Streetwise

If Happenings bled glitz and brought art to the people, then Street Works rose from the gutters, and the people often had to be lucky enough to find them. Perhaps that’s why the latter isn’t as well remembered in Sixties lore: The conceptual-art performances of a group of poets and artists, many such works were ephemeral moments carried out, as the name infers, on the streets. But if the performances were transient, they were decidedly not serendipitous in nature. Instead, they were thoughtfully formed and executed by the artists themselves as a kind of weird, carefully timed sculptural movement, and they couldn’t be bought or sold. And some weren’t for the squeamish, such as Vito Acconci’s Trademarks, which documents the artist’s process of inking and printing self-inflicted bite marks on his body. (Acconci is also infamous for Seedbed, for which he masturbated, unseen, under the floor of the Sonnabend Gallery while fantasizing into a microphone about the people walking above him.)

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• Vito Acconci
• Lakewood
• Laboratory of Art and Ideas
• Marjorie Strider
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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A new exhibit, In Plain Sight: Street Works and Performances, 1968-1971 — which opens today with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar, 404 South Upham Street in Lakewood — offers an unprecedented look at the movement, which included poets Acconci, Bernadette Mayer and Hannah Weiner, and artists Eduardo Costa and Marjorie Strider, as well as Renaissance man John Perreault, who also co-curated the show. Through surviving photographs, costumes, props, video and audiotapes, In Plain Sight reconstructs the ephemeral and reminds us of a movement that possibly spawned today’s body art, flash mobs and guerrilla street art while never crossing the line of commercialism that those genres can’t help but embrace.

The exhibit continues through January 4; log on to www.belmarlab.org or call 303-934-1777.
Sept. 24-Jan. 4, 2008