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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

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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)
Writing
Painting
Convention
Like
Numbers
Conventions
Takes
Letter
Everybody
Target
Start
Granted
Jolted
Whether
Letters
Johns
Wanted
Yeah
Jasper
Important
Number
Alphabet

More quotes by Vito Acconci

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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
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Architecture is not about space but about time.
Vito Acconci
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I was always fascinated by diagramming a sentence. Because that is going into a space, going into a world of language.
Vito Acconci
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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.
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[Photography was necessary to] make my place in the art-world: in order to do this, I had to make a picture, since a picture was what a gallery or museum was meant to hold (all the while, of course, I was claiming that I was denying the standard, rejecting it...)
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Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.
Vito Acconci
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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
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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
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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.
Vito Acconci
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[My early performance work] started by being the activity of a person, any person, like any other - but once that person became photographed it became a specialized person, the object of a personality cult.
Vito Acconci
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I wish we could make buildings that could constantly explode and come back in different ways. The idea of a changing environment suggests that if your environment changes all the time, then maybe your ideas will change all the time.
Vito Acconci
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I like Richard Serra sculptures too but I wish they had a goddamn hot dog stand inside.
Vito Acconci
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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
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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
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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.
Vito Acconci
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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