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comment The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci, one of the most acclaimed Conceptual artists of all time, turned his back completely on the world of galleries and museums 20 years ago to focus his creative energies exclusively on architecture and design.
On the surface, this may seem a distinctly radical career move, but a number of similarities exist between his artistic practice and his architecture work. Most obviously, architectural elements played an important part in Acconci’s art from the beginning: ramps; tables exploding out of windows; “houses” built of cars.
This slideshow includes images of some of Acconci’s most important artwork from the 1960’s and ’70’s; the pieces illustrate how a key concern of his current architecture practice—blurring the line between public and private space—was also a focus of his Conceptual work.
Listen to Acconci discuss the reasons for the major difference in mood between his artwork—menacing, sexual, adults-only stuff—and his more whimsical design work (1:56).
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And Acconci’s current design work delights in confusing the boundaries between public and private space—a key concern of his art as well. Consider two of his most (in)famous artworks: In “Following Piece” (1969), Acconci trailed pedestrians on the streets of New York until they entered a private place. In “Seedbed” (1972), Acconci performed (extremely) private acts beneath a specially constructed floor in a gallery as visitors walked above.
Perhaps the most crucial link is the fact that Acconci’s Conceptual art never wanted passive viewers. As he tells it, “I always wanted users, participants, inhabitants. I should have realized if I didn’t want viewers, I really didn’t want art.”
In this wide-ranging interview, Acconci takes us through his transformation from artist to architect; candidly admits his frustration at not being taken seriously by architects of his generation (and details some changes to the studio’s program meant to address this); discusses some of the recurring design motifs of his practice (bulges, portability, mirrors, tunnels); confesses to some flaws in a collaborative work done with Steven Holl; explains the inspiration behind his proposal, Building Full of Holes, for the Ground Zero site at the WTC; reveals his hope that architecture will become “a biological system”; and wonders if architecture as we know will cease to exist in the not-too-distant future.
The interview also includes a number of brief audio clips to give a sense of Acconci’s memorable voice: a gravelly rumble enhanced with the accent of a born-and-bred New Yorker (b. 1940, the Bronx).
[Editor’s Note: We offer two versions of the interview. For those who want to explore Acconci’s practice and projects in depth, the “director’s cut” is below. Those who would prefer an abridged version are invited to click here.]
Bryant Rousseau: Vito, with the benefit of hindsight, your remarkable transformation from a conceptual artist to an architect seems almost an obvious move: Your art was always very concerned with how bodies relate to each other in a defined space, whether within a gallery’s walls or the city at large. Also, your art didn’t want viewers, it wanted active participants—and there’s no more interactive art than architecture. But I’m guessing this radical shift in your creative practice was arrived at neither quickly nor easily. Can you walk us through how you came to realize that architecture was where you should be focusing your efforts?
Vito Acconci: It started when I was doing installations in the mid-1970's. [One] thing that characterized my [work] is I wanted to do installations people were a part of. I did an installation at the Sonnabend Gallery in Soho in 1976 called “Where We Are Now, Who Are We Anyway.” Basically, a 60-foot table—a wooden plank with stools on either side of it—was propped up on the windowsill of the gallery and then continued out the gallery’s window. So what started as a table became a diving board.
As in all of my installations of the ’70s, there was sound, [in the case of this artwork] a hanging speaker above the table, with a constant clock ticking, and my voice coming in saying things like, “Now that we’re all here together, what do you think, Bob?” And “Now that we’ve gone as far as we can go, what do you think, Barbara?” In other words, what I liked about the project was I found a way to use a gallery as if it was a town square, a plaza, a community meeting place.
At the same time, I started to have this nagging doubt. I thought: I’m kidding myself. A gallery or museum is never going to be a public space. If I really want a public space, I better find a way to get there. So even though the work I did for even a long time after that was still in an art context, I was trying to grope my way into architecture. If I thought the artwork needed a public space, I obviously knew there were disciplines that already deal with public space: There’s architecture, maybe landscape architecture, maybe industrial design.
BR: Can you talk about some of the transitional work you did in the early and mid-1980’s that was a sort of architecture/art hybrid?
VA: Work of mine had always been connected with the body, so in the beginning of the 1980’s, I did a number of pieces that, in retrospect, were a kind of play architecture or practice architecture: A person sits in a swing, and the action of sitting in a swing causes walls to come up. I wanted to make a body be the cause of architecture. Can a person’s action make a shelter?
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