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comment The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci
BR: You did the Kenny Schachter ConTEMPorary art gallery in New York. As an artistic luminary yourself, and with the gallery scene growing by leaps and bounds, is becoming a well-known gallery architect something that would interest you?
VA: I wouldn’t mind us doing another gallery, but I wouldn’t want to be known as a gallery architect necessarily. I would love to do a museum. For Kenny, we did a gallery, and we’ve done two art fair booths. One of the reasons we did it is because I have so many second thoughts and reconsiderations about art; I wanted us to see what kind of a gallery would we do. What is an art gallery like when it’s done by somebody who really feels like he has rejected art?
This slideshow includes images from the two works discussed on this page: the Kenny Schachter ConTEMPorary art gallery and Storefront for Architecture.
Listen as Acconci describes what initially attracted to him art; what turned him away from it—and whether he would ever consider doing art again (1:31).
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: In the gallery work, not only with Schacter, but with Storefront for Architecture in Soho, which you did in collaboration with Steven Holl, and which some critics feel is your best work, it’s very much about bringing the outside into the gallery, which ties into a lot of your overall thematic concerns.
VA: It does, but Storefront was an interesting project in that people who know Steven’s work more see it very much as a piece of Steven’s. People who know my work more think of it as a work of ours. It’s something that really was a collaboration. In some ways neither one of us would have thought of certain things if we didn’t have in the back of our mind that we were working with the other person. In fact for a while that was a problem. It started to be almost like I was trying to do a project that looked a little like Steven’s, Steven was trying to do a project that looked a little like us. But eventually we got somewhere.
BR: It had a happy resolution.
VA: Yeah, though I think it has a big flaw. The big flaw was that it’s hopefully a good space for spring and summer, but it’s a terrible space for fall and winter [the façade is a series of 12 panels that pivot vertically or horizontally to open the entire length of the gallery directly onto the street]. And one of the worst things is that we thought for a budget as low as we had, we couldn’t deal with the [exposure to cold air]. But you always have to deal with that. At least part of the reason architecture exists is that nature is dangerous, and that to me is such a tragic flaw of that project. We could have had something with some kind of transparent fabric that would have at least closed it up. We could have kept the openness, but we didn’t think far enough.
VA: Whatever we can do with our architecture, I hope we can make a space that allows people to be in the middle of this fluidity. But we still want it to have all the functions it has to have. And we might want to give new meanings to some of those functions, but not such a new meaning that we say that function isn’t important. At Storefront, they were freezing in the [winter] in there, and I thought that was really irresponsible on our parts. And I mean not just Acconci Studio, but Steven, too.
BR: Which is a good segue to my next question. As an artist you essentially had a free slate to do whatever you wanted, whereas with architecture there are real-world concerns and clients. Does that constraint aid in the creativity in any way, that there are these restrictions placed upon and you have to operate within them?
VA: It does. When I was doing installations in a gallery context, I would never really have an idea for a piece until a gallery said, “Here, you can use this space.” So I started to realize, I don’t know if I want to be told, “Do anything you want.” But if somebody gives me a space, now I have to consider this space, and the way I try to consider it is, can I find some quirk that it has that some other space doesn’t? So I realized I needed to react to something.
When we do work now, if we’re doing a skate park for example, sometimes our first conceptual proposal doesn’t have railings. But we know we’re going to find a way to do railings because we have to. I mention railings specifically because a railing looks like a kind of prison. But you start to think, how can I do a railing that doesn’t announce itself as a railing? And so in some ways it makes you be more inventive than you ever dreamed you could.
And in art, sometimes you don’t need to have that kind of reinvention—because you don’t have this problem that so many people have already dealt with, and the challenge is now, can you find your own way of dealing with it. Maybe a short hand way of putting it is, yes, in art you can do anything you want, but not too many people care except an art world. And the great thing about design is that people do care. They do get angry.
For a while it seemed like that New York cared so incredibly about architecture right after 2001. For a while it was amazing. I’ve never seen the city like that, where architecture was so much a part of the [discussion]. People [were really aware that] this is the world they’re living in, this is their everyday space. This is about history, the future. But then it all fell apart. That and the new Museum of Modern Art at the same time. The most wasted opportunities.
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