OUTSIDE IN
   The Vito Acconci's exhibition at Museo Pecci, Prato (Italy)

 There is an uncommon coherency in the works of Vito Acconci and it comes out from his umperturbed loyalty to certain basic propositions that featured, with plain naturalness and sharp determination, his major achievements - from his beginning as performer-artist to his last projects in "Public Art".
 First proposition: Art is basically an act that centres itself in a physical event sending forth a dialogue-involving message to the Art-Viewer.
 Second proposition: Art-works are consequently to be meant as temporal occurrences and/or spatial milieus where interpersonal interactions and exchanges take place. In a way Art-work is a sort of "ecological niche" of spontaneous significance and its aim is - as jeffrey ryan powerfully points out - reconnecting Art to Life, or, as Vito Acconci puts it, "showing objects that are on the same level of individual".
 The creative strenght of Acconci's artistical coherency is widely displayed in the solo-exhibition that Museo Pecci, Prato devoted to him. Much appropriately, exhibition is entirely founded on "Public Art" works Acconci developed since early Eighties. The definition of "Public Art" may easily consent ambivalent meaning: on one hand Art-work is "Public" in that is usable, inhabitable and term of physical relationship with the Viewer (Acconci today uses to refer to his works as "opportunities for people to meet, talk and discuss", as "spaces where people may find their own meanings" and repeats that (his) "work has no sense in a context where no different ideas and opinions exist").
 On other hand, Acconci's Art is "Public" in that it starts directly from forms, shapes and images, that are recognizable and conventional signs within a particular culture, to be re- elaborated in order to subvert their own conventionality. In the same way of Barthes, Acconci identifies mechanisms of language and communication as forms of cultural domination and social control, that Artist-as-Politician (or "Public Artist") is appointed to denounce and unmask.
 Still, Acconci's Art is "Public" because it engages "public" as integrating element or part  if his Art-work. Says Acconci: "Whenever I imagine a sculpture, people is part of the materials". As a truly political artist, Acconci wants to treat the viewer to all the elements in order to consider analitically and critically the power of things around us as well as the power of linguistic conventions and social institutions, suggesting there are alternative possibilities to conceive what really surrounds and encloses all of us ("To be in the world means to be surrounded with the world", says Acconci).
 In keeping with his peculiar purpose of analysing essence of 

                               -2-

things and conventions, Acconci today produces sculptures and installations that - unelegant and unaesthetic enough - turn to be provocative and counterenvironmental (as McLuhan said).  Such 
are maquettes of (unlikely)  projects of public places meant to 
re-design  landscape  where  individual  necessarily  moulds his 
perceptions, ideas  and  values.   Such  are  those  odd-titled 
installations   like "Adjustable   Wall   Bra",    "Telebobies", 
"Multi-Bed", "Convertible Clam Shelter", "Fluorescent Furniture" 
and even "Linear Mobile City", whose seeming abnormity (that is 
their macroscopic enlargement and functional incongruity) implies 
an undeferrable quest for private, individual off spaces - whom 
shape of those Art-works  hint at  - from  which  people could 
communicate and meet and, in this way, begin to think over one's 
relationship  to surrounding things in a new key.
 Making abnormal and counterenvironmental objects of everyday life, Vito Acconci attends today's man alienation as determinated by delusive certainty of of nowadays way of living. "Public Art" sculptures consequently become "healing places" where individual comes face to face to his own postulates and gaze at himself from outside.

                                                 Alessandro Tempi

FAX MESSAGE
TO: JEFF GIBSON c/o "ART & TEXT" Sydney (Australia)
FROM: ALESSANDRO TEMPI, San Giovanni Valdarno (Italia)

Dear Jeff,
           I regret that my translation isn't good and proficient enough as I expected. I am sorry about it, anyway. Should You need the original italian text for a better editing, You would just let me know.
           Thank You for the euphemism about my "style of writing suffering in the translation". It is a kind attention paid to my feelings. I appreciated very much.
           Apart from this problem, I hope our relationship may continue in the future, after all.

                                      Sincerely Yours

                                      Alessandro Tempi

March 25, 1992