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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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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)
Always
World
Sentence
Fascinated
Sentences
Space
Language
Going
More quotes by Vito Acconci
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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'm using my own person in pieces, but I'm trying to turn my person into a nonperson in the sense of a person without will, without volition. I'm subjecting myself to a scheme.
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 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
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
As a kid I learned notions of art and notions of not having any money.
Vito Acconci
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.
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
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
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.
Vito Acconci
[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...)
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
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
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
