, Christian Marclay) and veteran Downtown New York composers (John Zorn, Rhys Chatham). His sound and video installations have been exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. Licht has written extensively about music, art and film; his first book, An Emotional Memoir of Martha Quinn, was published by Drag City Press in 2003; a new book, Sound Art:Beyond Music, Between Media, the first extensive survey of the genre in English, will be published by Rizzoli in fall 2007.

Christine Poggi is Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (1992) and recently completed Artificial Optimism: The Art and Politics of Italian Futurism, due out from Princeton University Press in 2008.

Frazer Ward is an art historian and critic whose writing has appeared in publications including Art Journal, Art+Text, Cinema Journal, Documents, Frieze, October, Parkett, and various anthologies. He wrote a text surveying Vito Acconci's career for the Phaidon Press monograph on Acconci, and is currently working on a book project dealing with performance art and its publics, 1965-2000. He is an Assistant Professor at Smith College teaching the history of contemporary art and architecture.

Matthew S. Witkovsky is Associate Curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. He has written extensively on Dada, Czech art and architecture, and subjects in twentieth-century and contemporary photography. His most recent exhibition, Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945, is currently touring the United States and Europe. Among future projects is an exhibition devoted to uses of photography in vanguard art of the 1960s and 1970s.

Schedule

10:45am - Christine Poggi
Vito Acconci's Powerfields
(Download presentation)

11:15am - Liz Kotz
Dissolving the Self into Language: Acconci's poetics
(Download presentation)

11:45am - Alan Licht
The Music Rises and Prevails: Voice, Tape and Songs in the work of Vito Acconci

12:15pm - Q&A moderated by Meredith Malone

2:15pm - Matthew Witkovsky
Reasons to Move: Some Notes on Vito Acconci's Still Photography
(Download presentation)

2:45pm - Frazer Ward
Marginal Acconci

3:15pm Annette Fierro
The Body Goes Public: Vito Acconci's Recently Unearthed Landscapes
(Download presentation)

3:45pm - Q&A moderated by Monica Amor

4:15pm - Wine Reception to follow