About the Work
Vito Acconci saw the act of drawing breath as a twofold blessing. The inhaling and exhaling of air, which Goethe praised as a sign of life, helped this performance artist from the Bronx to definitions of a body-related architecture experienced through the breathing technique. Acconci, too, had written poetry, before he began to treat architecture as a body. Complemented by the sketched radius of the physical field of movement, his 'Three Frame Studies' from 1969/70 - with the rapid encircling of the fixed camera ('Circle'), the abrupt landing in an empty landscape ('Jumps'), and two wrestling bodies attempting to force each other out of the frame ('Push') all serving by way of measurement - depict the act of appropriation of the delineated space through body art. The artist also undertakes projects to vitalise the functional space. The steel shell he designed for Graz on the occasion of its being named the 2003 European Capital of Culture is a 'floating island' fifty metres long and twenty metres wide in the River Mur. The amphitheatre at its centre accommodates 350 visitors, and beneath it, the river pulsates as the artery of the Baroque city.
