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Bruce Barber: In your latest work you still haven't
lost what was important in the use of the Goffmanian "dramaturgical
metaphor". What interests me about Plot is that here you
have a space made up of "pages" which is to all intents
and purposes a book, but it becomes something other than a book and
you read it differently. How did the audience relate to that?
Vito Acconci: It's hard for me to tell for a number of
reasons. Because of my earlier work, I find it difficult to be
at a piece, because as soon as I'm there as a recognizable
image the work becomes something else. I really don't know
exactly how the audience reacted. Also I don't really
understand a non-American audience; how, what do an Italian's
movements around a space mean? I don't really know enough about
that so it's really hard to tell.
BB: in the Addenda section of Plot, you were talking
specifically about "imperialism" in relation to that
contract you formed with the people in Italy. You were there to do a
show; do a piece. Did the same kind of thing happen in Venice?
VA: Not so much, I guess. There's a piece between the
Venice work and this one which was done in Bordeaux this past spring.
The piece began ... it was a group show called ... Identity
– Identifications" [I'm not sure.] The show was
basically to do with earlier work ... person kinds of pieces.
The piece started for me as a kind of reaction against the way I
usually work. Sometimes I question whether I am just a little too
dependent on an existing physical space. It's very difficult
for me to do a piece until I see an existing physical space and I
start to define it visually, structurally, graphically, whatever, and
then I think, OK, what am I getting at. I wanted to do something
opposite to that, which could theoretically exist in any space. Once
I thought of this it seemed to me, if the piece could exist in any
space, then what becomes emphasized is the fact that something has
just been "dropped" into the space. If it could exist
anywhere, then the focus becomes on the particular "dropper",
the nature of the person who "dropped" the piece in. So,
OK, I am doing this piece in Europe. I am not going to be there, I am
going to send it ... I'm putting this piece in a space in
Bordeaux. It's coming from me in America, so I'm sort of
"dropping" this thing there. What am I "dropping"?
The title of the piece became "The American Gift". It was
a black box shape five feet by five feet by seven feet high. A slit
at the top of the box around the perimeter, a blue light inside so
that there's this vague blue light on top. The black box would
be at one end of the space. At the other were one or two folding
chairs. At the folding chairs there were two speakers and then inside
the box another speaker. At the folding chairs ... speaker on
the left, my voice speaking in English, in a whisper saying: "You
are the Europeans". Other speaker on the right, French man and
woman's voice: "Nous sommes les Europeans". My
voice: "You have America in the back of your mind, ah na na na
na na" ... "You are not responsible for what you
say, ah na na na na na". Of course they are not responsible, I
am saying it ... they are translating it. That kind of thing.
Then every once and a while from the box, my voice speaking in French
but obviously in American's French, saying something like, ah ...
"Listen America speaks, America speaks, La la ba la la la".
Then my voice by the chairs again: "You learn the language".
French voice: "Nous apprenons le langue, La la la". But
this time in a slightly French accent. Then from the box, my voice
saying: "Quiet please. One minute of America". And there
might be a minute of Charles Ives music to a minute of New Orleans
dance hall, to gunshots, to a woman screaming. It seemed to me that
there were some implications, though this was more narrative,
insinuating, round about drift kind of thing. That was more direct.
Actually the idea for that piece came from the film 2001 with
the black monolith ... trying to sniff out this black monolith.
The notion of doing pieces elsewhere, the notion of dropping
something elsewhere, began to really interest me.
The Venice piece began to develop a kind of ‘we' voice
and it was unclear whether the ‘we' was a kind of
Americans in Europe; almost a kind of desperate ‘we'.
Almost trying to make a ‘we', a ‘we' that is
not this yet but can we be a ‘we'. Can we be this kind of
community based on interest. It's almost a sense of failed
revolution.
BB: It seems to me ... I'm going to get into
intentionality; that invariably ends up with my projection onto the
thing.
VA: Sure when I talk about it, it ends up with my
motivations.
BB: I'm going to talk about eclecticism in your work.
It's the kind of eclecticism that doesn't carry a
pejorative sense. It's the kind of eclecticism that one would
associate with someone like Borges, only it's popular
eclecticism. You are working with popular psychology, popular
sociology, popular politics, popular music, whereas Borges might be
dealing with a once popular mythology, theme ... I find that
kind of relationship quite interesting. When you talk of ‘black
box' my mind goes immediately to Borges, and to Maxwell's
demon. Many of your earlier pieces have to do with ... things
that were possibly in the air at the time ... the entropic
function ... the exhaustion principle. That seemed to inform
your work.
VA: Yes, in a lot of ways. At least in retrospect. I'm
not sure how much it was part of a conscious intention at the time
but in retrospect it seems that way in many early pieces, those
direct body pieces. Almost like a last gasp of Minimal art making
myself into a self-enclosed object; circling in on myself, turning in
on myself. It really was connected I think to that time, also
bringing popular currents ... encounter groups and that sort of
thing. That stuff is obviously a big part of work of mine. I mean, I
hated the idea of encounter groups that existed at that time and yet,
obviously, they interested me.
BB: Getting back to Plot. You say in the end of the
Prologue that you are constructing a plot and that you are
constructing a sub-plot which negates the intention of the plot. The
plot might be: "I do not believe anymore in the efficacy of
art". The sub-plot: "But I have to believe in it because
I am part of that plot to convince you the viewer of that meaning".
You've done your market research and now there's your
imposition. Now going to some notes about video (Art-Rite, No: 7) and
going to what is essentially a producer-consumer relationship, you
are saying ... OK this is the way television works, I deal with
video in a similar but more potent way. And when you are dealing with
your audience you go through the whole range of human emotions.
VA: I wish you could see the tapes I've just finished.
They're called The Red Tapes; two hours of what we have
been talking about; trying to come to grips with American history,
American culture.
BB: When I started doing my investigations I was annoyed that
critics were using ‘reify', a classic Marxist term ...
Max Kozloff is a classic example ... using that as a pejorative
in order to criticize early works of yours and others. And then
there's Lea Vergine, I like what she has done but she has been
over-prescriptive and has come up with what I would call a specious
psychologism. She hasn't realized the differences between an
artist using certain materials or ideas as his or her subject, the
artists' wants to use this as their subject matter ...
they don't necessarily need to do it as some kind of therapy.
The artist isn't always a victim of his or her psychology. And
yet going back to an earlier statement by you; if I remember rightly,
you said that you used to think that art wasn't therapeutic and
that now you think it is.
VA: Yes ... You don't remember when I said that do
you? I'm trying to remember. If it was in '73, it would
have made sense in regard to pieces I was making then. It had a lot
to do with using gallery space to focus on the kind of public-ness of
that space. I could use the exhibition space to make something public
that supposedly wasn't public. I would use this situation to
effect or change something in my everyday life. Can I just mention
briefly a piece as an example. There was a piece called "Air
Time" (Sonnabend). It was a closed-circuit video thing where I
was in this enclosed space, hidden from the audience. There was a
video monitor outside. I was facing a mirror so that the audience
could see and hear me on the monitor, not so much talking to myself
but talking to a specific you, a person within my life; a
person whom I had been living with for four years. My attempt was to
recreate incidences in our life together. I want this to be public, I
want them the audience to see the way you ... once it's
public, I have to see the way I am with you ... have to face up
to the reality, that I can't change it now that it's a
public fact. I can't change it. I'm forced to realize
that we can't be together anymore. If I made that statement
then it would have made sense. There were a few pieces like that.
BB: The ‘you' that you talk about in your pieces
is not only singular but also plural. That interests me where you
bridge the gap, whether in talking to one you are talking to the
other. By extension ... I can make a huge leap here and talk
about the so-called collective consciousness and collective
unconsciousness; that is, we are what our culture and our family has
made us. Nothing is going to alter. So when we are talking about the
individual, we may be also talking about the group.
VA: Though we're never sure. We don't know
whether we are keyed into that. The thing that has troubled me about
earlier work ... I always wonder about my use of self in earlier
pieces. It's always seemed like a very generalized self. Very
recently when I see a lot of work by women dealing with self, it
seems a really specific self ... compare it to some of my stuff
and it seems like, my god, as if mine is a general, abstract, a kind
of male abstracting notion. A generalized almost grandiose self.
BB: When I talked before of the self-effacement, in a sense,
of a work such as Plot, I could in turn generalize about your
earlier work as being self-aggrandizing. One of your strongest pieces
for me is Seedbed. That piece points out the problem of not
only dealing with the individual but also with the group. And not
only dealing with a self-aggrandized Vito Acconci but also with a
self-effaced Vito Acconci. Not only dealing with the intimacy of your
contact with yourself and your audience ... that onanistic type
of behaviour ... turning yourself into a kind of object ...
VA: That interesting problem of dealing with people which is,
... my god, what am I doing to these people? Bring them into the
gallery and make them part of my fantasy life. Of course they can
leave. Things like that interest me in the piece but the entrapping
of an audience gives me very queasy feelings.
BB: Your work seems peppered with Goffmanian concerns, those
also of Edward T. Hall, Reich ... lots of people there but the
way that you deal with that material is hard to pin down ...
whether you identify with it or live through it.
VA: Goffman was someone I came across at a really important
time for me, a time when my work was in a sense really beginning. My
whole background was writing, poetry, fiction and in ‘68/'69,
things began to shift. The shift was occurring and I began to search
out moves in real space and came upon Goffman. This thing came at
such an important time in my life and my work. It's almost
difficult to know what I feel about Goffman aside from that I related
to him at the time. There's almost that kind of positive(ist)
side of Goffman that I related to.
BB: So this gave you an idea of what was happening in your
own life?
VA: Yeh. It started to ... having Goffman's
language at hand, it started to allow me to order things ... to
clarify things ... to put things in some kind of order rather
than vague, vague groupings. It was a kind of categorizing I could
relate to. I've always had to deal with things in terms of
categories. Categories can be wide enough to lose things that don't
belong there. I've always had that kind of bias. If we're
using words, we're using categories anyway, the thing is to
stretch them as far as possible so that you can't avoid them.
BB: They're often stretched enough in our society
anyway. We have to attempt to restrain the artifices of the Humpty
Dumptys of this world.
"Orchestra Pit" (Plot) ... how to dig the
harmony of the spheres. Is that some kind of reference to music?
VA: So many pieces of mine come from my own background of
playing with words. Centre point. There was this centre point. I
don't know how this came about but there was to be this music
coming from the centre. Once you get the centre, you get the pit;
once you get the pit, you get the orchestra. Harmony and harmony of
the spheres. Dig. I think that happens a lot in my work ...
taking that semi-mystic notion ... I've obviously been
attracted to it ...
BB: it's a kind of verbal and visual punning in a
sense.
VA: Then once I've got this kind of plot thing going,
there's a novel field, a movie field; then obviously, if
there's a movie field, there should be background music.
BB: But you're not dealing with traditional novel of
filmic structure. The plot is a plot ... not in the sense of
being a narrative, climax or denouement? It's an interesting
plot.
VA: The plot started me thinking very much in terms of
science fiction. Maybe that is the kind of ultimate, ultimate novel;
a combination of horror movie on the one hand and science fiction on
the other.
BB: In the different rooms or spaces you are trying to
provide analogues for objects from contemporary American art history
... say, the last ten years.
VA: Yes, things that were very reminiscent of art that's
been going on.
BB: Still a little ambiguous, in that you need signification
of the word to object to get at it. But when it's on tape ...
it becomes provisional, a provisional quality in that you can pass by
them without any conditions of true acceptance going on.
VA: That's something which has always troubled me.
BB: It's always provisional ... and as far as art
history is concerned it doesn't help the ‘efficacy'
of art.
VA: What do you mean?
BB: It doesn't (in terms of plot) help your self-image,
maintain or provide for your immortality through your art. It doesn't
make your art live on after you, and doesn't really impose your
will on any other artists.
VA: Hmmm ...
BB: Your latest work doesn't appear to have received a
lot of attention. Why?
VA: No, it hasn't. (Laughs) That troubles me. Even when
stuff is written now, it still talks about earlier work, the really
blatant frontal image of that earlier work. It's been really
difficult for people to deal with my more recent work. I'm sure
that people think it's regressive, which is a fear of mine.
BB: Regressive?
VA: Yes, if I was dealing with direct person in earlier
pieces, now there's no person there. Now I am dealing with
space in a way that could be related to traditional sculpture.
BB: Plot though is dealing with very contemporary
kinds of issues and not necessarily popular ones.
VA: Those early pieces, if I want to criticize myself or hate
myself, were really media oriented. They were very easily sloganized.
Five or six words could give the idea of a piece. You can't do
that with my recent work. Many of those early pieces like "Claim",
where I sat at the foot of the stairs of a basement ... there
was never any allowance to say ... what if I change my mind in
this ... what if I didn't want to go on with this constant
obsessive drive towards something ... what if my mind drifted.
That kind of thing was never allowed for; there was always this kind
of directness ... focus. If those pieces were drive, now I'm
more interested in drift. But at the same time ... at the base
of my work, there still seems to be a kind of I/you/me/you. There's
still that going on. Maybe it had to be at that time when the notion
of encounter group seemed as if it was going to lead somewhere.
Obviously it couldn't. Things aren't quite that simple.
BB: All of your early works have to do with manipulation.
They may be exploitative in a sense, sometimes of yourself or your
audience but these later pieces take into account the audience.
Tell me about the Venice tape.
VA: The Venice tape stands up by itself; I'm not sure
whether that's good or bad. The verse itself leads to a kind of
theatrical situation; it sets up scenes without that situation. It
was part of that series of rooms which Germano Celant arranged,
called Ambiente. In the Venice section maybe twelve or so
contemporary people had rooms to themselves. Interesting space. Each
room had a skylight, though in other ways each was varied. In size
they were all about thirty by twenty feet. It was a piece that
started with the title. I don't think I'd even seen the
space. I thought, well it has to have something to do with Venice so
the piece was called Venice Belongs to Us, stolen from the
Jacques Rivette movie Paris Belongs to Us. I think that came
before I even saw the plans for the space. The thing that struck me ...
OK, let me go back into what is probably an habitual way I have of
going about pieces, what are the quirks in this space? There was a
skylight and there were three entrances, something I thought I could
make use of. Lately I've been thinking of what I can do with a
space ... simply lay something over a space, or across the
space, trying to deal with what is already there and join something
to it. So, taking that skylight area, planks were laid across the
skylight so that it became a kind of room in itself. At each doorway
a large ladder blocked half of the doorway and led up to the
skylight. There were some stools placed on top of the planks, the
room became loaded with some kind of presence. Four speakers were
placed on top so that the sound was directed downwards. Then the text
itself; one speaker dealt mainly with in a sense, directing a
specific ‘you' ... almost a kind of theatre
direction. That was speaker one. Speaker two dealt with kind of movie
directions ... setting up a scene. Speaker three dealt with an
announcement of possible intention, not so much my intention but what
‘our' intention could be in the "lights, camera,
action!" I guess on seeing that space I thought well the
skylight area; whoever might be up there ... obviously no-one
could be up there but you could look down on the space and ideally
out on to the city itself, on to Venice. Almost a kind of lookout
space. This movie idea, setting scenes of Venice ... the piece
dealt a lot with this ‘we' ... what are ‘we'
doing here? Almost a kind of ... a lot about this piece is in
different pieces of mine ... that it seems to be stringing
people off into "revolutionary fervour", but I don't
take them anywhere ... what do I do? I've got nowhere to
go and I've got nowhere to tell them where to go. There's
this fight ... builds up but then plop it drops.
BB: I think you mentioned somewhere (Art-Rite) that Goddard
does the same sort of thing ...
VA: Yeh.
BB: Seeing some of his films ... you almost turn round
to the person next to you ... did you see that? What are we
going to do?
VA: Yeh. For a while that's enough but it can become
self-satisfying. OK, we're angry ... fine.
BB: Well, you've got to start somewhere. In some way
what you are doing is presenting the issues, yet setting the scenes
and the stage for another theatrical ... maybe the revolution is
theatrical in your case.
VA: Yeh, well I'm not really sure.
BB: The use of the ladder interests me. Weren't you
using ladders, stairs in '71?
VA: That's true actually, there's a lot of ladder
stuff.
BB: Jacob's ladder? Transcendence?
VA: I'm not sure how consistently ... it seems
that it's setting up to something but doesn't quite get
there.
BB: It's not a simple "Sisyphus" thing ...
rolling a boulder up a hill and finding it coming back down, though.
VA: There's a lot of people using ladders. Recently in
Ohio (Dayton) there were a lot of ladder structures. There's a
piece that's going to be done at the Whitney for their Biennial
and at least the piece I'm thinking of now involves a kind of
ladder structure. So it's there a lot; it's a general
enough form.
BB: Why do you think the ladder is so prevalent in your work?
VA: I think it has a lot to do with that notion of training,
a kind of preparation that either leads to a kind of exhaustion or
you break through that exhaustion and you get to something ...
or is it an illusion of getting to something? When you reach the top
... is reaching the top of the ladder ... is this a real
place of rest, or is this just saying, I have achieved something? I
don't know. It has a lot of these implications.
BB: Chapter 2 of the Plot is "The accelerated
mountain. A ladder-like structure closed on the outside. A ladder
that will have to be climbed from underneath: inside, coloured lights
dot the ascent, like signals, like visual-lights on an upward
journey." The quasi-religious connotations of that kind of
thing ... "a search for tomorrow"?
VA: Yeh.
BB: One of the most important elements of your work for me is
this notion of dealing with the "popular" and in some
ways it's the "popular" things like Goffman that
lead me away from your work. I know that you're a part of your
culture as I am of mine. You come out of literature, poetry; you've
been an heir to the issues confronting abstract expressionism and
minimalism. I've been an heir only to the minimalist,
conceptualist tradition. In some ways that leads me away from
identifying too strongly with all the kinds of issues that you've
involved yourself with because they have become popular in a certain
sense. They are popular for a certain section of the population and
yet I may conjecture that you have deep feelings for the working
class ... you live in an area where you are seeing certain
sections of the population undergoing so much stress.
VA: Yes, sure, but I'm seeing them with obviously
non-working-class eyes ... you
know ...
BB: My background, even though I may sound like an academic,
is British working class ... your background ... going to
Italy to do these pieces ... how does that ... You have
come from New York ...
VA: Yes, that's strange. I'm from New York. My
father was born in Italy so I grew up very much with that kind of
Italian consciousness.
BB: What does that mean for you?
VA: Well, for me it was entirely an Italian cultural
consciousness. I grew up listening to only Italian music, seeing only
Italian art. I guess I was twelve before I realized that you didn't
have to be Italian in order to write music or to do art. I grew up so
much in the middle of a kind of hero worship for DaVinci and Verdi.
My family was really very lower middle class ... except I never
would have ... The attempt was to raise me as ... as a kind
of Italian prince. I never realized how impoverished my family was
until I was in high school.
BB: I hope it wasn't a Machiavellian prince!
VA: Not quite ... no. I don't think it was quite
like that; my family wasn't that impoverished.
BB: Yet there is something quite Machiavellian about the way
you, dare I use the word, use your audience.
VA: Yes that's been bothering me a little lately. What
kind of manipulation, pressure have I been exerting. I'm not
exactly clear on that.
BB: Have you talked to many of your audience members? You
obviously have some cognizance of what you are doing with an
audience, even when your presence is just limited to video tape or
sound tape.
VA: Yes. I've gotten extremely varied kinds of
reactions. Most people have felt that they have been involved ...
that they have felt some sense of freedom and that they weren't
in fact being exploited. Obviously, that doesn't apply to all
of the pieces. They must have felt exploited with some of the earlier
work. I at this point object to that, yet at the same time, I keep
wanting to do pieces which take that public situation into account
and that you are with that potential audience as very much part of
the piece. Now how do I keep that from being a matter of manipulating
the audience? I'm not quite sure.
BB: Even when you have your audience empathizing with you as
in say Seedbed ... though that is always going to be a
difficult piece ... in a sense you are still manipulating your
audience, extending, projecting your fantasies onto them and you are
definitely in control of the situation.
VA: Yes, I'm not sure. My conscious aims are towards
the opposite of that.
BB: So it's the empathy that you have for your audience
rather than that they have for you?
VA: Yes ... but I think the emphasis has been on the
other side of that. I'm not so sure with the very recent pieces
like the work done at Sonnabend.
BB: Tell me about that.
VA: There was this board that had a kind
of table function with stools on either side
of it. It extended out the window about six
or eight feet like a kind of diving board and
was about sixteen feet or thereabouts inside
the room. A hanging speaker was midpoint between
where the board was a table and where it became
a board out the window. Part of the gallery
was closed off and in darkness so that it became
almost a large black box. A speaker at that
plank area, and two speakers at the back. My
voice saying ... "now that ...".
Voice says "rise ..." violin
music ... "change places ..."
... "rise ...". Sort of
like musical chairs. Voice saying "what
do we do with that one ... no room for
that one", or "where do you think
you are going?" "Where do you think
you are going?", then from the black room:
... kind of indefinable crowd sounds ...
many talking, garbled sounds, then a voice above
the table. Two women's voices start to
give ... define the crowd room as something
that is always there in the background. Is it
something we are going towards, is it something
we are avoiding ... this kind of indefinable
"they". The "they" give
us reason to exist or "they" give
us something to run away from but the main part
of the tape is the "now that". It
was repetitive and there were ten sections.
The piece which repeats is the "now that
we know we've failed", the crowd then goes
off into position one but it's mainly
about this kind of vapid gallery situation ...
the contemporary situation.
BB: It seems we are running out of time. Thank you, Vito.
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