Rest in Peace, Vito Acconci (1940–2017)

ARTnews brings the shocking news that Vito Acconci has died at the age of 77. "Though Acconci made his name with radical performances and later reinvented himself as an outré architect, he started out as a poet, and throughout his life emphasized in interviews that writing was at the core of his practice," writes Andrew Russeth.

(On the topic of influences, he once listed Faulkner, Genet, William Carlos Williams, and Jean-Luc Godard.) In April of 1967, at the age of 27, he began publishing a journal in New York called 0 to 9 with Bernadette Mayer, which ran Sol LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” among other radical texts.

Recalling that time years later, Acconci said that he particularly envied Aram Saroyan, whose poems regularly consisted of just a single repeated noun. “[W]hile the rest of us tried to be verbs, like everybody told us to do, he had the nerve to stop at nouns,” he once wrote of Saroyan. “Because he took a deep breath and willed himself into the self-confidence of naming.”

One might say that Acconci quickly willed himself into the self-confidence of acting. Verbs—executed precisely, even recklessly—shape his most famous works. In Following Piece (1969), he stalked after people around New York City, stopping his furtive pursuit only once they entered a building. “It was sort of a way to get myself off the writer’s desk and into the city—it was like I was praying for people to take me somewhere I didn’t know how to go myself,” he said in a line that was quoted in a profile last year in the New York Times.

As that profile noted, Mr. Acconci had evolved in his later years into "a highly unorthodox architect and designer, to the confusion of many.” Not all confusion: "Discussing his architectural practice with Jeff Weinstein for the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, he said, 'I admit what I want—did I always want this in work, and maybe I didn’t know it?—but what I really want from work is, I wanted a work that can make people freer than they were before.'”

He will be missed.