Design as guerrilla activity

By GAIL BAILEY

Vito Acconci sits in the stylish lobby of Auckland's Duxton Hotel. Although less than five minutes into the interview, the New York-based artist, known for his early radical performances and now for architectural projects, "liberates" this public space with a slouch.

As founder of the Acconci Studio (1988) in Brooklyn, New York, Acconci and his team of five architects have sought to fight the "totalitarian activity" involved in architectural design, rejecting the tendency to "design prisons for others and restricting what people do" in public spaces.

"I design for people who don't mind being a child again," says 64-year-old Acconci, his voice a guttural rasp.

While Acconci talks animatedly about his vision of people "taking a public space into their own hands", I imagine the pristine couch opposite us as a trampoline and want to jump on it - with my shoes on, of course.

In New Zealand for several days, Acconci first appeared as the keynote speaker at the one-day symposium, Public Art-Public Spaces, presented by the Wellington Sculpture Trust at Te Papa.

After his talk in Wellington, a city he referred to as "the New York City of New Zealand", Acconci flew to Auckland, "a kind of LA version", to launch St Paul St Gallery at AUT School of Art & Design.

The gallery is showing his work in a two-part video series: The Red Tapes (1976) and Screening Architecture (2004), the first showing in the Southern Hemisphere.

As part of the gallery's launch, Acconci led a willing audience on a retrospective journey of his work.

From early fixation on his body, where the body doubled as both private and public space, to the shift to commissioned public architectural projects that seek to turn a space inside out, one gets the impression Acconci has exchanged one extreme for another.

This constant interplay was embodied, for example, in his early performance work called Seedbed (1972), where Acconci masturbated below the ramp of a gallery floor and communicated his fantasies to an unsuspecting passerby.

How did Acconci's work evolve from a kind of narcissistic perversion to the potential "liberating quality of architectural design?"

"Well, the 60s became the 70s, a move from the concentration of the self," he says.

Installation art merged into public art projects in the 80s, when Acconci worked on such missions as building small houses in public spaces, notably Bad Dream House (1984).

What happens when you turn a house upside down? You have no home, in the traditional sense of the word. A traditional space for privacy becomes public.

This tendency to subvert the possibilities of public space is one of the Acconci Studio's guiding principles.

"We, hopefully, free what people can do in a public space. We tend to say, let's make a fluid space, where people have some decision-making power. However, this is more of a dream, this possibility of changing public space."

And when he starts talking about architecture that has "a kind of skin", I think of the Acconci Studio design for a Tokyo clothing store, United Bamboo, whose walls are made out of stretchy PVC sheeting.

Since 1998 the Acconci Studio has been the base of operations for what he refers to as "guerrilla activity". If their designs are chosen for a project, and there have been many, Acconci and his fellow collaborators travel to various unwary locales.

"I go to a place as an outsider, explore the terrain, feel out the situation and it [a public architectural project] acts as a bomb, thickens the plot, makes people itchier than before, but also puts them on new footing."

As he says this, I wonder about the sensitivity of the hotel's surveillance cameras.

Yes, there have been radical projects, such as the Studio's 2002 proposal of a New World Trade Center design that looked as if it was already bombed. Acconci justified such an approach by saying that in an age where terrorists blow up buildings, we might as well design buildings that act as camouflage. New York, however, was not ready for such a project.

And yet the Studio's Island on the Mur in Graz, Austria, (2001) had a gentler mission. Instead of sitting on a park's edge passively admiring the river, what about being able to row out on that river, taking a piece of the park with you as a private island?

Sound far-fetched? Then it is probably an Acconci Studio production.

* St Paul Street Gallery, AUT School of Art & Design; Part I, to Sep 25; Part II, October 4-31