Vito Acconci, who bushwhacked the path to video art in New York in the 1960s and early 1970s, makes many of today's young artists look tame. The nearly 60 short videos in "Vito Acconci: Where We Are Now (Who Are We Anyway?), 1976," the excellent early-career survey at MoMA PS1, manage to be unnervingly funny, pathetically gross and politically razor-sharp. And even with a decades-old patina of age, they're still too funky to fit into MoMA's scrubbed white Manhattan premises.

Mr. Acconci appears in all of them. Thirty-something, hirsute, in slack shape, he looks and acts the part of sleazoid voyeur, stand-up comic, psychopath and self-martyred saint. He's silent in the early films, and compulsively verbal in several of the later ones, often engaged in wheedling, threatening or accusing an invisible lover, or himself, or us.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/