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comment The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci
BR: You did a number of these housing-type pieces at the time, but they were still more art than architecture.
VA: Those pieces were a way to demonstrate a kind of house building. But eventually, I thought: but a house has to stay there. I have to find a place where people can go to and stay a while and maybe come back. So by the mid-1980’s, there were a number of house-like pieces, like “Bad Dream House”: Two upside down houses tilted against each other support a third upside down house on top. And there was a piece made from junk cars called “House of Cars.”
This slideshow includes images of some of Acconci’s art/architecture “hybrid’ works from the 1980’s that provide critical insight into his transformation from artist to architect.”
Listen as Acconci describes the architecture he is most keen to do—and talks about his desire to design clothing (1:10).
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
BR: Then came your exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1988.
VA: Both “Bad Dream House” and “House of Cars” were at the MoMA show. The title I gave to the show was “Vito Acconci: Public Spaces.” So there was a large green banner outside the museum with those words, and I felt the way that Jean-Paul Sartre seems to think Jean Genet felt when, as a child, he took a loaf of bread and he was called a thief, and he decided, “now I’m going to be a thief.” When I saw that sign, I thought, I can’t turn back. I’m dedicated now to creating public spaces. So it was exactly at that time in 1988 that Acconci Studio started.
BR: Talk some more about the primary motivations behind the launch of your own architecture and design studio.
VA: It started because I thought if I want something that results in a public [reaction], I don’t think it can start private. So I needed to have people around me, specifically people from an architecture background. I needed them for two basic reasons. Number one, I wanted to do architecture, but I really didn’t know how. Number two, I thought if I’m really going to take this seriously, I can’t be a single agent, a single artist, even a single architect. And I made this assumption that the public starts with the number three. One is a solo, two is a mirror image; the third person starts an argument. Once an argument starts, probably public has started.
BR: What I find fascinating is that since launching Acconci Studios, you’ve never looked back. You really entirely ceased being an artist.
VA: You were very right in what you said in your first question. I never wanted viewers; I always wanted users, participants, inhabitants. I should have realized if I didn’t want viewers, I really didn’t want art. Because with art, no matter how many nudgings into the traditions are made, the convention is always the viewer is here, the art is there.
So the viewer is always in a position of desire and frustration. Those “Do Not Touch” signs in museums are there for a reason: The art is more expensive than people are. I hope that is an immoral position, and I wanted things to be in people’s hands, people to be inside something. You know architecture by walking through it, by being in the middle of it, not by being in front of it. And I wonder if the real way you learn things is to be in the middle of something.
BR: Can you articulate a single aesthetic sensibility that ties all your architecture work together?
VA: If there’s anything I want a work of ours to be, I want it to be secular. I don’t want it to have any religiousness in it at all. I don’t want it to have belief. I’d like to have commitment as we work, but always commitment knowing that something is going to change. We’re not going to be committed to the same thing all the time. We want an outside to come in, so that the commitment is revised.
And what we hate about any kind of architecture is if it makes people feel small.
BR: As someone who has been a writer, an artist and an architect, I’m curious as to which of those pursuits you think can have the greatest role in effecting genuine change?
VA: To me it’s architecture. The reason my [work] became design and architecture is that I realized with [those disciplines] you can deal with all the everyday occasions of everyday life, or at least some of them. And those everyday occasions of everyday life seem like the important ground. This is where people aren’t studying, they’re doing, they’re in the middle of something. And that’s where we like to affect people because I think that’s how they’re affected.
BR: You began your creative career as a poet. Do you invest a site with a narrative you have invented for it? How does writing manifest itself in your design work?
VA: Like it or not, I still probably think verbally, very different from anyone else in the studio. Sometimes I think what separates our work from others—and I’m desperate to know sometimes what separates our work from the work of architects we pay attention to a lot—maybe it’s a combination of mathematics and poetry.
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