Street Works: Urban Performance Countering the Neoliberal City

In the documentation for Vito Acconci’s famed performance work Following Piece(1969), a note indicates that the work is part of a series of “Street Works,” sponsored by the Architectural League of New York. While this act, for which the artist followed one person in public until he or she entered a private space, is now canonical within postwar art history, little attention has been given to the broader context of the performance: the series of other urban performance works staged within New York's city streets. These performances centered on the very nature of public space itself, often reorienting the city’s famed grid toward more liberatory ends. While Acconci’s work unsettlingly forces viewers to consider the limits of privacy within the public realm, other works, like those of John Giorno, who handed out pornographic material to commuters exiting the subway, tested other limits of propriety. John Perrault’s work created a symphony of payphones left off their hooks. By focusing intently on discrete units within the rational grid, the Street Works performers sought to turn the ordered space to more spirited ends. Importantly, they did so at a moment when New York streets had begun to lose their luster, and public officials sought, through police action, zoning, and other means, to “make New York work again.” The Street Works, therefore, attempted to foster non-work both by precipitating a more nuanced consideration of the nature of public space itself and by promoting a sense of play, pointlessness, and a lack of utility.