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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...)

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)
Since
Meant
Art
Picture
Claiming
Order
Standards
Rejecting
Place
Photography
Denying
Make
Necessary
Museum
World
Hold
Gallery
Courses
Museums
Course
Standard

More quotes by Vito Acconci

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole.
Vito Acconci
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Architecture is not about space but about 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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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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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
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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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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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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
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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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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
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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.
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