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Collage of five diverse artworks from the Hammer Museum Collections side by side. From left to right: 1) Contemporary painting of two embracing figures with surreal elements. 2) Post-impressionist style painting of trees with vibrant blues and greens. 3) Black and white illustration of a face with intricate patterns. 4) Japanese woodblock print style image of a figure in a checkered robe. 5) Photograph of a couple dancing, the woman in a black dress and the man in white

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Digital Archive Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology
Art Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Fresh Acconci
Fresh Acconci, by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, 1995

Mike Kelley, Artist
Fresh Acconci , 1995

Medium
Single-channel video, color, sound
Dimensions
45:00 min.
Credit Line
Courtesy of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Image courtesy of Paul McCarthy and Hauser & Wirth (photo Paul McCarthy)

Following a conversation about the physical beauty of performance artists, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy collaborated on Fresh Acconci, a restaging of early works by the New York–based artist Vito Acconci that explored questions of social interaction, the distinctions between public and private behavior, and the objectification of the human body. Using Hollywood film actors, Kelley and McCarthy set the video in a Spanish-style home in the Hollywood Hills, an area known as a locus of communal living and cult compounds in the 1960s and 1970s. Fresh Acconci collapses performance art with Hollywood movies and the private rituals of countercultural collectives, conflating multiple contemporary mythologies from otherwise unrelated sectors of the culture.