Vito Acconci in Conversation at Acconci Studio, New York features a conversation between the artist and architect Vito Acconci and undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2007-2008 academic year, students in the Halpern-Rogath Seminar in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania explored Vito Acconci’s engagement with the experience of power, understood through the activation of specific bounded zones. These have included the page, streets in New York, a basement, galleries, and public environments. Acconci’s earliest forays into the realm of architecture in the 1980s marked a major shift in his work from an emphasis on the individual body (often his own) to the social body in an urban context. At the same time, the artist’s focus on architecture, the built environment, and relevant social systems has emerged as a natural extension of his earlier interests in probing idiomatic language, the boundaries of the body, and the unstable delineations between private and public spaces. Recognizing the fact that architecture has the power to control the body and the rhythms of daily life, Acconci visualizes structures that perpetuate instability and the possibility of choice on the part of the user. The projects, which are collaborative undertakings with a team of designers and architects, focus on the creation of dynamic circulation systems that bend, twist, ooze, flow, bulge, and ripple across an existing landscape or a body. The course culminated in the exhibition Power Fields: Explorations in the Work of Vito Acconci at Slought Foundation, Philadelphia.
