VITO ACCONCI: I remember being tremendously jolted the first

time I saw a Jasper Johns painting.

And it seemed like, wow, conventions are important.

It's as if Jasper Johns really wanted to do all these little

abstract brush strokes, but he said, why

would anybody pay attention?

However, if I make a number five, you can't help pay

attention-- if you make a target.

It's a way to draw people in, which made me think in terms

of English.

English language idioms--

can you play with words?

The great thing about words is that they seem so definite,

but they're so hazy and cloudy.

You can pick one word within a word and it starts to

contradict the basic word.

I don't want to do something that refers to

something off the page.

Towards the end of the time I was writing, I started to

think, I can't use words like "tree," "chair." This refers

to a space off the page, whereas I could use, on the

page, words like "there," "then," "at that time," "in

that space," "in that place"--

words that directly referred to my act of writing the page,

words that referred to the reader's act of

going down the page.

They were almost like guides for the reader.

Though, eventually--

one of the last poems I wrote was a poem consisting of a

page on reading speed--

how to improve reading speed.

The title given to it was something like "The Time Taken

For Me to Walk From 14th Street and 6th Avenue to 14th

Street and 5th Avenue"--

so an attempt to make reading time

equivalent to writing time.

By the time I got there, I thought, I can't turn back.

The stuff has taken me out to the street.

And also, I started to question, if I'm so interested

in space and moving over a space, why am I moving over an

8 and 1/2 by 11 piece of paper?

There's a floor out there.

There's a street out there.

There's a world out there.

What can I do on the street?

Follow a person.

What I thought of as activities--

they weren't exactly performances.

There wasn't a viewer.

If anything, I was the viewer.

I used what was available.

I started to use a Super 8 camera--

later, a video camera.

I was very struck by a beautiful Charlie Chaplin

statement when he was asked, why didn't he ever use a close

up in his comedies?

And his answer was, well, there's just nothing funny

about a face 15 feet high, which changed my life.

And then I realized, but video is a place--

a video monitor, a video screen, at least then, was

approximately the size of a person's face.

So the way I did videos was my face on screen, face

to face with you--

I have to assume somebody's going to watch it--

with you offscreen.

What am I doing in relation to you?

First of all, where am I?

Am I face to face with you?

And in this case, I'm on the floor.

I'm either a pet cat or a snake.

[MUSIC PLAYING FROM VIDEO]

No, I don't need your picture.

I don't have to know what you look like.

We haven't even said hello yet.

You can look like anybody.

I'll take anybody.

I'll take anything I can get.

Some of the videos I did before this--

I was really struck by the--

sorry, I can't say I stole this from these movies.

But it was '72, '73, a great Bob Rafelson movie called

"King of Marvin Gardens."

It begins with black and Jack Nicholson's face leaning into

the screen, and direct confrontation.

That was important to me.

Though, I had done stuff before that, I guess.

But actually, I think a lot of the face-to-face video stuff I

did was really not until '73.

So I think I got it from "King of Marvin Gardens."

-People always say about you that, at some point, you

turned your back on the art world.

VITO ACCONCI: To me, the shorthand to the time is the

music of the time.

In the late '60s, early '70s, I was listening to Neil Young,

Van Morrison--

single voice, long song.

There was something else going on in the music.

The introduction of the Velvet Underground was like the

introduction of the city in the middle of what, in effect,

was rural music, country music.

You have all the time in the world to wander.

But Velvet Underground was the city's closing in on you.

So by the mid '70s, I was listening to a

different kind of music.

I was listening to the Ramones, the Sex Pistols.

No longer single voice, no longer long song, because a

scream can't last for six minutes.

It started to become clear to me that my stuff is so

grounded on the '60s.

It's so grounded on a time in which the common language is

finding oneself, as if the self is something that you

separate from the rest of the person and concentrate on and

contemplate.

[UNINTELLIGIBLE SOUNDS]

VITO ACCONCI: I've never loved galleries.

I've never particularly loved museums.

But have I turned my back?

I don't know, it's an interesting--

I think I don't feel a connection to the art world.

But I always had questions about the art

world, even when I started.

I come from a generation who had the illusion that we were

going to do the kind of work that would make galleries go

out of existence.

We were very naive.

And also, in some ways, a lot of us were right.

We didn't make commodities, so we always had a

difficult time surviving.

By '73, '74, '75, I and a lot of other people were starting

to have very different notions of self.

Self wasn't this precious jewel that you found and

focused on.

Self maybe existed only as part of a social system, a

cultural system, a political system.

By the mid '70s, I wanted stuff of mine to be part of

those overall systems.

In other words, I thought, is my stuff inherently

self-enclosed?

Yes, it was me and you.

But what about we?

Once I did "Seedbed" in '72, I started to realize it's not

the '60s anymore.

I might have masturbated in a gallery in 1972.

People were fucking in the streets in 1965.

Art is a little slow.

Luckily, life is faster.

Our first goal is really not to build.

Our first goal is, can we come up with a design, can we

design a space, can we design a condition that

will surprise us?

An attempt we made a few years ago to propose a new light

system for New York--

the competition brief said that the new light system

should have a very thick post, because the post would have to

hold different kinds of lights,

different kinds of signs.

We thought this was probably misguided since you wouldn't

need all those different kinds of lights, all those different

kinds of signs, all the time.

Let's take the opposite approach.

Let's use the thinnest pole possible.

Then, each pole would hold one kind of

light, one kind of sign.

The more you needed then, you would braid them together.

You would braid each one sign, one light post together so you

could have multiple lights at posts.

Needless to say, the new light system is exactly the same as

the old one.

We, like a lot of people, made a kind of attempt at a

possible new World Trade Center.

We proposed a World Trade Center full of holes.

Our starting point was that if a building nowadays is going

to be exploded anyway, maybe a building nowadays should come

already exploded.

It should come pre-exploded.

So we take the original site of the World Trade Center,

extrude it to a height of 110 stories high--

more of a mass, more of a volume than the original World

Trade Center ever was, more private office space than

anybody could possibly need so we could shoot cones into it.

Now that the building is riddled with holes, it can

possibly act as a kind of urban camouflage.

A terrorist flying by above looks down and says, we don't

have to bother about this building.

It's already been dealt with.

Now that the building is riddled with holes, there are

now tunnels from one side to another, tunnels

from bottom to top.

Now that there are tunnels through the building, the rest

of the building can come inside.

Parks can come inside the building.

Street vendors can come inside the building.

In other words, instead of trying to observe the

convention of private office building with so-called public

space outside, can we mix public and private?

Which, I think, our projects, at least when they work,

always try to do.

This is paradoxical maybe, but even though we build far from

everything we do, we do think it's necessary to build,

because you have to build in order to test the theory.

And the only way you can test the theory is what happens

when other people come in.

I got a lot of my ideas of architecture from "Blade

Runner." "Blade Runner" was so startling to me.

This contradicted the 2001 notion of architecture.

The future is abstract and all white.

The "Blade Runner" notion shrugged its shoulders and

said, we're never going to have enough money to build

from the beginning.

Let's just tack on to what's already there.

And again, it made a kind of sense.

So our first goal is to do something that surprises us.

And hopefully, if it surprises us, maybe it can surprise and

excite at least one other person.

Graz, for example--

we always made the assumption that probably there's a chance

that younger people like our work.

I don't think we have much of a chance with older people.

But that's OK.

It's a way that I can maybe pretend that

I'm not getting older.

When the Graz island was finished, people in Graz

started to use the island as a place for walks.

And a lot of old people were walking on the island.

I was really surprised.

The interesting thing, when somebody was in the theater--

and especially, I remember, this happened a

lot with older people.

They're in the theater.

They're walking.

Suddenly, they look up and around, and

they started to laugh.

It seemed like, well, maybe they kind of got

the feeling of it.

They were in this open space.

Now, without realizing it, without going through an

entrance, it became a more closed space.

And even though we couldn't use the same language, people

came up to us and thanked us.

There was a peace tree named after us.

Now, I don't know if I can say that's totally a sign, but it

seemed like--

What we were asked to do was this person-made island that

would have three functions-- a theater, a cafe, and a

playground.

So we started with the

conventional idea of a theater--

a bowl.

What if we twist the bowl?

What if we turn it upside down?

Bowl becomes dome.