Vito Acconci - Kyle

- 'City of Words', lithograph by Vito Acconci, 1999

- 'Crash', photointaglio, aquatint, relief and shaped embossing by Vito Acconci, 1985
-Acconci in 1971

Vito Acconci was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941. His parents were Italian immigrants. When he was young his dad would take him to museums. He also gave Vito his first education in the arts. In 1968 he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross with a BA in literature. After college he worked as an art professor at many different universities. Currently, he teaches in the art department at Brooklyn College.

Acconci began his career as a poet, but later worked on performance and video artist. During this period, he focused on confrontation and Situationism. One work that I found interesting was a description of a performance he did in 1971 called Seedbed. He had a huge ramp installed in a gallery and while people would walk above him on the ramp he would vocalize his fantasies about the people into a loudspeaker. He did all of this while masturbating. One of the motivations for doing such a performance was to involve the spectators in the creation of the piece.

During the 1980’s he began to focus on different types of art. He began to make furniture and machinery that would allow spectators to erect signs and shelters. What interested him most, however, was architecture. He would construct prototypes of theoretical house designs and in 1988 opened the Acconci Studio for focusing on theoretical design and building. Acconci designed the United Bamboo store in Tokyo. Recently he has focused on architecture that blends private and public spaces. One example of this would be a hallway he designed for an airport in Wisconsin called “Walkways in the Wall” that lets people walk through the structural boundaries of the building.