In January 1972 the American artist Vito Acconci performed what would become his most notorious work, Seedbed, in a newly-opened downtown New York gallery. Dependent on the gallery-visitor’s presence to provoke his desire, Acconci lay hidden below an artificial floor engaged in solitary sexual activity while starkly verbalising his fantasies. A seemingly unequivocal assertion of masculinity and virility it exposed dominant assumptions about the gendering and heteronormativity of the artist and the creative act. However, not simply a gallery performance, the work resulted from the artist’s understanding, indebted to the then current urban theory of Serge Chermayeff and Alexander Tzonis, of the exhibition as a space of encounter continuous with the fabric of the city. The critic Carter Ratcliff pithily observed that it was an attempt to ‘create an eroticized space in which the texture of urban obsessions can be intensified.’
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine Acconci’s interrogation of heteronormative masculinity in its historical and geographical specificity, at a moment when lower Manhattan and the spaces and character of contemporary art was being socio-economically reconfigured through the departure of industrial manufacture and the competing claims of rights to the city. A principal motive for Acconci’s work, as has previously been acknowledged, was the emergent ideas and practices of protest of Radical Feminism. This paper, however, argues that the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, which occurred in close vicinity to the artist’s residence, instead provided the exemplary contestation that would fundamentally determine how he questioned masculinity. This is considered through the seemingly mundane cartography of the city in his earlier ‘street works’ and ‘photo activities’ which connected performance, visibility and the physiology of the body with the workaday world of labour, consumption and networks of mobility. These documents, when considered in their relation to historical sites of contestation, are shown to be a subtle mapping of anxieties, codes and urban spaces of masculinities, anticipating the artist’s provocative and polarised staging in the 1972 exhibition.