EXHIBITIONS

Vito Acconci was one of the first artists I contacted and visited just after I was selected as the new director of the KUNSTMUSEUM LUZERN in spring 1977, eight months before I actually started to take over from Jean-Christophe Ammann in December 1977. Having the rare and exceptional situation that Amman didn't leave a pre-set program, my chance and challenge was to be able to schedule a program to start in January 1978. Vito Acconci was still more a fame, a myth as a writer, a radical and rarely appearing performance artist, producing and showing videos, who made few and sporadic appearances in different art settings in the US and Europe. The two different installations of his, I came across 1976 in an art exhibition setting made me very curious, especially as I had the chance to meet him in person at Adelina von Fürstenberg’s Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva where I watched him photographing his installation in her space which was a front store with two store windows at the time. This first meeting and some other more ephemeral inclusions in larger group shows as Venice Biennial 1976, and others, motivated me to persuade Vito in New York in his Brooklyn studio to accept my invitation to do his first museum solo show, at least in Europe, even before the mostly cited one at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, later that year showing and documenting his writings. After he came to visit the Museum soon and then accepted and was very inspired by the very special Lucerne space at the time (in a landmark Bauhaus style building, now replaced by another great architecture - at least for the Concert part - by Jean Nouvel) he was immediately inspired for a large installation in the main hall, and accepted also my proposal to show his series of installations with his registered reading of his texts as part of this installations relating to spaces architecturally, constructively and always relating to the cultural settings. He first wanted to use the photo and drawing collages he did after these works and then arrived with a dryer documentation re-shooting and mounting his texts, photos, plans, sketches and comments. The special distribution of the space interferes as main installation and the presentation of the documentation in the side galleries, where visitors had no other choice than walk through seeing the whole installation, is mirrored in the way we managed together to document the exhibition in the catalogue, a most successful combination of the exhibition as the first impulse and publication as its total equivalent or its correspondent other part, which only makes the project complete as a whole. But to see, hear and feel the physical installation could never be achieved and reexperienced only together with the publication. Acconci was the artist I loved to produce and it gave impulse for both. Read also the abstract of the publication and the texts and the interview in it as well as the new interview I gave to Claudia Steinberg about Acconci and the adventure to realize this exhibit. MK, 4.12.20