15 Quotes by Vito Acconci

Architecture is not about space but about time.

It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole.

It’s language as a kind of structural system. A diagram of a sentence, now that seems like a kind of architectural model. I don’t know how to explain it, but it would be nice to try. Why, why this fascination?

I was always fascinated by diagramming a sentence. Because that is going into a space, going into a world of language.

Especially once those poetry events began, because, yeah, the stuff was still on the page, but the page was starting to spill into real space, spill into air, once you could hear it, once there was a typewriter, once there was a body of a typist, it was getting rid of the confines of the page.

Everybody uses labels: they give you a handle on things – an over-simplified handle, sure, but without labels, without ads, without words, the world would be an indistinguishable mass, a blur. You can hope, maybe, that people ascribe so many labels to you that none wins out.

There’s a legal term for a problem in public space: something that might draw people to an area-say, across train tracks-where they might be caused harm. It’s called a ‘public nuisance.’ I wouldn’t mind being called that for my life’s work.

I’m using my own person in pieces, but I’m trying to turn my person into a nonperson in the sense of a person without will, without volition. I’m subjecting myself to a scheme.

Maybe I had to stop photographing so that I could learn to touch.