“Art was a field that had no specific characteristics of its own except the fact that it was all called ‘art’. That’s a very early seventies attitude, that art was a field into which you could import from psychology, from sociology, from history. Years later I thought the direction was wrong; rather than bringing the world into art, maybe the motion should be to bring art into the world.”
By KLAUS BIESENBACH

KLAUS BIESENBACH: There is a contribution in this issue of photographs of New York in the late ’60s, taken by Lörinczy György. Let’s talk about this time. When did you first come to New York?
VITO ACCONCI: I was born in New York. I went to school outside of New York, then I came back. So for me it was coming back to New York, rather than coming to New York. I came back in 1964-65. At that time I was writing. I considered myself not in an art context, I was in a writing context.

And in which part of New York did you grow up?
In the Bronx, near Fordham University and the Bronx Zoo and the Botanical Gardens.

And did you often go to Manhattan?
I went to high school in Manhattan. I grew up in an atmosphere where the only thing anyone could possibly do was some form of art, music, or literature. We played with words a lot; I learned puns from my father. He played Verdi, but at the same time played Cole Porter songs. It was a kind of excitement; it wasn’t Culture with a capital C, it was everyday. It was something we lived with; it wasn’t something we studied.

When did it happen that you first deliberately produced a work of art? When did you create an image that was a visual image? The first visual impression I could exhibit today as a curator?
Probably never. [laughs] I thought of myself as a writer. I never cared about an object. I never cared about an autonomous work of art. I exhibited photographs of the activity, but I didn’t think of them as works of art. They were documentations of an activity.

I saw the show at Barbara Gladstone last year and selected many of your early performance works for the “Video Acts” show at P.S.1, which then traveled to London. I think we presented 29 performances including the Red Tapes and others. Were these tapes made to be only a documentary-art?
No, no. If anything, at that time I very much separated a performance done for a live audience from an activity in which there was no audience, where there would maybe be a photograph. In 1969 I did a number of pieces in which I would go through some activity while holding a camera and taking a photograph. I thought of them not so much photographs of an activity, but they would be photographs through an activity. In other words, holding the camera while going through the position of capturing my toes. Raise my hands up over my head, click camera, photo number one. Bring hands down, touch toes, photo number two. That was probably the first time I thought something was going to be produced. Everything you get is some kind of residue, some sort of leftover.

In Joan Jonas’ piece that we exhibited in the same show at P.S.1, she plays with the camera as if it were a mirror. Did you ever have this kind of funny alternating of the mirror or the camera?
The first video clip I ever did was in the fall of 1970. The question I had for myself was, what can I do with a video camera that I couldn’t do with other cameras? I focused on the simultaneous feedback of video; you can see what you are doing as you are doing it. There was a tape called “Corrections”; a monitor was in front of me, and a camera was focused on the back of my neck and head. By means of the video camera the monitor would act as a mirror for what I couldn’t see. I could see tufts of hair at the base of my neck. I considered these tufts of hair as a kind of imperfection. I light a match, bring the match back so I can burn the tuft off the base of my neck, and once in a while, I might make a mistake and my hair catches fire. The video monitor acts as a guide; I can see it quickly, I can put the fire out.

Art objects, if it is painting or sculpture, are very often objects of desire – they are rarefied objects. They are about seduction, by being rare and being beautiful. How much was seduction a part of your actions, in that time?
I think my whole activity and the activity of a large part of my generation was devoted to canceling out and contradicting everything you just said. But most of my videotapes were based on seduction. In 1973, when we thought of video, we thought of television monitor, which is basically the size of a person’s hand. I thought of video at that time as a place for face-to-face contact; my face, my position onscreen, comes face-to-face with your position off screen. I was addressing the viewer; it was totally about some kind of rhetoric, some kind of “I seduce you.” How do I grab you, how do I pull you in, how to I go out to you, how do I bring you into me? Total seduction.

How did you make a living in the ’70s in New York when you did these very non-object, non-market related pieces?
Part-time teaching jobs, talks … the work didn’t really cost that much then. Living expenses were one twentieth as low. [laughs] In 1969, I was living in a small three-room apartment on Christopher Street between Bleecker and Bedford. The rent was approximately $65 a month. But even until 1980, a 3,000 square-foot loft was $250 a month. At that time I didn’t need a studio. My studio was going out on the street, or doing an activity that produced a photograph.

The $65, three-bedroom apartment must have freed a whole generation to experiment on processes and actions that were not necessarily so product focused, which is today nearly impossible for a young artist to do something that is non-product. Was the art scene in New York in the ’70s relatively small, compared to now?
Compared to now, it seems it was miniscule. Once galleries began in SoHo in the fall of 1971 and beginning of 1972, at a live performance you probably expected an audience of 25 to 30. But then again, a lot of the times I didn’t know, because my position as a performer was I was going to be blindfolded, and this would go on for a few hours. I had no idea how many people there were.

I spent a whole afternoon in the Barbara Gladstone show. Some of those works were incredibly explicit for America today. I wondered if I could show a work like this in a museum now?
That was America after 1968, which was a very different America. My work was nothing compared to the time. The Beatles had songs like “Why Don’t We Do it in the Road.” All I did was do it in a gallery. [both laugh] Art was slow. Life was much, much faster and much more explicit than any of the art going on. It was a time of concentration on person-to-person relationships – that meant everybody fucked each other. It was a time of focusing on oneself. The self was a precious tool – to find oneself, and then interact with someone else. I think that idea worked well. Obviously I wasn’t the only one who did it; it was really just an embodiment of the time.

I was born around this time, in ’66, and so when the first AIDS case was announced I was fifteen, and it shot right into my puberty, torturing me. [laughs] I think it was ’81. Did this end the liberal ’70s in New York or did it take a couple of years?
It probably did, but I don’t know. But I hope the notion of fucking and not fucking was inherent to the notion of liberalism. I hope that people can still be liberal minded even when they can’t be fucking so much. [both laugh] I hope that maybe the fucking was the beginning of something and not the end.

Was one part of the liberalism that a poet would go into producing visual actions and producing pieces that were not to be sold? Because I could not imagine that you could ever sell this material in the ’70s. Who would buy this?
People started to buy little bits of documentation, but I never thought of the things as sellable until I first started to show in a gallery, around 1970. The first solo show I had was in 1971 at John Gibson, when he had a gallery uptown. He said, “You get a 30×40 matboard, and you put photographs on the matboard.” I was from another context. I didn’t know about matboards. Documentation is great when it’s a magazine, when it’s a newspaper. When it becomes relatively the same size as a painting and is placed on a gallery wall, then disaster happens.

I was just discussing with a couple of colleagues how one could present that period in a museum show.
Impossible. There is a kind of survey show of mine now at MACBA in Barcelona. It feels so much like a museum show to me. It all feels packaged – not packaged in the sense that you make an object that can be sold and sold and sold. It seems rarefied, it seems stuck to the wall, and it seems that my work and a lot of people’s work from my generation was made during a time of war and not wall. It was significant when galleries first opened in SoHo; 420 West Broadway opened in the fall of ’71. When Sonnabend Gallery opened, there were two entrances; you could enter by the elevator or you could enter by the stairway. There was a freestanding wall in the middle of the room and you could go in different directions. In 1976 a wall was built perpendicular to that freestanding wall, so now you walked along an L-shaped corridor that lead you directly to a room; I really thought that everything changed, painting’s come back.

It’s the change from floor to wall …
Wall was about focus, concentration; you stand here, and the art is there. Floor is, you are on the same level, you are finding it, you are groping around.

It’s an interesting difference, because in the ’90s there was that moment where video projection seemed to rule every gallery show. Then the empty wall space became more important again, but only because there was the time-related image somewhere floating in the room. Was there ever any performance show that successfully grasped the air of the ’70s we just talked about? Then or now? Ever?
Now I’m not so sure. People claimed my “Seedbed” show did that. It became a myth. If something has to reflect the time at the time it is done, I wonder if in retrospect it seems to have some connection to that time … but at the time, if people knew of it at all, they probably saw it as a little bit ridiculous. I thought the stuff was funny.

In “Seedbed” (1972) you masturbated for hours, daily, underneath a wooden ramp at Sonnabend Gallery, and expressed your fantasies into a microphone. Were you embarrassed?
Nobody could see me. I was under the floor.

When you think about that decade, was there anything particular that you were impressed by? An image in the largest sense of an image?
The one I am going to bring up was probably in the ’60s. The most influential thing for me in the ’60s was Godard movies. I can’t think of any particular images, but it was more the notion of doing things in a cheap, expedient way … the notion of making do. We didn’t have to go on site, on location. If you wanted to film a jungle you could just take a close-up of grass and leaves in Central Park. The ’70s were probably personified by music – the Sex Pistols. You could almost do it yourself. You might not know how to play music, but play it as hard and loud as possible, and do it almost as short as possible. Whereas late-’60s, early-’70s songs were long because there was a solo voice trying to find himself/herself, these songs in the mid-’70s were very short. A scream can’t last more than a minute and a half.

When I think back on the ’70s, I always think about Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, but also because they died in the ’70s. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Matta-Clark’s cuttings seem to have such an explosive impact on generations of people, nowadays. Was this very known and visible at the time?
Yes, but again the audience was smaller. Both of them were important to me. I have to admit that Smithson’s writings were more important.

For me Spiral Jetty is as much a seminal work of the ’70s as your show “Seedbed.”
When I first knew about it I thought it was a little grandiose, not that I wasn’t interested.

I liked the Barbara Gladstone show incredibly much. It was a spectacularly thoughtful and beautiful presentation. How long did you work on it?
I would say I worked on it all my life. Originally, I proposed a book that would deal with the first pieces of work, when I had realized I wasn’t doing poetry anymore. Then, I wanted to take all the pieces that dealt with bodies starting with 1959, going on to 1973. You needed all those in between pieces, which were just as important.

How does that work connect to your monumental, more sculptural pieces today?
I don’t think of them as sculptures. I don’t see myself as an artist anymore, what I do is architecture and design. We are an architectural studio. I hope it’s the opposite of monumental. Monumental is something you bow down before.

I used “monumental” in contrast to the more intimate gestures in a gallery. Perhaps “autonomous” is better than “monumental.”
They are not autonomous actually, because they are always tied into a site. If there is a river we do something on a river. We work like architects, we are told what to do.

Are you telling me that in the ’60s you considered yourself a poet, and in the ’70s you consider yourself a more visual, action-related artist, and now you consider yourself an architect?
Totally. And one of the reasons that attracted me to art in the beginning was that it seemed like art was a non-field field. That’s a very early-’70s attitude, that art was a field into which you could import from psychology, from sociology, from history, from news. Years later I thought the direction was wrong; rather than bringing the world into art, maybe the motion should be to bring art into the world. And that’s what design and architecture does. It is what possibly changes people’s minds, not study or contemplation.

Could I describe these three stages as stages of refusal? Because, as a poet you are not producing a sellable object, and as a performance artist you don’t, and now you say you are not doing rarefied objects, you are doing objects in relation to function.
Probably because of a writing background I never had a particular love for objects. I have a love for instruments. Once an object is used it is not an object anymore. I would love to be able to make a theory about objects, and a theory about instruments, but I don’t think I have tried yet or haven’t been able to do it.

Is there anything a human being created in the last couple of years that you were very impressed by? I have tried not to hit forbidden words here.
Does visual include the detachable, or the usable? I would say: Foreign Office Architects’ Yokohama Terminal; Lars von Trier’s Dogville and Dancer in the Dark. I know you are starting to wonder if I would name art. Probably not. It has always been easier for me to mention things from other fields that I have been excited by, thrilled by, influenced by, moved-on by; it is harder for me to name art.

Especially as a born New Yorker, are you planning something in New York?
We are doing a subway station in Coney Island, and we did a subway station on 164th St. in the Bronx, but because of my background we are not really taken seriously as architects. The difference between a work of mine then and now – and in some ways I kind of regret this – is that now it necessarily costs more money. In retrospect, the stuff I was doing in the ’70s was making a kind of statement that art didn’t need to share in the everyday, economic climate of the time. You could do something for nothing. It was so much about cheapness and availability. My work now must be making a statement that art or architecture is an activity that not only shares in the economic atmosphere but also multiplies it. And that statement bothers me at the same time.

I remember for example in Berlin, we were thinking of asking you to do something with the KW building, and we talked to a couple of people who worked with you before, who said we could never afford it because you are such a perfectionist.
Not everything we do is so expensive; we have tried to do things cheaply too. It is interesting because architecture is sort of meant to be renovated. You can’t really preserve the way something originally was, because conditions change. I don’t think that’s the most terrible thing. It doesn’t have that rarefied secretiveness that art has.

I grew up in Cologne, and Cologne Cathedral is such a huge building. It took more than 100 years to build. When we went to visit as school children, we were actually explained it would never be ready because there is an architectural unit connected to the cathedral who continuously redoes it. I think this is a beautiful concept of art and architecture, always being in repair.
Always being in repair while people are passing though. It is a beautiful combination. Making something that was never dreamed of.

Klaus Biesenbach is curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and founder of KW in Berlin.

Vito Acconci was born in 1940 in New York City. He was a published poet by 1969, and has since written many theoretical essays. His pieces from the late ’60s through the ’70s, that involved live and recorded work, have become critical markers in the history of performance art. Beginning in the ’80s, his work has gradually gravitated towards design and architecture – including seating structures and more substantial architectural units. Today he has an architectural studio in Brooklyn, New York and works on projects both at home and internationally. www.acconci.com