ACCONCI ART ‘INFILTRATES’ VIEWER EASE

To Vito Acconci, art can be both therapeutic and provocative--at the same time. Using what he calls “infiltration tactics,” Acconci creates work that is comfortable, even fun for the viewer, but that subtly overturns conventions.

“I would love my work to negate habits and assumptions, to lead to questioning of the habits of the culture,” he said in a recent lecture at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

To do this, Acconci works with familiar, accessible forms based on domestic architecture and furnishings. This gives viewers easy access to the pieces, by connecting the gallery or museum space with the space of their everyday lives. Once within these comfortable environments, Acconci’s subversive strategy takes over.

Nearly 20 years of Acconci’s work incorporating ideas of shelter and domestic relationships is surveyed in the La Jolla museum’s current exhibition, “Domestic Trappings.” According to curator Ronald Onorato, the show takes a revisionist stance, “tracing the artist’s primary concerns for certain types of spaces and psychological reactions--humor, threat, elation--from the earlier phases to the recent phase, using furniture and vernacular architecture.”

Acconci began his career in the 1960s as a poet, and even then he was primarily interested in shaping experiences rather than making static objects. “I wanted to create a space for the reader to travel over, across the page,” he said.

When he shifted to the visual arts in 1969, he worked according to the basic conception that “the art occasion is an occasion for interchange, meeting.” It seemed, he commented in a recent interview at the museum, that “the art context made such a break between viewer and artist. Artist was on a different plane, art was on a different plane, a higher plane than viewers. Viewers had to struggle in order to get to the art.”

Acconci reached a solution to this hierarchical tradition by working his way “out of the art object,” and into performance pieces, videos and installations, many of which are documented or reconstructed in the La Jolla show.

In many of the earliest such interchanges, Acconci aggressively confronted viewers, either live or through audio tape. The sound acted as pressure, “pushing the viewer up against the wall.” Through this assertion of his power to entrap the viewer, Acconci hoped that the viewer would begin to question his or her own manipulation and oppression, to analyze the power relationship just experienced.

In subsequent works, Acconci broke down the hierarchy separating him from the viewer by treating the gallery as “a psychoanalyst’s couch.” In “Reception Room” (1973), he presented himself (live and through tape) as vulnerable and insecure, undermining the viewer’s perception of the artist as an untouchable, priestly figure, and making himself easier to approach.

Acconci’s more recent works, viewer-activated constructions and furniture-type objects, are even more inviting to the viewer. If provocation exists, “it’s provided in a much different way. It’s not so much through lack of ease, but something that starts to raise a question, but it’s done much quieter.”

In “Instant House” (1980), on view in La Jolla, a viewer sits on a swing seat, which causes four surrounding panels on the floor to rise and form an enclosure. Painted on the inside walls is an American flag, on the outside, a Soviet flag. Onorato observed, “the audience is put into a childlike situation. We have to re-think our own attitudes and assumptions from that position.”

Whereas in earlier works viewers were confronted directly with a statement (which, Acconci admitted, could easily be avoided), in these more participatory pieces, viewers are left to discover meaning on their own. This may be a quieter approach, but Acconci believes it could have a more long-lasting effect, provided that relevant questions are raised.

“I don’t like recent pieces of mine, when I can feel that they’re just furniture, or they become just cozy, just places to sit down,” he said. “They work for me if they provide a place to sit but at the same time a question about sitting or the power relationships that sitting might imply.”

Acconci has not abandoned the notions of vulnerability and hierarchy. Even in the newest furniture pieces, “there are places for high, for low, for dominant position, for submissive position.” And in “Community House” (1980), another viewer-activated structure (not on view in La Jolla), issues of dependency and power emerge quite concretely. If one person stops pedaling the bicycle that holds the house up, the walls could collapse on those inside.

“The house depends on a bargain for group use,” Acconci said, and in that respect “it is more city-like than house-like.”

In the past few years, Acconci has embarked on several projects for public parks, including a controversial proposal for the Spanish Landing area in San Diego. These public works are decidedly low on aggression and high on accessibility. In them, Acconci hopes, “totally known elements collide into mystery.”

This surreal quality pervades the local proposal, with its familiar sailboats uncharacteristically earth-bound, and its large, airplane-shaped mounds acting as tangible shadows of the craft overhead. Large concrete plane segments emerge from the ground as Acconci’s wry comment on the notion of monument.

Like “rising whales, or a kind of monster,” the planes can be climbed upon and played on, and at night they provide illumination for the park. In this scenario, powerful and perhaps threatening objects are transformed into playful, harmless structures, suggesting again the marriage of therapy and provocation in Acconci’s work.

(A committee appointed by the San Diego Port Commission unanimously approved the $350,000 project, but commissioners have since balked at final approval.)

“Domestic Trappings,” at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art (700 Prospect St.) through Aug. 2, will then travel to the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., and the Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis. An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.