VITO ACCONCI
The Language of Public Space
By Karlyn De Jongh
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Vito
Acconci (* 1940 in the Bronx, NY, USA) was a pioneer of performance art
(‘Body Art’) in the 1970s, but created a widely varying body of work,
ranging from performance to video to installation to sculpture to Public
art and landscape architecture. Since the 1980s the artist has been
focusing on architecture that integrates public and private space, to
reconsider the language of environments.
Karlyn De Jongh:
You started as a poet and have expressed yourself in many ways.
Language—whether written, spoken, or body language—seems very important
to you. Nowadays you create work that is related to public space, which
you have described as “a mix of the public and private.” Would you say
the mix you spoke about is a kind of conversation between public and
private?
VA: Language is important for me, but I don’t know
if it is important for everyone. I don’t think it is about conversation;
it is more about being in the same place. No matter what problems New
York has, for me the great thing about this city is this mix. It is the
fact of a mix of colors: you walk down the street and really don’t know
what nationality a person is. That’s probably here more than anywhere
else. That’s what a city should be. A city should be a mix of people.
It’s not necessary that they are talking; it is just that they are in
the same place. The habits of one culture are starting to slip inside
the habits of another culture. It does not have to be as conscious as a
conversation; it is more a part of everyday life. The thing is: it
probably takes time.
The people of my generation—who were very
affected by the Vietnam War—thought it would be possible for a
revolution to happen in the United States. Maybe the notion of a
revolution isn’t as great as we thought. Maybe a revolution makes a new
power structure. Then there has to be another revolution and another
one. Also I don’t know if things happen in a so-called public space. I
think things happen over the telephone, through the Internet, in back
alleys, in city streets, not so much in plazas. Well, the United States
has no plazas. They really don’t. The only public spaces in the United
States are corporation plazas and they are just there for the
corporation to get more space. Plazas were incredibly important in the
past: they were places where people met and discussed; I am not sure
whether that is true now. Now, it seems as if a plaza is a convenient
place for a city to get a large number of people together, so they can
have a surveillance system. It’s almost like you know what it is people
are doing when they are all in that place. You don’t know what they are
doing in alleys, what they are doing in back streets. So, I don’t know
whether a plaza is a viable revolution notion.
KDJ: You have
described the public space first and foremost as a physical space—or
even a physical place. Is it for you more about a location than about
space in general? How do you see this physicality?
VA: The
way I have been thinking about space is physical. I think that is a
mistake; I think it has to be some kind of mix of physical and virtual
space. There is a project being built soon in Indianapolis, in the
mid-west of the United States. It does have a physical place. The site
is a street in Indianapolis that goes through a building. We did not
have to pick this site, but we picked it because we thought there was
not really a big budget for this project. By picking this site we forced
ourselves to think more about the virtual than we usually do. The
project works as follows: when the street goes through the ground floor
of this building, the tunnel is actually a volume of color. At different
times of day the color changes. We are not sure about the colors yet,
but let’s say it is blue in the morning, purple in the afternoon, and
pink at night. When people walk or cycle through the building, around
them is this massive structure that holds thousands of different LED
lights. As people walk through, each person activates a sensor that
turns on lights around them. So, in a way they are causing the lights.
It’s almost as if they have a swarm of fireflies around them. They act
as lights, but they also start to intermix: if I have activated one
cluster of lights, you have activated another, as I come to you and you
to me, they start to mix.
For us it may have been a first attempt
to make a space that will always be different, depending on how people
will be using it. I think that is a very, very small start: it has to be
more than light, but it gave us a chance. We are thinking about it a
lot. It is easy to do it by people activating light or sound. What we
would really like is if a person comes into a room and there is nothing,
but if he wants to sit down he leans against the wall and the wall
starts to depress and make a seat for this person. If the person no
longer wants to sit, he gets up and the seat turns back into a wall.
Something like that. It should not be that a place is here and a person
is there; it should be more that the place and the person start to
intermingle. And I am sure it is going to happen. I hope we get a chance
to do it, but I have the feeling it will be someone younger than I.
KDJ: You want people to be participants and inhabitants of a space and
mentioned you would like them to interact with something you make, that
people would be able to touch an art object. Why is this tactile
experience for you so important in reference to art?
VA: I
wonder now if it should be as important as it was. For me it came from
the 60s. You mentioned the importance of language, but the importance of
language in the 60s was finding oneself: all my work was doing what the
culture was doing; everybody was trying to find themselves. Maybe I,
together with some other people, made it more obvious, but it was just
what the culture at large was doing. There were a number of sociologists
that were important to me at that time: Irving Goffman and a person
named Edward Hall. Hall wrote The Hidden Dimension and The Silent
Language. The latter was about spatial relations. I bought a lot of
books at that time about how people communicate and how close they are,
where their hands are in relation to other people. There was a
psychiatrist at that time, R.D. Laing, who was important: he wrote about
‘you and me’. The work of Hall struck me. He said there are four
different kinds of distances. A so-called public distance with a speaker
and an audience. There is a social distance, when people are
approximately three meters away from each other and both can see the
whole other person—in the case of being in the US this distance allows
you to see whether the other person is carrying a gun; you can check if
you are safe. When the same two people are suddenly a few millimeters
away from each other, sight doesn’t count anymore. Sight blurs; you
start to resort to other senses—you start to resort to hearing, to
smell, possibly to taste. Around that time, I started to think that
maybe the visual is a way to control. Maybe the only way to possibly
learn something is when you can’t use that visual anymore: then you
can’t control. Even in language, when you talk about something you grope
towards an idea, as if you are trying to feel the idea out.
I
wonder sometimes if I would think as much the way that I do if I hadn’t
been born in New York and grew up in this city. This became clear to me
in the 70s when I went to Chicago for the first time. I realized—and it
was a startling thing—that you could see buildings in Chicago. That
isn’t such a strange thing, but for someone coming from New York it was:
in New York you rarely see buildings; you see buildings in Manhattan
when you are in Brooklyn. You are always in the presence of buildings,
but everything is in close-up. I learned a lot from being in close-up
rather than from being in panorama. There are advantages to each:
panorama or vista give you a chance to consider; close-up doesn’t. So,
you probably need both. The proximity of things in New York is so
important to the work I did, I think. I don’t think that ever really
stopped. It’s not so easy for me to give an overall view.
I
always try to let my students think about what happens when you are too
close. Think about a space that is so close that you cannot even see it.
What happens? Things like that have shaped not only my thoughts, but
also the way I worked. I hope I can think; the only way I know I can
think is when I do some projects. They are a way to prove your thinking.
Or writing.
When we make spaces, we try to think whether we can
make space for people who don’t mind a second chance to get to be
children. Children go through space differently. We hope sometimes that
we don’t make space. When we make things that are real failures, these
are things that are immediately seen: ‘this is a seat’, ‘this is a
table’, ‘this is a shelf’. For me it is more important to make spaces
that allow you to think ‘this could be a shelf’, ‘this could be a
table’. It gives people a chance to find something for themselves. To
get back to the public plaza: I always like it if a public plaza has
seats. It’s interesting to see that if there are plenty of seats
available, some people prefer to sit on the steps. This is the first act
of rebellion. It’s like: the seat tells you to sit down—I am going to
find some place else. And it gets in the way: you cannot climb up and
down those steps so easily, because a person is sitting there. At the
same time it’s like ‘wow, this person decided to do something on his or
her own’.
KDJ: Some time ago I was in Graz, Austria, where I
visited the café you designed in the Mur River. The café is a functional
space. If this piece were not used anymore, what meaning would the
piece have for you then? When the use value of your pieces disappears,
do they—in a way—die?
VA: If they are not used anymore, yes.
Then they would be like these museum pieces. They would be like
artifacts of a past culture. Once a space is in a place for a number of
years, why would it be used? I am giving a messy answer; I don’t know
how to give a more neat one.
KDJ: We have been talking about public space. Do you think there is also something like public time?
VA:
I once wrote an essay called A Public Space and A Private Time. That
was done in 1990. It began with a paragraph about there not being
anymore public time, because of cheaply available wristwatches. It used
to be so in New York—in particular when passing banks—that you could
look into a window and see a clock. There would be clocks on the
streets. Suddenly there aren’t so many anymore. It seemed that time
became private: time became something you wore on your wrist. To me that
was a sign to the becoming private of public space. Whatever the
computer is and how many possibilities it has, it also is a kind of
introduction of privacy: you can have everything on your laptop. I
realize some change here in the studio: when we were making physical
models we spent more time together; people gathered around to talk about
a model. And we used to play music a lot. Now people have headphones.
We still talk, but you are sort of in a private enclosure. I am not
saying we should go back to some other time, but I think we should find
what we could do with that. There are all these private capsules. Once
in a while these capsules bump into one another. Maybe they intermingle
and become private again, but maybe they have taken something over from
the other private capsules. If they intermingle enough it may not be
that bad, but maybe that’s the new publicness. I think maybe that is why
the new publicness is almost like particles rather than surfaces or…
I
am not sure as to what I am saying yet. But I think there is private
time. But I don’t know how to define that exactly. I have never worn
headphones on the street. That seems weird to me. That is another great
thing in New York: I can walk down a street that I have known for years
and years and suddenly there is a building I hadn’t recognized before.
It’s not that it’s a new building; it’s just that New York has so much
incident that you probably cannot pay attention to it all at the same
time. There always seems to be something new. And I like the idea of
gathering things on the street. Something that is very important to me
in life is movies. It’s not that movies aren’t important to me, but it’s
hard to watch a movie from beginning to end; the notion of watching a
movie on a DVD is great for me: I can see parts and I can see it in any
order I want. It’s easy to do that with a movie, but if you could do
that with a space… going into a space, leaning against the wall. You can
do that with a movie: you can make your own version of it. I don’t know
if a person making movies is as fond of the DVD as anyone else, because
it can be twisted. I always wondered, wouldn’t it be great if you could
walk down the street and a movie is being projected on buildings, so
you can see the buildings, but you can also see the movie?
I keep
coming back to the idea of mix. I think that is the kind of keynote to
the 21st century. I think the closest thing to architecture is music:
both of them make a kind of atmosphere, they make an ambiance. With both
music and architecture you can be doing something else—you are always
in the middle of architecture: you’d better be doing something else! But
you can also be doing something else while listening to music. So, both
have the notion of multi-attention. I think multi-attention is probably
the keynote of the 21st century: you have to be able to pay attention
to more than one thing at the same time. Maybe that can be the making of
a new person. I hope we can do the kind of work that helps that new
person to develop. I don’t know if we can; I can think of so many
architects that are more important than we are. And especially younger—I
am jealous of younger architects.
