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Architecture is not about space but about time.
Vito Acconci
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Vito Acconci
Age: 77 †
Born: 1940
Born: January 24
Died: 2017
Died: April 27
Architect
Artist
Designer
Illustrator
Landscape Architect
Performance Artist
Photographer
Poet
Television Producer
Video Artist
The Bronx
New York City
Vito Hannibal Acconci
Vito Acconi
Vito Acconci (Hannibal)
Architect
Architecture
Space
Time
More quotes by Vito Acconci
Everybody uses labels: they give you a handle on things - an over-simplified handle, sure, but without labels, without ads, without words, the world would be an indistinguishable mass, a blur. You can hope, maybe, that people ascribe so many labels to you that none wins out
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
I didn't want to admit that I was a performer. A performer meant spotlights - a performer had connotations of theater. I would have preferred agent to performer.
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole.
Vito Acconci
Architecture is inherently a totalitarian activity. One thing we hate about it is that when you design a space, you're probably designing people's behavior in that space. I don't know if we know how to change that, but our goal is to make spaces for people rather than people being subservient to spaces.
Vito Acconci
Rather than attend to a world considered as if it's out there, I have to start to attend to me. That led to some things that I never wanted it to lead to, person as a sort of psychological miasma. I started to get wrapped up in self, and then, for the first time, self did become an autobiographical self.
Vito Acconci
There's a legal term for a problem in public space: something that might draw people to an area-say, across train tracks-where they might be caused harm. It's called a 'public nuisance.' I wouldn't mind being called that for my life's work.
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
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?
Vito Acconci
I was always fascinated by diagramming a sentence. Because that is going into a space, going into a world of language.
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
Sustainability has become a religion in architecture - not that there's anything wrong with it - but I think it has to work both ways. Everyone thinks architecture has to be subservient to sustainability, but what if we thought in the other direction, like, what can sustainability do to make architecture more exciting?
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something.
Vito Acconci
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.
Vito Acconci
I wanted to be involved with the making of some kind of parallel world. I thought, there's no reason to go to different parts of our world, because you can write them. You can stay home, stay in a little room, and imagine all these worlds. And I wanted to do that. Why did I want to do that, I'm not sure if I can tell.
Vito Acconci
Public space can be a lot better with some private space to contradict it and vice versa. It keeps the system alive. If the system is just one thing, then it's closed and it eventually dies.
Vito Acconci
