VITO
ACCONCI:
Rehearsals for Architecture
Kenny Schachter/Rove @ 132
Perry Street, NYC
October 15th – December
30th, 2003
Opening Reception: Wednesday October 15th, 6 - 9pm
Kenny Schachter/Rove
t. 212 807-6669 f. 645-0743
www.RoveTV.net schachter@mindspring.com
REHEARSALS FOR
ARCHITECTURE
By the late 60’s, toward the end of the time
when I wrote poetry, I could use only words like ‘there,’
‘then,’ ‘at that time,’ ‘in
this place’; I used puns, words that canceled
themselves out and left only the space of the page
and the time taken to traverse it -- the page was
a field over which I, as writer, and then you, as
reader, could travel. My work could have become architecture
then, but it never crossed my mind; and mind was important
to me then, so I entered an art context, at a time
of ‘conceptual art’ – I didn’t
have any skills, but I knew I could have vague ideas.
In the early 70’s, when my activities
and performances ‘found myself,’ made
and un-made my person, my body was a space-in-itself,
a space to act on (COMBINATION); or my body became
part of a space, part of the architecture of a room
(CLAIM, PROPS). My work could have become architecture
then but, again, it never occurred to me; instead,
the work became installations – something like
stage-sets for audiotaped voice -- in a gallery/museum.
By the mid-70’s, I worked from
the assumption that a gallery/museum was a place where
people were going to come to anyway: my installations
could form a community, bring a community together
-- the gallery/museum was transformed into a town
square, a plaza. I was only pretending; a gallery/museum
would never be a public place, no matter how much
I wished it, how much I pushed it. My work should
have become architecture then; but I didn’t
know how to jump out of the gallery/museum and into
the public space concomitant to architecture.
In order to get to public space, I had
to re-invent architecture for myself; I had to connect
architecture to the body, the source of my work --
the body became the cause of architecture. In the
early 80’s, a piece consisted of an instrument
used by a viewer; the viewer’s use of the instrument
made a surrounding, a shelter, a house (INSTANT HOUSE,
COLLISION HOUSE, COMMUNITY HOUSE). But these were
only games of architecture, models of house-building-and-unbuilding;
no architecture was left to be inhabited.
By the mid-80’s, I made places
for people: houses and landscapes (FACE OF THE EARTH,
HOLE IN THE GROUND) and furniture (BIG BABY FLOOR,
TURNED TABLES). But they were only prototypes; they
could be used but they couldn’t be lived in,
they could only be played with – they were play-architecture,
architectural models to walk in. What kept then from
architecture was: my desperate maintenance of ‘art,’
my desire to have meaning, insert meaning, ‘add’
metaphor -- as if, for a person to enter a place,
that place had to be personified.
I got rid of art by working with other
people; in 1988, Acconci Studio began; together we’ve
shrugged our shoulders -- architecture ‘means’
through people’s activity inside it.
- Vito Acconci, Oct 03
