Interview

Vito Acconci’s studio is in a large building in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. The day I arrived tointerview him, the electronic interactive screen displaying studio numbers wasn’t working, prompting me to ask several people if they knew where theAcconci studio was. No one did. Eventually I found the place where the 69-year-old artist works on his design and architecture projects that range from giant bras to bridges for hedgehogs. The studio is bright, with large windows facing the street. The dominant furnishings are the shelves of books acting as room dividers, each containing a tantalizing selection of titles ranging from psychology and art to song lyrics. Acconci is most famous for his performance installations in the 1970s, which live on for a new generation in documentary footage immortalized on various online sites—especially his most infamous work, Seedbed, in which he lay masturbating under a wooden structure while visitors walked above him at Sonnabend’s soho Gallery in 1972. But while Acconci shed his rebel artist skin years ago, he’s still pushing boundaries.

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KAREN WRIGHT: I know you were born in 1940. Tell me a bit about your parents.

VITO ACCONCI: I come from an Italian family. My mother was born in New York, but my father was born in Italy. My father was a very formative person in my life. He hardly ever went to school. I doubt if he even finished a year of high school, but he was totally involved. The only things that were important to my father were literature, music, art, and architecture. He was a bathrobe manufacturer and that was a very money-losing business. As a kid I learned notions of art and notions of not having any money.

WRIGHT: So you learned about failure early?

ACCONCI: Yeah, from my father. The great thing about my father is that it wasn’t about study. It was about loving something. Coming from Italy, he read Dante to me, but he also read me Cole Porter and [William] Faulkner. He became entranced with the English language. He loved puns. He would say things like, “What’s honeymoon salad?” And the answer is, “Lettuce alone.” And he would follow that up by saying, “Don’t look now, mayonnaise is dressing.”

WRIGHT: So you felt privileged, in a way?

ACCONCI: It was an incredible way to grow up, because words that you’re taught—these definite things—you realize they sort of beautifully fall apart; that words are tenuous. In the middle of a large word, there’s a small word that possibly contradicts the larger word. So I grew up where, on the one hand, the only thing I would ever think of doing was something in writing, music, or art, and on the other hand, I could’ve reacted strongly against it because it would’ve been a way to rebel.

WRIGHT: New York became a kind of laboratory for you as well, didn’t it? I’ve heard you say that the Guggenheim was important to you.

ACCONCI: I went to high school four blocks away.

WRIGHT: I feel like the Guggenheim is like a sculpture, and inside it, are objects . . .

ACCONCI: Yeah, but does it have to be sculpture? I mean, sculpture is something you don’t go inside of. Isn’t it more like a wooze space?

WRIGHT: A what space?

ACCONCI: A wooze space, a swoon space. The great thing about the Guggenheim is that you can see art in the fastest way if you want to. Which isn’t bad. [laughs] It’s almost like Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t know something called the Internet was going to exist, so he made it so you can go down as fast as possible.