Christof Migone (CM): I want to begin our discussion on the Following Piece (1969) by asking about the context of the piece, the Street Works Number 4 event by the Architectural League of New York. Vito Acconci (VA): Street Works was formed by four people: John Perrault, who was a New York poet. He survived by doing art criticism, and shortly after became art critic for the Village Voice. Another member was New York poet Hannah Weiner. Then there was Scott Burton, and the fourth was Eduardo Costa. They organized a series of events that would take place over a two or three day period. In different places in New York, out of the way places... but now I can’t remember what I would even mean by that. Because I think some of them were in Soho, but this was just before Soho became an art neighbourhood. I don’t really remember what the Architectural League of New York did exactly. They had a space in the upper sixties on Park or Lexington Avenue. I think the purpose was to exhibit and discuss architecture, though it was obviously looser than that. I think that after the first two or three Street Works they wanted to make it part of their program. So there would be an exhibition in their space for approximately a month, and one month was October 1969, which determined for me the length of my Following episodes. The show was going to be from Oct. 3rd to Oct. 25th. At that time, the notion of showing didn’t seem like something I was interested in doing. So that Oct. 3rd to 25th would set up the time during which I would do this everyday. CM: From the moment you started, did you already have in mind the follow-up to the Following Piece, the series of private pieces you did the following month that you framed as “re-activating” the Following Piece? VA: I’m almost certain that I didn’t. I’m almost certain that the idea came somewhere around Oct. 20th to 25th close to when it was going to be over. As you know, my thinking process—especially then, but also now—mostly comes from word play. So I thought, if I had done the Following Piece could this be extended, could there be a follow up to Following Piece? But no, it wasn’t planned before. CM: And getting into the Following Piece itself. I know you’ve resisted bringing out the psychological aspects of it, but… VA: I mean obviously there were psychological elements. I tried to treat it as a series of facts: People on the street in New York. I pick one. I latch myself on to this person. 42
And I had the luxury of doing that because it was in New York. In other words, I doubt if I was ever noticed while I was doing it because everybody is following somebody in New York. You know, I certainly didn’t follow somebody at three o’clock in the morning. I also realized a psychology of mine was involved. I don’t know if I planned this at the beginning, it could be checked by looking at the list of all the Following events, but they were all done very much as if from afar. You know: women in yellow sweater, in front of such and such a store or on such and such a street, turns corner etc. I’m almost certain that I made a point not to follow women as much as men because I wanted very much not to be noticed. CM: Right. VA: I mean if this had been a few years before—while I was at the graduate school in Iowa City—if I had done it there, it would have been totally different thing. I’m an aggressor on somebody, somebody’s action. In New York, I thought I could be dragged. I had been used to thinking of myself as a writer, so this was a way to get myself up from my writer’s desk, out into the world. It gave me some kind of atlas; it gave me a kind of directory. And again, I might by this time be so used to saying some of these things that they might be true, but there might be ten or twelve other things that might be true too. CM: It’s good that you brought up your past as a writer. You seem to be saying that what’s important for you is not only for the writer to get out of the chair, and go to the street, but to go to the street and use it as a text. It was not about abandoning the page but about finding it somewhere else. VA: In the mid-sixties I went to the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa from ‘63 to ‘64. At that time, the most important writer, the most important influence for me was Alain Robbe-Grillet. The most important movie that I had seen at that time—and I think it still remains the most important movie to me—was written by Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad (1961). CM: Given Marienbad and its sense of space, and given the Following Piece, obviously your stage is the street. Your current architectural work must also take the street into account all the time. VA: My work takes Marienbad into consideration because I think it probably made me realize—even though I know I didn’t realize this at the time—that architecture is just as much about, or more about, time as it is about space.