The Moore Island Bridge

Vito Acconci, born January 24, 1940, was considered a well-rounded artist even during the time of his childhood. As a child of age 13, Vito wrote short stories and poems to express his emotions and showed them to his family to see. During his young age, Vito did not embrace his Italian heritage but actually rejected it. He believed that Italians could not express art or have a passion for it but later accepted his heritage (Lockwood). He eventually became tired of the restrictions poems put on a person’s artistic skills and turned to study as an actor. In this profession, he was able to use his voice to express his arts to the audience and develop his trilling performance attributes. In the end, he found that using a monotone was not enough to express his passion of art and that emotion was too broad of an art to express (Lockwood). Later he developed a sense of art where he would construct his actual body into a different form. He transformed his body by pulling on his chest and shaving it to make women’s breasts. His true belief about life is that the home is a sanctuary and has both a positive and a negative connotation to it. Positively, a home is a place to fully express one’s self and would not be criticized for it. Negatively, it is a place that is confined and would engulf a person unless broken free from it (Lockwood). He then found that public art was his true calling and had the public become the art. His passion to take the public and construct it into art has common people view it as they go through their daily lives.

The Moore Island Bridge, an elaborate bridge, performs as a bridge to walk on, a bar to socialize, a café to relax and drink coffee, and a sunbathing area to get a tan. This multi-useful bridge is able to give an exterior of a bridge but to the artist, it’s an artwork that people can walk through and visualize inside and out. This bridge is complete with a walking bridge for pedestrians to enter on either side and the main core of it is a vortex-like structure for people to enjoy. It is considered an island due to its massive form and enormous space that the bridge takes up on the river. This artistic structure is composed up of materials such as metal and glass to give the bridge a simple, clear look. However, the way that Vito constructed the core to a spiral type structure gives people the sense that the bridge is animated and in motion. As people can see, the core is not fully encased by the shell that gives the bridge its shape and is only covering over half of the structure. This was purposefully done to give pedestrians walking through this structure a chance to see the difference of a glass view and an open view to change their perspective of the world. In addition, Vito ingeniously uses the shape of the vortex structure to give people a chance to view different angles of the river and the landscape as they travel around the exterior of the bridge. Vito’s goal of building this unique bridge was to have people enjoy art in a new, creative way by actually traveling through it in their daily lives. This bridge gives people a chance to view reality through the mind of Vito and find that reality is able to form with creativity and artistic ideals.