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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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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)
Public
Contradict
Alive
Versa
Dies
Vice
Space
Closed
Better
Eventually
Thing
Keeps
Private
System

More quotes by 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 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
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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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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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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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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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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 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
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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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Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.
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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It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole.
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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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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Architecture is not about space but about time.
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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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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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 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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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