Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects (The MIT Press) - Hardcover

Alice Hobbs

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262083396 ISBN 13: 9780262083393

Publisher: 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relies on paradigms, cybernetics, phenomenology, physics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, information overload, outdated scientific thinking, and computer programming to create a "complex" that is architectural and sculptural as well as mental and emotional.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

Review:

Aycock's ambivalent response to the rise of feminism is one of the many issues that Robert Hobbs addresses with some subtlety in Alice Aycock, Sculpture and Projects. This 11-by-9-inch spaciously designed monograph masterfully integrates its documentary and interpretive functions, suggesting a felicitous coupling of scholar and art. Hobbs, a distinguished art historian, illuminates Aycock's work with references as intricate as Aycock's own, which range from the literary to the biographical.

--Art in America

Synopsis:

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 can be seen as a metaphor for the disconnections of postmodernism and a specific inspiration for Aycock's method. Having discovered the case of N. N., a schizophrenic whose poignant and vivid descriptions of his condition she found in a little-known study, Aycock employs allusive texts that disperse a work's meaning so that its content is controlled by disparate outside forces. Hobbs shows how the disjunctions of Aycock's disconcerting and exciting work reveal a new space between juxtaposed views, inviting the viewer to glimpse unimagined possibilities.

About this edition

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