This essay focuses on the most notorious of the works by the American artist Vito Acconci, his performance-installation Seedbed, and explores how its reception-history informs its meaning. It specifically considers the way in which Marcel Duchamp was drawn upon as precedent, both by critics in the 1970s and in debates over the past two decades about gender identity. Taking up the purported performative and libidinous dimension of interpretation, as proposed by Amelia Jones, a consideration is given to the ambiguous and unstable features of this reception-history, especially as it was articulated by the critic Robert Pincus-Witten who provided the first significant claim about such a relationship. To this end, Duchamp's erotic object Wedge of Chastity is used as a way of highlighting the implications and instabilities in interpretation and Duchamp as precedent.
The essay as a whole reflects upon the enactment of masculinity in Acconci's work, as previously discussed by Jones, but problematises her interpretation by questioning what function a theory of sexuality has in understanding the work.