Beyond Sculpture:
Function, Commodity, and Reinvention in Contemporary Art
Vito Acconci
The work I'm doing now isn't art. At least I hope it isn't art. I hope I am a designer. I think what I do is some kind of architecture, landscape, and product design. But obviously it didn't begin that way. It didn't really begin as art, either. My background was writing until around 1969. Stuff of mine appeared within the context of writing and poetry. Towards the end of the time I was writing I wanted words to become matter. I wanted to treat the page as a space over which I, the writer, could move. Because I was interested in the page as a literal space to travel, this page then was a field over which you, the reader, could move, at that time, in that place. In some ways, looking back, the stuff could have become architecture here. I was interested in moving over a space. I was treating a page as a kind of model space of a world. It could have become architecture then but became art instead.
At the end of the 60's, when I started doing stuff in an art context, my starting point was, "How do I move in real space?" What gives me a reason to move in experiential space? One example was a 1969 piece for a program called Street Works. The piece I did involved a very simple scheme. Each day, over a month-long period, I would pick at random a person in the street. Each day, I would follow that person until that person entered a private space-home, office, whatever. Episodes ranged from say two- or three-minute episodes, when someone would get into a car and I couldn't follow, to seven- or eight-hour episodes, where someone might go to a restaurant, a movie. I would set myself up as an agent. I attend to the world as it is considered out there. How do I key myself into that world? In retrospect, the stuff could have become architecture then. I was involved with movement in the city. It could have turned to architecture; it didn't. Where it went, instead, was rather than attending to the world as if it was considered out there, I started to attend to me. I concentrated on myself.
It was the end of the 60's, beginning of the 70's, a time when the common language was "finding ones' self," as if the self is something you can separate and contemplate, like an object. So I examined myself, I turned in on myself. I tried to think of art exhibiting as a kind of relation. How do I make an exchange between "I" and the role of viewer, "I" and the role of artist, another person in the role of viewer. I questioned if I was doing art or forming a kind of personality cult. I think what started to bother me was that everybody who knew a piece of mine knew what I looked like. So, eventually, I started to disappear into the surrounding space..
In a 1972 piece called Seedbed, in a conventional gallery room, halfway across the room, the floor starts to rise. The floor becomes a ramp, rising to about 2-1/2 feet, 3 feet, at the far wall. A person walks in the gallery, probably walks up the ramp as a continuation of the floor. The piece is done over a two-week period, each day from opening time of the gallery to closing time. I'm underneath the floor. I'm moving around under this floor where people are walking and my aim is to constantly masturbate. And in order to do so, I can use viewers as help; help in the sense that I hear viewers' footsteps on top of me. I can build sexual fantasies on those footsteps. Those sexual fantasies can keep my activity going, keep my masturbation going. Every now and then, the masturbation reaches climax. The viewer on top of the floor, on top of the ramp might be thinking something like, "Oh, he's done this with me, he's done this for me." Why do this piece in the gallery all day? Because I had to become part of the architecture of the gallery. I had to become part of the floor. A person couldn't enter that gallery when I wasn't part of the floor. I couldn't leave that floor until the last person of the day left the gallery. So again, the work could have become architecture then. If I was trying to make a person part of a room, the work could have become architecture. It didn't. The work changed.
By the mid-70's I wasn't doing live activity anymore. I was doing what was starting to be called installations, installations in a gallery space or a museum space. My starting point was conceiving of a gallery or museum as a place where people are going to come anyway. Now that they're here, could a piece be used to form a community? One example was a 1976 piece called "Where We Are Now (Who Are We Anyway.)" You went to the gallery, Sonnabend Gallery, when they were at 420 W. Broadway, which was probably a kind of important part of the piece, because 420 W. Broadway at that time announced itself as, "This is the center of the New York art world." Or probably in New York terms, it announced itself as, "This is the center of the art world." Maybe the piece made some attempt to come to grips with that kind of self-congratulatory situation. You enter the gallery around the corner of that black room at the right of the image. You walk along an L-shaped corridor that took you to what was usually used as the main room of the gallery. For the occasion of this piece, the doorway is blocked off and the room is painted black. Next to the black room is a long table, stools on either side of the table. The table is propped up on the windowsill of the gallery and then extends out the gallery. Or, the way I saw it, whether anybody else saw it this way or not, the way to settle in at the gallery might be a clue to leave the gallery, get out of the gallery. All the pieces of the mid-70's use sound. There's a hanging speaker above the table, a constant clock ticking. My voice comes in, "now that we're all here together, what do you think, Bob? Now that we've gone as far as we can go, what do you think, Barbara?" etc., etc.
I started to have a really nagging doubt. I was trying to treat the gallery or museum as if it was a town square, as if it was a plaza. But I knew I was kidding myself. The gallery or museum is never going to be a town square or a plaza. If I really wanted a public space, I'd better find some way to get there. But I didn't quite know how to do it directly. One way I could deal with it was to think what bothered me about a piece like this. I liked the fact that the place for viewers here is the table, the stools on the table. What I started to think about was that viewers could listen, but they couldn't talk back. The audiotape wasn't going to change according to what viewers did and I wanted viewers to have more of an inherent part in the work.
In a piece called Instant House, done in the beginning of the 80's, the viewer started to become a part of the work. The house consists of four panels, an American flag covered on the floor, and a swing in the middle. If a person sits on the swing, the swing starts to go down, and these panels start to rise up, making this instant house. And the instant house becomes an American flag house inside, a Soviet flag house outside, so you make one kind of space for yourself, another kind of space as an announcement for others. What I liked about these pieces was that the architecture only lasted as long as a person kept the instrument or vehicle going. When the person gets up off the swing, the walls now go back to their original position on the floor. At the same time, I think what started to bother me about these pieces was that I was making all this effort to go to a demonstration of house building, house making, but there was no house left. There was no house left for people to use.
By the mid-80's there started to become spaces left. I started to use houses a lot. It didn't start with houses but it probably started with thinking of how I could use a convention that everybody in a particular region knows almost by heart. The house form seems to be the convention that everybody in a particular location knows, therefore the house form is something you can take and play with. You can turn it inside out. People will still know it is a house. You can turn it upside down, as in this piece, for example, a 1984 piece called Bad Dream House; three upside down houses- two upside down houses on the ground, supporting a third upside down house on top. (fig 1,2,3)You enter at either end, at the open gable. You sit at or walk past an upside-down table or you go upstairs to what used to be the underside of the house. Now that it's upside down, it's facing sets of seats, facing sets of bleachers. Or you go further up to the glass house. Some walls are opaque, some walls are transparent, some mirrored. I think at this time it was clear to me that the stuff really wasn't art anymore. What was wrong with these pieces is it called itself a house, but it wasn't a house. You couldn't live there. You could play there, but it really couldn't function as a house.
I think that towards the end of the 80's, I started to think that I wasn't really interested in the art viewer anymore. And by art viewer I mean when a person enters an art space, that person, in effect, is saying, "I am an art viewer, and by extension I'm separating myself from all those others who aren't art viewers." I started to realize I was much more interested in the casual passerby in the city, a person who stops at something, not because it's called art, but because, for some reason or another, it connects with this person's everyday life. So I started to think, okay, I wanted this stuff in public spaces.
Disciplines in public spaces already exist. Architecture exists, for example, in public space. I had to start working in the way an architect works. I had to start changing my way of working. I couldn't work as a single person anymore. I had to work as part of a group of people. Why? For two basic reasons- I wanted to do stuff in public space and I wanted to do architecture, but didn't know how. All my career, the starting point I've taken is that I don't have any particular skills, but I probably know how to use the Yellow Pages, so I can find people with those skills. Now I would change the language. The Internet would replace the Yellow Pages. So, I needed to work with architects. I needed to work as part of a studio of architects, people who could do that kind of stuff. But more than that, I needed to think with other people. I think the more important reason why I needed to work with a group of people was that I started to become very aware, and maybe fearful, of the English language phrase, "the person who lives by the sword dies by the sword," which I translated into, "If something begins private, it ends private." If I really want something to become public, it has to begin semi-public, quasi-public. Public probably begins with the number 3. One is a solo; two is a couple or a mirror image; the third person thickens the plot and starts an argument.
Acconci Studio started at the end of the 80's. Acconci Studio consists of a group of designers, group of architects. Aside from the person who is the studio manager, there are six people in Acconci Studio now. Four of them are architects in the sense that they went to architecture school and have worked in architects' offices. There isn't a licensed architect in the studio. The way Acconci Studio doesn't work is-I have an idea and these people carry it out. The way Acconci Studio works is, maybe I start a project off with a general idea, with a vague idea, then we talk a lot, we discuss. I think it becomes a kind of collision of ideas. I want to believe it is a collaboration. It probably can't be a true collaboration for the simple reason that I pay the people who work for me; they don't pay me. So there's a kind of power imbalance, but I think we come close to a collaboration.
Acconci Studio has done work from product design to houses. In 2002, Alessi, the Italian design company asked 15 architects to do a coffee and tea set. There were two that they didn't produce and ours was one of the two. Alessi asked for four containers- one for coffee, tea, milk, sugar and the tray. We tried to revise the program a little bit. We thought that if we did the thing well enough, we possibly wouldn't need a tray. We could have things fit together so that you could pick them all up at once. And we also thought that Alessi left out something important. They left out cups and saucers. We initiated the design by starting with a general sphere, and then we would pull pieces away from the sphere, pull pieces away from the sphere until all that's left is 4 units- coffee, tea, milk, sugar, and a transparent connector in between. The transparent connector holds the cups and saucers. You take the cup and saucer out. This spheroid has 4 flat points, so you roll the spheroid to one flat point, push your cup inside, press up, now you have coffee. Now you roll the spheroid to another flat point, push your cup up, now you have milk, now you have sugar, etc. (fig 4)
We've also done furniture. The projects I'm showing have all been produced since 2000. In 2000, 2001, we tried to design a kind of prototype bench, a bench based on the notion of a strip, a surface that twists so it seems to have a front and a back. In our case, the back of the bench twists to become the seat of the bench. The seat, in turn, twists to become the bottom of the bench. That twists to become a seat inside the circle. It is made out of fiberglass and lit from inside. You sit on the outside of the circle, you move over and gradually you're on the inside of the circle. (fig 5)
Acconci studio has also done some interiors. In 2003 United Bamboo, a group of designers asked us to design their first clothing store in Tokyo. United Bamboo people had this fear that because this modular system is usually used for residences (in Japan), it was always going to look like a house; it was never going to look like a store. This made us think that we had to provide a kind of second skin. So we covered the store with a kind of mesh surface. The facades then bulge in and out through this mesh surface. The store itself is on the ground floor with offices on the top floor. The bulging facade on the upper floor holds a projection screen. If you are inside the United Bamboo store and you try on clothes and like the way you look, you can have yourself photographed so you become the model for United Bamboo clothes outside. The facade on the ground floor is pushed in so that it gives you a way to enter. There's a mirror on either side. We tried to make a clothing store that was as soft as clothing, as soft as skin. The material is PVC (polyvinylchloride), the kind of material that's usually used for a projection screen. PVC material on the ceiling is pulled down to make a wall, then pulled out to make a counter. Shelves are made by pulling the PVC out, pushing it in again, pulling it out. Since it is projection screen material, we don't have to light the shelves from the outside, we can put light inside, so the illumination and the support surface is the same. The store is in a very small space. It's about 45 feet long and 15 feet wide, so we thought we needed all the space we could get. Anytime there was a nonstructural wall, we removed the wall and replaced it with a curving glass alcove that emerges from the property of the store, into this kind of jungle of shrubbery around the store. The hanging clothes are in these alcoves. (fig 6)
We've designed places that function as plazas. This is a project that was started the beginning of 2001. (fig 7, 8, 9, 10) It's in Memphis. The site is a performing art center in Memphis and there was a left over space outside the building. It was asked if we could possibly turn that left over space into a plaza, a place where people, during intermission could go outside and spend some time together. There's an overhang from the building that extends over this left over space. You can see it at the top of the slide. Our starting point was, "What if we could fling a liquid out into the air, a liquid out over this plaza?" But it has to stand up, so we pull it down. We pull it down to make columns, to support itself. At the same time, we can push it up. We push it up to make a funnel. Now that there's a funnel, sunlight can come in. Outside you can have spotlights of sunlight, just like inside there are spotlights on the stage. There are seats around the columns, but the columns are hollow and they can be entered. The material is mirrored stainless steel, both inside and outside. When you're inside a column, the sky is reflected down on this circular wall around you, so it's as if you're sitting inside a room of sky.
We've done park-like spaces. This is the River Mur in Austria, in Graz. (fig 11) In 2003 we were asked to use the river as a place for a person-made island. The island was supposed to have three functions: a theatre, a café and a playground. This made us think, "Let's try to have one space." How can one space have three parts and three functions? Maybe that space could twist. We were asked to do a theatre, so we started with the idea of a bowl. A bowl is a conventional theatre shape. What if we take that bowl and twist it? Take that bowl and twist it, turn it upside down. Now it's a dome. The dome is the café. The dome is the roof of the café. The morphing space between bowl and dome becomes the playground. It is lit at night. (fig 12) Lights come up from below the bleachers. Light shines down from under the dome. Here you have entered the island in the bowl, in the theatre. (fig 13) We knew that there wasn't always going to be an official theatre event, so we wanted it to have a function even when there wasn't a theatre. Therefore, we made the seats not straight, but in waves. If the seats are straight, everybody is sitting straight ahead, as if at an airport. If the seats are in waves, maybe now it gives people a chance to sit face-to-face, person-to-person. The bowl then starts to twist, to become a dome. This is the entrance to the café. (fig 14) This in-between space becomes the playground. The playground is above this pedestrian walkway. (fig 15) Entering the café, we tried to make the café have the same kind of twisting warping space as the island as a whole. You walk through a doorway and there's a canopy above you. (fig 16) The canopy twists down to make lounge seating around the dome, so you can sit back and relax. It was brought up to us that there might be different kinds of functions here, so we tried to make movable furniture, curved, triangular tables and chairs, a table for two; you join two together, table for four, table for six. (fig 17)There's a kind of rubber band above the bar. It comes down, twists and multiplies to make multiple bar counters. We tried to think of some kind of ultimate act of drinking. Wherever you had a glass, you could place your glass down.
We think of ourselves as architects. Maybe the Graz project came close to a house, but we haven't built a house. Nobody is going to take us seriously until we build a house. Most architects start by building their own house or their mother's house. My mother is dead and I certainly don't have enough money to build a house. Fortunately these two Greek brothers asked us to design a house for them in Kalamata, Greece. I don't know if they are still serious though. These were just some first ideas about a house. Since there are two brothers, we would have two combining spirals. The houses have infinite motion. The roof of one brother's house would act as the balcony of the other brother's house and these balconies and roofs would sort of intertwine. (fig 18,19, 20)
In 2002 we made a theoretical proposal for a new World Trade Center and we designed a World Trade Center full of holes. Our starting point was that if nowadays a building is going to be exploded anyway, maybe a building should come already exploded. Maybe a building should come pre-exploded. So we took the original- the whole site of the original World Trade Center, extruded it to a height of 110 stories high. Now we have more of a mass, more of a volume, than the original World Trade Center ever had. We have more private office space than anybody could possibly need, so we can shoot cones through it, making these holes and tunnels. It can function as a kind of urban camouflage. A terrorist flying above might look down and say, "Oh, we don't have to bother about this one, it's already been dealt with." Now that there are holes in the building, now that tunnels extend from side to side, from bottom to top, the rest of the city can come inside. Parks can come inside the building. Street vendors can come inside the building. In other words, instead of observing the convention of a private office building with a public plaza outside, our attempt, as I think it is in all our work, our attempt is to mix public and private. (fig 21)
Why do we, like so many designers of the 21st century, tend towards a topological space? Because a topological space is a movable, warpable space. Maybe boundaries aren't as fixed as all that. Maybe if outside and inside aren't so definitively separated, people decide what they want to have be inside and outside. I don't know if we can define what public is, but it certainly is a composite of privates. I think we want to think of swarms and multitudes. Ideally, we want to make a kind of space that can liberate people. I don't know if we'll ever find out whether we have or not. I think I mentioned earlier that gradually what drew me to architecture is that architecture is the art of everyday life. Everybody knows architecture, whether they realize it or not. Everybody knows architecture because everybody is always in the middle of architecture. Everybody knows architecture because everybody has climbed a stairway, everybody has gone through a doorway. My fear about architecture is that when you design a space, are you necessarily designing people's behavior in that space? Is architecture necessarily a prison? Therefore, we try to make a space that's changeable, that can adapt to people. I don't think we've done that, but we try or will try. Thank you.
