The scene is a boiler room in the basement of P.S.1, a converted schoolhouse in Long Island City, New York. The room is at the bottom of a stairway; a shallow pit separates the entryway from the boiler on the far side. Black wooden planks are laid over the length of the cavity, with six wooden stools below, creating a bleak classroom, an ugly, refracted version of the former school upstairs. Two bare light bulbs dangle from electrical cables on the ceiling to hang below the planks, giving a murky, obstructed light.
A voice, that of Vito Acconci, speaks from beneath the makeshift desks. He is a schoolmaster announcing the day's lessons. 'Lesson Number One: Let's be suckers.' From the opposite corner, his voice repeats, 'Ready? Let's be suckers.' A chorus of overdubbed Acconcis, acting out the voices of multiple students, repeats the lesson by rote: 'We-Are-Suck-ers! Repeat: We-are Suck-ers!' The lesson ventriloquizes and deforms the lessons of the educational institution that gives it place, and makes visible the contempt writhing in the foundations of the American educational system. The piece also critiques the didactic moralism of architecture itself: it's not a coincidence that 'edifice' and 'edification' share the same Latin root. Architecture is historically conflated with spiritual enlightenment, with intellectual improvement; that is, with education. Acconci's work, titled Under-history Lessons (1976-87), was meant to undermine the former status of the school and to make visible a sickness at the heart of the architecture's moralistic stance.