to resist that interpretation of you as the predator, or those kinds of readings of it? VA: Again, I thought I couldn’t be a predator in New York. I mean it was so much on my mind that this was a play. Again, when I was starting to do activities my biggest question was: Now that I’m here, that I’m in real space, now that I’m not on page space anymore—when I was on page space I felt, I can’t say I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew that I wanted to go from top of the page to bottom and from left of the page to right. Page space is like framed space. Street space was more open. There are highways and byways you know. There are turns; there are intersections. So the biggest question for me is: what is giving me a reason to move here? And everything I’m saying might be based on the notion of: I don’t want to recognize, or I don’t want to admit that I am intruding on another person’s space. Except I really don’t think I was. I think I was using it as a way to say: I’m here, where should I go? If I focus on a person, I go where that person goes. CM: And one of the parameters of the piece is that there is a very distinct directive that you have given yourself that you be in public space but not private space. VA: Yeah, it would stop before I went into private space. CM: There is an obvious practicality to that. But it is interesting that in some ways even though the space of the city is more fluid, like you say, as opposed to the page or the gallery, there is that limitation of public/private. Maybe I’m being too reductive, but you often talked about a throughness. It seems like it’s a kind of recurring image that you are seeking, also in your architectural work, this interest in passing through. VA: That is exactly how I was thinking about it. I was talking a little awhile ago about Last Year at Marienbad, and again I’m sure I couldn’t have used those words then, but architecture is about going through architecture. CM: Right. Now to get into the idea of following as lineage I alluded to earlier. There are many people doing work which is very clearly inspired by your own work. How do you react when you encounter those instances? VA: Well when Sophie Calle did her piece [ed. note: various works between 1979 - 1981 by Calle featured
following as a central strategy], I don’t remember what year, but she called me to ask me permission. I said “You don’t need to. Thank you for considering that, but I would think it’s kind of up for grabs.” She very much did the psychological version. CM: Yeah, it is a good example of that. VA: There’s also a film version. Christopher Nolan, the guy who has now become the Batman director, his first movie is called Following (1998). And strangely I haven’t seen it and I keep forgetting about it. I should see this. I think it was already after the Sophie Calle piece. Which I think became much more famous than my piece. CM: The Sophie Calle? VA: The Sophie Calle. CM: That’s hard to say. Now to speak specifically about the Following Following Piece that Thérèse Mastroiacovo in Montreal is doing where she is taking any instance of the Following Piece appearing in a book where there is a photograph of the piece and then redrawing the spread where it appears. It is kind of a cataloguing, a documentarian project, that has an obsessional quality, given that the drawings are quite meticulous. And although not rendered exactly like a facsimile, there’s that attempt to be, factual, I guess is the word. VA: There have been a lot of versions. I’ve come across a lot of student versions. There was a person, in grad school at Pratt, maybe in 2000, who apparently was doing all these pieces based on Following Piece. She also wanted to follow me. But she would ask permission and I thought: I don’t know if that’s really the way (laughs). Do you really want to do it that way? (laughter). CM: Yeah, that seems counterproductive. VA: Yeah. But, over the years, surprisingly often, if I’m giving a talk, some student comes up to me and says that ‘I tried to do a version of your piece…’ And maybe it makes sense. Just as I thought of myself as a writer, now I’m possibly doing something else… And the best way to begin is to follow what people do anyway. There’s some kind of influence. I literalized it. You know. I would have a different influence each day (laugh). I guess maybe students gravitate towards it, because it seems like you’re always, you’re always copying somebody, whether you realize it or not. So here is a way to make it obvious. 45