I need sticky things. Ideas that are flexible, malleable, with plastacine qualities; things that can keep sticking to other things, that can be used to build SCULPTURES, not structures
What is the difference between a structure and a sculpture? forms we can mold, assemble improvisationally–forms with feeling. I want to make flexible sculptures that can mold into/onto places, that can mold around corners, that can mold into the parts of the city I care about, that can become real in the world in a particular way—that can take the shape of the world.
I am repelled by the block-like nuggets we are given to work with at school. We are asked to use them to build these fortresses which we call theory.
Great, hard, solid, unbreakable as these theoretical structures may be, they don’t actually seem to be able to take hold of the city, or to find a hold in the city, in a visceral way.
They can’t fit anywhere in the world. Instead, they become the kind of things that people who build them get locked into, attached to, unable to get out of—forget they even have to try to get out.
Assumption Five: The notion of
urban space, or particularly
New York space, as a tangible rather
than a visible space. New York is a
city that you hear and touch, a city
that you feel your way around in.
(Vito Acconci, “Site: The Meaning of Place in Art and Architecture,” 1983)