Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects (Mit Press) - Hardcover

Hobbs, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262083396 ISBN 13: 9780262083393

Publisher: The MIT Press, 2005

Synopsis

A long-overdue monograph on a sculptor who draws not only on minimalism and conceptualism but on a rich web of intellectual and visual sources to create postmodern work that is a "complex" of juxtapositions.

Alice Aycock's large, semi-architectural works deal with the interaction of structure, site, materials, and the psychophysical responses of the viewer. Offered meaningful but contradictory clues by both her images and her texts, viewers attempt to discover not only what the work of art conveys but how it communicates its contents, in investigations that parallel the artist's own. In Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects, Robert Hobbs examines the development of Aycock's work over twenty years and her negotiation―along with other artists who came of age in the early 1970s―of the transition from modernism to postmodernism. "The problem," wrote Aycock in 1977, "seems to be how to connect without connecting." Hobbs describes Aycock's strategies for doing just this: for creating a work with disparate image and texts that offer a new perspective on reality. Influenced by the "specific objects" of minimalism's hybrid forms and by conceptualism's emphasis on language, Aycock relies on paradigms, cybernetics, phenomenology, physics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, information overload, outdated scientific thinking, and computer programming to create a "complex" that is architectural and sculptural as well as mental and emotional. Schizophrenia and other mental conditions, sometimes considered metaphors for the disconnections of postmodern existence, are specific sources of inspiration in Aycock's work. By exploring the physical and existential positions of isolation, estrangement, disorientation, entrapment and fear, her three-dimensional constructions not only posit alternative states of mind, they suppose possible narratives and suggest multiple truths and lies. Aycock's work invites the viewer to experience sculpture with the entire body and a fully mind. Her sculpture has had a transformative effect on the contemporary art experience.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Hobbs is Rhoda Thalheimer Endowed Chair in the Department of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of many books, including monographs on Edward Hopper, Mark Lombardi, Lee Krasner, Robert Smithson, and Kara Walker.

Review:

Robert Hobbs is the right scholar to probe the imaginative, anti-entropic universe of Alice Aycock, an artist long overdue for such comprehensive treatment. Spanning the domains of architecture, site-specific sculpture, historical cosmology, and systems theory, Aycock's structures and eviscerated machines invite the viewer (and now reader) to contemplate and inhabit their schizophrenic evocations of contemporary subjectivity. Aycock's wide-ranging intellectual interests are matched by Hobbs's careful scholarship into the social, art-historical, and personal contexts that have fueled this important art.

―Caroline A. Jones, Professor in the History Theory Criticism Program in the Department of Architecture MIT and author of Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses

About this edition

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0262083396
• ISBN 13: 9780262083393
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400