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)
process, anti-form sculpture that just spread over the floor. Toward the end of the ’70’s, a lot of those galleries changed their shape a little bit and start ed to build walls where there weren’t walls before. Things were going back to a kind of packaging, going back to wall. I always thought of floor as sprawl, as spread, and wall as summary or com pletion, in my terms, maybe even as a simplification. You can see all of a wall in front of you, whereas on the floor you have to walk through. You don’t see a floor all at once. Maybe there’s something interesting about wall that 1 don’t realize. The notion of wall has been on my mind a lot in recent pieces. This made me think about doing a piece about walls, something in general about constantly moving, rotating walls and a surface. JA: How does the idea of a wall work in the Atlanta piece? VA: It’s connected to the recent pieces of vehicles activating something, something done on one side of the wall which could activate something on the other side of the wall. You do some thing in one area and affect something a hundred miles away. Well, that’s an exaggeration, not exactly what is hap pening here, but you do something in one space and affect or make some thing in another space. That in general is what began the piece. JA: How are these notions of portabil ity and wall carried out in Instant De cor! What are the actual mechanics of this installation piece? VA: The piece consists of two pink bi cycles, each with a kind of a wing structure, which overlaps and connects the bicycles. On the back of the pink bicycles is a kind of picnic table, fur ther connecting the bicycles. The wings become very varied: one bicycle has a wing covered with leopard skin on one side and camouflage on the other; the other bicycle’s wings have one wing that is an American flag, which is half- covered by camouflage material because it is overlapped by the other’s wings, and another wing covered with Italian restaurant red table cloth that starts to take off from the red and white stripes of the flag. You have two winged bicycles with a kind of picnic table in front of a wooden stool placed in front of what looks like a mural on the wall, a forest scene. All this is in the second room. As you ride the bicy cles, the forest scene shade goes up, and approaching you, coming off the wall and down onto the floor is a shade with a blue sea of breasts. Meanwhile, in the other room, a very vivid black face has come down in between the two stools. The mask becomes very ambi guous for a person sitting on one of the stools. When you get off the bicycles, the sea of breasts rolls back up, the bi cycles roll back to the stool, the forest comes back down, and the black face disappears. JA: Where did the idea for the sea of breasts come from? VA: I knew I wanted something pas toral, a forest. As the pastoral scene disappeared, I wanted something related to come in and go across the floor—a sea appears, but that wasn’t quite enough. While it had to be re lated, it needed to be almost totally dif ferent and subverted. Instead of a na tural scene, something else should come at you. If it had been a forest of pricks, it would have had to be a meta phorical sea. I was making vague con nections—here’s a sea of breasts, here’s a black man’s face. JA: In her recent Art in America arti cle on your retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Carrie Rickey stated that, al though your pieces were not site-speci fic, they remain situational. Does In stant Decor have any connections with Atlanta? VA: Sometimes I can imagine this piece being done anywhere. I wanted to do a piece that involved a wall, but it could have been done any place, even a space without a wall where I would put in a wall. Maybe I had even thought of the black face as being related to At lanta. The black face became very ab stract. At first, it was going to be brown because I wanted a naturalistic black face. I don’t think it’s specifically con nected with Atlanta, but then I wonder if it could be done elsewhere. I don’t know if I would have thought in those terms. Starting with VD Lives - TV Must Die, the pieces really aren’t that oriented toward a specific place. I think it’s the influence of television, which is distributed everywhere so place isn’t as important. TV can be transported any where. Maybe that’s one of the reasons 1 wanted more recent pieces to be liter ally transportable as vehicles. Television space and airplane space are similar. You never see where you are traveling; you just get there. It becomes immedi ate place, no process toward the place. JA: Your vehicles or machines seem an apt responge to this technological age. VA: Yes, but this isn’t the machine age anymore. This is the electronic age. It’s too bad—I (and some other people) have been doing a lot of machine-like pieces. Maybe we’re really out of date. Machines have been outdated for a long time; now it’s electronics. Maybe installations are outdated. Maybe things are or should be totally different. Installations are too much a specific space. The pieces are really nostalgic. There is something about an installa tion that takes up too much time and too much effort. The amount of time we spent on finding something to stick the photographs on the shades was ridi culous. JA: But that was a definite interest on working on this piece. Everyone got really caught up in little details that be came so important—whether staples should show or not. It seemed so im portant, but was really fairly meaning less. VA: It became a model of real world activity. We spent 12 hours making de cisions about paint. It’s funny, because those little things relate to its conven tion aspect. We might not know what the piece is, but we all know something about it—we all know the conventions. It’s almost as though that’s the mean ing of the piece. Maybe all these pieces are about the basic act of building and decoration, relating to some notions I’ve had in connection with Venturi’s architecture. By ignoring an intention, it unwittingly becomes a symbol for something cultural. JA: What interested you about Ven turi’s architecture? VA: That notion of conventional de vices and symbols. There really is a convention of what a house should look like. There’s no need to invent a house because the shape is already there as a given. Once shape is already there as a given, use that given and ap ply something to it. You can have any kind of building and then stick on a de coration. This, according to people like Corbusier, is horrible; you don’t stick on decoration. But maybe it is more in teresting to stick on decoration because then you can have conventional house shed, the house that everybody knows, and not be confused. A Corbusier church starts to have all kinds of sign value in itself whereas older architec ture has the principle of the decorated shed. The Venturi example is Las Vegas. The buildings are not the sign, but then you put the neon on them. You become more in control of your decoration* of your symbol. Pieces of mine, like In stant House, couldn’t have come about without Venturi’s stuff. This Atlanta piece could be a decorated shed. JA: That conventional structure lends its familiarity then to the less obvious decorative notions. VA: Yes, I think that’s what’s going on. Why does music like Stockhausen sound awfully dated and strange? Be cause it doesn’t play enough with the conventions of music. The Ramones are playing with musical givens, not new inventions. You’ve heard it all be fore. That’s why Godard movies seem incredibly interesting, because you have seen every scene before. They just play with givens. I have talked about more recent pieces, like Instant House, as shelters or houses, but they are al most about walls. Walls are a place where you can hang posters. Walls are a place where you can pin up things that can take a message to the viewer. JA: Your work has begun to deal with surface lately. You have been getting more and more interested in notions of color and decoration. VA: What interests me about decoration is that decoration is propa ganda. The way one decorates a house now becomes a sign for the decorator’s relation to a culture. In that sense, de coration is incredibly perverse. JA: Yes, but I see decoration as a way of extending one’s self. VA: But it’s the person being incredi bly manipulated by the particular cul ture. People might be thinking they are extending by making inventions and decisions when what is really happen- A T t; i R k -ti ACCO^/^/ A&/<: /r> /3S3*. *,/ V op 77rs /r ‘&&&5 =====3 ^ &4£k'4/ycJb/ / 30 * —f 1 - s&z&cac. to'sf' szerv/zvZ P/z&fT euyz. ' Vito Acconci, working drawings for Instant Decor, installation, Atlanta Art Workers Coalition Gallery, 1980 (photo: courtesy of the artist). Vol. 5, No. 1 January/February 1981 2
