Following Vito Acconci

Abstract

This chapter dwells on Vito Acconci’s urban performances in relation to his early literary production and his later architectural installations, covering the period from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. I examine Acconci’s underlying assumptions about New York and public space in the 1960s, especially in the performance Following Piece (1969). I follow Acconci in his move away from a modernist-driven desire for autotelic creation dependent on minimalist procedures to an ever-greater explicitness and inclusion of cultural references that revisit American mythologies about building and inhabiting. His mappings of textual/urban spaces and American cultural symbols expose phenomena of compliance with the larger systems of culture and ideology. This chapter offers close readings of his cartography-inspired poetry that involves transferences from maps and atlases, then turns to Following Piece as a seminal work and ends with discussions of three architectural installations.