Vito Acconci Quotes - Page 2

In a time when everybody is talking about finding oneself, how do you find yourself? I wanted to do it as literally as possible. How do I prove that I'm concentrating on myself? I prove it by doing something physical. I can bite myself. I can burn the hair off my chest. The goal? Yes, I have a body. I have this thing that people call the self. Maybe I can change the self.

Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.

Why was I in a basement saying, "I'm alone here," wielding a lead pipe and crowbars? It was like I was doing the Vietnam War. It was like I was being America. If I put a blindfold on, I can't see you as people, which seemed to be what the United States was doing. I mean, it was important for people in my generation, because I grew up in the '40s, at a time when America was supposedly the hero nation. America saved Europe. And, some years later, we realized, America is a criminal.

Sometimes when you come from outside a discipline you pay attention to things that insiders take for granted. I admit that sometimes I feel hesitant in the midst of other architects. I can't help thinking that they know more than I do, but I also feel that maybe I can go in directions they learned you're not supposed to go in.

Maybe I can pull at my breast in a kind of futile attempt to develop a woman's breast. It's not that simple to become a woman. But I think what was important, when I think back on that work, is something like The Little Engine That Could. It's me saying, I think I can, I think I can. Though I'm doing something I obviously can't, it's the process toward it that is important. The will toward it, the effort . . . My work was about getting to a place that you couldn't get to.

I always thought, I can't waste time, I have to do work. I also thought that I was slower than other people, that I had to concentrate more. I always thought, I'm not brilliant, I have to work. That was something I embedded in myself very early: I have to go home and write. But did I get any more work done than people like Frank O'Hara, who were always going to parties? Probably not.

Modernism was a big thing for me, coming from a father who was very interested in art, music and culture - and almost always Italian art, music and culture. One good thing about Italians is that culture is part of everyday life. But Modernism is a movement of the past. The idea of a Modernist building as a sculpture set on a pedestal of grass is a part of Modernism that I'm not so crazy about.

The great thing about the Guggenheim is that you can see art in the fastest way if you want to. Which isn't bad. It's almost like Frank Lloyd Wright didn't know something called the Internet was going to exist, so he made it so you can go down as fast as possible.

I was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I'm making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I'd driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don't have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it.

I always thought of writing as public, I never thought of writing a diary. I had been struck by, jolted by things I had read, and I wanted to do the same to others. I don't think it ever was the notion of an autobiography; I skipped that phase totally, I think.

Writing was always a laborious thing for me. I never wrote fluently, I never wrote fluidly, there was something very awkward in my writing. But it seemed to me purposely awkward. It's almost as if I made the labor part of writing.

My first pieces, in an art context, were ways to get myself off the page and into real space. These photographic pieces were ways to, literally, throw myself into my environment. They were photographs not of an activity, but through an activity; the activity (once I planted a camera in the instrument of that activity - once I, simply, held a camera in my hands) could produce a picture.

Yeah, it's not that I wanted to do a painting, I wanted to do writing like that. What jolted me about Jasper Johns was how important it is to start with a convention, how important it is to start with what everybody knows and everybody takes for granted, whether it's a number, an alphabet letter, a set of alphabet letters, a target.

Yes, the fear of its blankness. At the same time, I kind of loved it. Mallarmé was trying to make the page a blank page. But if you're going to make the page a blank page, it's not just the absence of something, it has to become something else. It has to be material, it has to be this thing. I wanted to turn a page into a thing.

I came from the time of so-called New Criticism - the poem in itself, the writing in itself - but around that time I had come across a critic called Kenneth Burke, who wrote a book called A Rhetoric of Motives, and it seemed to talk about another way, and gradually I realized that other way was that the reader made a difference.

It was very definitely architectural. I was using the words on the page as some kind of equivalent of a physical model. But I never thought at that point that I wanted to move toward architecture. I wanted to move toward real space. Sure, that's probably another way of saying, I want to move toward architecture. But I didn't define real space in terms of architecture, then.

I can pick out people in this city to follow. I can be in a show at the Museum of Modern Art, my space in the Museum of Modern Art is my mailbox, my mail is delivered there. Whenever I want mail, I have to go through this city to get my mail.

If something's public then it seems like the important thing is the person in that public. And the notion of rhetoric. I went to Jesuit schools that focused on first there's grammar, then there's rhetoric, and rhetoric's usually seen as a kind of degraded method, because you're trying to persuade.

I became much more interested in plot when I really didn't consider myself a writer anymore. When I was in an art context and I started to do installations, that was when writing of mine almost returned to fiction. Earlier I felt like I didn't have anything to write about, I could only concentrate on the page, I could only concentrate on words.

It's language as a kind of structural system. A diagram of a sentence, now that seems like a kind of architectural model. I don't know how to explain it, but it would be nice to try. Why, why this fascination?

I liked the idea of architectural games - you're always building and rebuilding. And I still thought of myself in opposition. I thought, If architects build a dream house, then I want to build a bad-dream house. My piece was called Bad Dream House.

Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.

You could walk around behind the typist and read the text, which was about hearing, and what you heard was the sound of the typewriter. Of course, this was a pre-electric typewriter, a typewriter that made noise.