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comment The ArchRecord Interview: Vito Acconci
[Editor’s Note: The interview below is an abridged version of an interview with Vito Acconci. To read the full version (and the introduction), click here.]
This slideshow includes images of some of Acconci’s most important artwork from the 1960’s, ’70’s, and ’80’. The pieces from the ’60’s and ’70’s 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. His art/architecture “hybrid’ works from the ’80’s provide critical insight into his transformation from artist to architect.
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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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?
It started when I was doing installations in the mid-1970s. [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?” … 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.
Can you talk about some of the transitional work you did in the 1980’s that was a sort of architecture/art hybrid?
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?
You did a number of these housing-type pieces at the time, but they were still more art than architecture.
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.”
Then came your exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1988.”
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 Studios started.
What I find fascinating is that since launching Acconci Studios, you’ve never looked back. You really entirely ceased being an artist.
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 then 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 and not being in front of it. And I wonder if the real way you learn things is to be in the middle of something.
Can you articulate a single aesthetic sensibility that ties all your architecture work together?
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.
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