Vito Acconci Quotes

“Architecture is not about space but about time.”

— Vito Acconci

“Any time you do something, you make decisions about time and space. I wanted those decisions to be out of my hands. I could be dragged, carried along by another person, I could be a receiver. I could be the agent of the overall scheme, but I didn't want to be the agent of the particular action. I could make the ultimate decision that my space is going to change now, but I don't know where it's going to go.”

— 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

[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

“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

“It's not the bullet that kills you, it's the hole.”

— 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

“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

“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

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

“I was always fascinated by diagramming a sentence. Because that is going into a space, going into a world of language.”

— Vito Acconci

“My first pieces, in an art context, were ways to get myself off the page and into real space. These photographic pieces were ways to, literally, throw myself into my environment. They were photographs not of an activity, but through an activity; the activity (once I planted a camera in the instrument of that activity - once I, simply, held a camera in my hands) could produce a picture.”

— Vito Acconci

“Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.”

— Vito Acconci

“It was very definitely architectural. I was using the words on the page as some kind of equivalent of a physical model. But I never thought at that point that I wanted to move toward architecture. I wanted to move toward real space. Sure, that's probably another way of saying, I want to move toward architecture. But I didn't define real space in terms of architecture, then.”

— 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 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

“I was starting to recognize a corner I was driving myself into: that all writing could do was refer to things that had already been written. I'm making the margin, but the margin of a book that already exists. I was having this exhilaration at, but at the same time horror of this recognition that I'd driven myself into the world of only books. This is a world of the previously written, and maybe I don't have to add to it, maybe all I can do is measure it.”

— 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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