This title was digitized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA).
About Art papers. (Atlanta, Ga.) 1981-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 1981)
$1.25 ARTPAPERS Covering the Arts in Atlanta and the Southeast Vol. 5, No. 1 January/February 1981 ISSN 0271-2083 Vito Acconci, partial view of Instant Decor, installation, various materials including two bicycles, photo mural screens, ca mouflage cloth, fake leopardskin, checked tablecloth, American flag, ropes, and pulleys, Atlanta Art Workers Coalition Gal lery, 1980 (photo: Dan R. Talley). INTERVIEW: Vito Acconci By Jan Avgikos Since his first works as a visual artist in 1968, Vito Acconci has established himself as one of the most important artists of the last decade. Acconci personified the changes in attitudes and means of presentation which characterized the art of the ’70’s in a career which evolved out of minimalism to embrace conceptual art, body works, video and per formance. In this sense, Acconci’s work is emblematic of the past decade. In his most recent group of works (since 1979), which Acconci refers to as “vehicle transporting and self-erecting architecture, ” we can see an extreme shift toward notions of surface, color and decoration, characterized by mass cultural concerns. These transitions in his work can be seen in direct response to the art of the ’80’s and indicate that Acconci will continue to hold a leading edge in deter mining the aesthetic issues of the next decade. JA: You were scheduled to be here in At lanta two years ago. How did you happen to come down for this installation? VA: When I said I would do a talk, doing a piece came up. For a lot of reasons, I imme diately said yes. I knew Dan Talley when he was President of the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition and once vaguely told him I was going to do something and then never did. After I had committed myself, I kept say ing, ‘Why are you doing this? In a show that has no or very little budget, how can you possibly do a piece?’ Everyone around me was saying it was absurd, ‘What are you doing anyway? There are other ways to do a piece. Don’t waste a piece there.’ I can understand that in a lot of ways. It’s exact ly the attitude I hate, although it’s a very easy one to have. You ascribe importance to a show at the Whitney and non-impor tance to a show in Atlanta. I hate that, but obviously I can understand how artists of my generation or position easily fall into that. You don’t have time to do everything and certainly don’t have money to do everything—do you really want to do some thing that becomes this kind of struggle? But my work came out of all this, out of street spaces, out of alternative spaces. I don’t want to get into a position where I have to do a show for the Museum of Con temporary Art in Chicago, but I can’t do a show for the Art Workers Coalition in At lanta. Obviously it’s easier to do a show in a bigger place because there is more of a budget; and it’s a real struggle to do pieces elsewhere. Even with the limitations, I would still love to do both. On one hand, I kept thinking I shouldn’t have said yes, but on the other I couldn’t have said no. When I say I want my work to be distributed, I don’t just mean in museum spaces. I want it to get to other places too. It’s about por tability, not message: it should be traveling. JA: In developing your installation piece for Atlanta, Instant Decor, how aware were you of the actual space of the Coalition? VA: Although I had seen the Coalition space two years before and knew its limita tions, I have to admit I really didn’t remember it too well. After a while, unfor tunately, you can’t distinguish—you see a lot of spaces. I was seeing the diagram of the space more than any actual remem brance. In diagrams, certain things stand out: there’s a bold black line, representing the wall in the middle of the space, that probably seems even more predominant than it is in actual space. In looking at the diagram, I kept focusing on that wall until it connected with a lot of what Ijas been going on in my mind lately, about wanting to do more with the idea of wall. I’ve thought lately of the late ’60’s and early ’70’s, my generation, as being floor time, a sculpture time rather than a painting time. The late ’70’s and ’80’s seem to be a painting time or a wall time. It’s significant that when galleries in Soho first opened, they were very different from other galleries. They were much more continuous sprawling spaces. There weren’t as many walls. They were continuous spaces for sprawling sculpture. At the time they opened, people like Bob Morris were doing
