Vito Acconci


When artists grow up they become architects and city planners. By creating an uncomfortable situation, architecture can push the individual to fight for better conditions.

Demetrio Paparoni: Since 1984 you have used the term "piece" to describe your work, indicating that for you they are not just objects, but also actions and interventions. You yourself have said that the prototype for the "piece" is the house, which shows just how important architecture and design and furnishing of public city spaces are for you. All symbols have the capacity, as you yourself explain, to reinforce and support a dominant class, race or gender. You are looking for a space that can create chaos, like a house turned upside-down, so that it creates the necessary conditions within the individual to change the rules of the game, to look to the future with the spirit of someone who wants to revolutionize his or her own existence.

You have always worked on the possibility of acting within the public domain to bring out a private and intimate world. So there is a connecting thread going from an action like Seedbed – in which, and that was in 1972, you masturbated in a gallery curled up under a tilting false floor – to the architecture you are doing today: you want to get rid of the divisions between public behavior and private actions. "Public Art" is probably a very good way to describe it, and yet the work seems to take place around the idea of 'I'…




Demetrio Paparoni