Vito Acconci, Performance Artist and Uncommon Architect, Dies at 77

Vito Acconci, a father of performance and video art and a shamanistic, poetic, deeply influential force on the New York art scene for decades, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 77.

Maria Acconci, his wife and only immediate survivor, confirmed the death. She said it came after a short illness but gave no cause.

Starting in the late 1960s, in love with literature but realizing he was too restless by nature to be a traditional poet, Mr. Acconci began creating documented performances in the street or for tiny audiences, his radar finely tuned to an existential unease that pervaded American society.

Some performances might have gotten him arrested, though Mr. Acconci also seemed to possess the instincts of a cat burglar. In one of his most famous early works, “Following Piece,” from 1969, he spent each day for almost a month following a person picked at random on the streets of Manhattan, sometimes taking a friend along to photograph the action. The rules were only that Mr. Acconci had to keep following the person until he or she entered a private place where he couldn’t go in.

Mr. Acconci saw himself not as a stalker but as an unmoored soul searching for direction.

“It was sort of a way to get myself off the writer’s desk and into the city,” he once told the musician Thurston Moore. “It was like I was praying for people to take me somewhere I didn’t know how to go myself.”