Alice Aycock: and Projects. Cambridge and London: M.I.T. Press, 2005; pp. 1-8.

Text © The Beginnings of a Complex

The problem seems to be how to connect without connecting, how to group things together in such a way that the overall shape would resemble "the other shape, ifshape it might be called, that shape had none," referred to by Milton in Paradise Lost, how to group things haphazardly in much the way that competition among various interest groups produces a kind ofhaphazardness in the way the world looks and operates. The problem seems to be how to set up the conditions which would generate the beginnings ofa complex.

Alice Aycock Project Entitled "The Beginnings ofa Complex . . ." (1976-77): Notes, Drawings, Photographs, 1977

In Book 11 of Milton's Paradise Lost, Death assumes the guise of two wildly dissimilar figures near Hell's entrance, each with an extravagantly inconsistent appearance. The first, a trickster, appears as a fair woman from above the waist and a series of demons below, while the second-a "he;' according to Milton-is far more elusive. It assumes "the other shape" that Aycock refers to above. 1 When searching for a poetic image capable of communicating the world's elusiveness and indiscriminate randomness, Aycock remembered this description of Death's incommensurability, which she then incorporated into her artist's book Project Entitled "The Beginnings ofa Complex . . ." (1976-77): Notes, Drawings, Photographs. Although viewing death in terms oflife is certainly not an innovation, as anyone familiar with Etruscan and Greco-Roman culture can testify, seeing life's complexity in terms of this shape-shifting allegorical figure signaling its end is a remarkable poetic enlists images from the past and from other inversion. In this trope, death not only culminates disciplines to serve double duty in her work, to life; it is its chimerical and dark equivalent. create it even while dissipating it. In many of the Standing at the threshold of Hell, it looks back at pieces from the 1970s and early '8os for which she the vital forces it terminates, reflecting at once became famous, Aycock choreographs both her both time's multitudinous shapes and its cessation. and scripts about them so that the Viewed metaphorically, Milton's Death is a mirror binary opposites of presence and absence, creation and a fissure in a closed universe that provides and destruction -low-key late-twentieth-century glimpses of heretofore unimagined possibilities. surrogates for Life and Death-are deconstructed. This type of opening is a key stratagem in Although her art might appear to have an edge Aycock's work, which seeks to unlock a new space over her art writing, since we are accustomed to between juxtaposed worldviews. The price for this regard artists' statement as supplements, neither realization is high, of course, since it disrupts the act of viewing the sculpture nor the reading of established patterns and ways of reacting to them. its supplementary text should be given primacy. Ultimately it places all worldviews on notice and Binaries in Aycock's art give way to dif.ferance­ thus goes far beyond Marxist art's proclaimed Jacques Derrida's special conjunction of"difference" ability to undermine a dominant ideology's mode and "deferring"-that is spatial in demarcating of seeing and understanding. Moreover, this art distinctions among closely associated entities and supersedes the defamiliarization Russian time-bound in delaying ultimate or transcendent formalists theorized that new works are capable of meanings. Presence as authoritative meaning is effecting when they alter the ideological and destabilized in this postmodern work, and cultural terms used for both framing and Aycock's sculpture-like Milton's shape-shifting experiencing the world. Aycock's art does so by Death-provides new perspectives on life. empowering viewers so that they might continue Working in this vein in "The Beginnings ofa the process of transforming the world long after a Complex ... ," Aycock may have chosen to leave the given piece has been created. In addition to ending of the above statement inconclusive subscribing to Viktor Shklovsky's admirable because she envisioned the beginnings of the assessment that "the technique of art is to make complex constituting her art as the first objects 'unfamiliar; to make forms difficult, to installment of an ongoing contract with her increase the difficulty and length of perception viewers. Aycock provides these viewers with a great because the process of perception is an aesthetic number of meaningfuJ and often contradictory end in itself and must be prolonged;'2 Aycock clues and then encourages them to negotiate willingly abrogates part of the artist's traditional individually the terms in which her art is to be responsibility as the prime generator of a work's perceived. The basic stipulations may be hers, but meaning when she enlists viewers as her ongoing the outcome, as she intended, can be highly collaborators in this process. personal, depending as it does on the individual In citing Milton's mysterious image, Aycock understanding attained by viewers who willingly condenses life's intricacies into a disruptive complex submit themselves to the initial and, in many that she views as architectural and sculptural as cases, dizzying features of this obsessive work. well as mental and emotional. As we will see, this This book is concerned with Aycock's complex joins the presence of art with the otherness purposefully unwieldy complex, its development, of schizophrenia: it builds even as it tears down. and the many deliberate breaks in it, beginning in Moreover it demonstrates how this artist regularly the late 1960s and early '7os and continuing for almost two decades of extraordinarily intense research that was based on a belief in art and 2 sculpture as a mode of inquiry and not a stable entity. This study will contend that Aycock many of the iconographic sources for Aycock's rethought not only the role of the art object but works as possible and unravel many of its also the mode of apprehending it. She attempted mysteries and deliberate obfuscations, knowing that to discover the type of information art might such an approach will enrich the reader's overall convey and how it might do so. Moreover she understanding at the expense of impoverishing the intended to place viewers in situations where they direct apprehension of individual pieces, making would have to face this same problem. This two­ them less confrontational and puzzling. While my phased epistemological quest, undertaken first by approach may appear at times to undermine the artist and then by her viewers, involves taking Aycock's radical attempt to project the task of substantial risks, as the process of looking at and making meaning out to viewers, l hope that understanding a given work of art is far more readers will recognize this artist's incredible leaps open-ended than usual: responses can be from one symbolic system to another as generalized even though individual reactions concerted attempts to undermine established cannot be predicted. ideological pathways. Although her highly complex individual works This book will also demonstrate how the might appear to lack a coherent meaning and a openness Aycock courts in her art is relatable to fixed identity, Aycock's overall oeuvre must be new ways of viewing the world in the late twentieth regarded with some sense of closure, as her series century that are a legacy of the information age, of works reveal overarching patterns and concerns first in terms of the widespread advance of the that partially mHitate against the epistemological mass media in the mid-twentieth century and then quandaries specific pieces can initiate. Moreover, in terms of the creation of Pes in the 1970s by leaving individual pieces susceptible to the followed by changes enacted by the Internet at the references and associations she provides, Aycock century's end. Developed in tandem with this has created a situation of putative presence and plethora of information were concomitant notable absence that is applicable to her work and innovations in its storage and retrieval, as well as to the artist's traditional role. This inherent an increasing awareness of the ways it can be contradiction between single works and entire marshaled to ratify some worldviews while series-as well as between an individual piece's undermining others. By looking at Aycock's work cogency and the accompanying text's apparent chronologically, we can begin to see how it disruption of any straightforward efficacy-is one participates in the sheer wealth of this information of the disconcerting and exciting dialectics on age at the same time as it casts aspersions on which her art is predicated. Although she often monolithic views. Repeatedly this type of refers to her family history, voluminous reading, epistemological work creates puzzles with distinct and far-ranging image file, her work, which breaks, establishing perceivable gaps in the remains insistently open to her own contradictions ideological fabric of its contemporaneous world and therefore to viewers' interpretations, can and in the individual work's rhetoric so that both frustrate those who wish to view individual pieces its time and our views of it are fluid and disruptive. as closed circuits synonymous with their creator, It allows us to imagine how people in the past as did the abstract expressionists and their critics. might have fantasized, for example, about the Because I will be considering Aycock's ability to fly and to be in two places simultaneously individual works in terms of her overall oeuvre, that became realities in the twentieth century this study may be able to achieve an overall when airplanes and telephones substantially changed conclusiveness about this challenging work that is people's modes of travel and communication. impossible when examining only one example or a small group of them. To provide the necessary 3 wider perspective, I will attempt to identify as Moreover, this work makes us aware of the Moving from the 1960s to the '7os information age's enormous contributions to our ability to travel through time, and it enables us to assess the past from manifold perspectives that Maturing as an artist after the climactic 1g6os, include present views while going far beyond them. when vanguard art had often been equated with Although individual pieces might appear strangely fashion and new styles seemed to coincide idiosyncratic and whimsical, as they often have in almost too conveniently with new fall listings, critical writings on Aycock's work, the first full­ Aycock relied on fundamental aspects of three of scale assessment of this art presented here reveals the major and lasting currents of this hectic them to be part of a concerted and far-ranging decade when she developed her work. attack on the limited understanding that comes The first was epitomized in the '6os by the from accepting a prevailing ideology. Though her color field painting of Morris Louis, Kenneth work does participate in an information-age Noland, and Jules Olitski. It adhered to the Platonic ideology, it attempts to counter, as we will see, system of limiting viewers to a stirring and discrete ready acquiescence to the dictates of this and format, termed "opticality" by critic and scholar other worlds by viewing them all as contradictory, Michael Fried to connote "a space addressed often mythic and poetic, and certainly subject to exclusively to eyesight," which it then encouraged the playful excesses of debating that the Greeks viewers to transcend in the interest of universal dubbed "sophistry." Aycock's sculptures puncture values.3 This art's high aspirations were indirectly the information age's apparently seamless web, critiqued by Fried's former close friend at Princeton making what she terms "tears in the universe;' at in the 1950s, . Often associated with the same time as they interrupt themselves, color field painting in the late 1960s, Stella offered forcing viewers to think about both art's presumed the famous laconic observation, "What you see is cogency and the disinclination of her work to what you see."4 Aycock viewed his shaped paintings play into these assumptions. The consequent as the beginning of a trajectory that removed the breaks in the ideological fabric of our time and the art of painting from its close affiliation with the wall, overturning of the ontological work of art, which so that it might become associated with the in the past was deemed a surrogate being, will "specific objects" of minimalist Donald Judd.5 constitute two of the major subtexts in the account Although she rejected the opticality of color field art, of her work that follows. she regarded the shaped canvas as an antecedent After looking at how Aycock pursued an for her own work. epistemological mode for almost two decades, I The second major current that influenced conclude my investigation when she begins in the Aycock's art is , a new development in late 1980s to create elegiac and retrospective views the '6os known primarily through the work of of her previous works. Although her subsequent Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris public sculptures build on a substantial number of (Aycock's professor in graduate school). Minimalism the ideas examined in this study, they open a new perpetuated aspects of formalism's holistic and different chapter deserving its own publication. approach while, according to Morris, beginning to A postscript at the end of this book adumbrates project works of art outward to their viewers, the direction taken in Aycock's more recent pieces, making their apprehension provocative exercises briefly noting their reliance on the same virtual in phenomenological seeing-an approach crucial imaging techniques employed by such architects to Aycock's development. as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid.

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g."' ..<::u The third approach that Aycock drew upon beyond objects or material known through was . Evidenced by the investigations experience albeit related to such knowledge." of LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Art & Language members, among others, Although Aycock, like the conceptualists, wished conceptual art endeavored to equate art with her viewers to become involved in the work of concepts that could be circumscribed by language. interpretation, she was reluctant to dispense with LeWitt took pop artist Andy Warhol's tongue-in­ the object, which often assumed the scale of cheek yet resigned view of himself as his architecture in her work. We might say that her television's consort and tape recorder's lifelong best art in the 1970s and '8os connects Robert mate and transformed it into the dynamics of an Morris's minimalist object, with its emphasis on "idea becom[ing] a machine that makes the art:'6 phenomenological seeing, to a conceptual Aycock's art, as we will see, modifies aspects of emphasis on the work that viewers must both Warhol's and LeWitt's approaches by undertake in order to understand how art characterizing these couplings as schizophrenic functions epistemologically. Then she complicates and cyborgian. this process by subscribing to Derrida's open­ Instead of making "art investigations"-Kosuth's ended signifiers. term for his own conceptual work-traditional In the 1g6os, formalism and conceptual art sculptors and painters had become content with used a number of strategies to ordain meaning, art's "presentation" and with the viewer's transfixed respectively, as transcendental or categorical. In expectation of a transcendent experience. contrast, some minimalists-Morris, in Consequently, Kosuth saw such artists as decorators particular-aimed at restricting their viewers to a of"nai've art forms" rather than as philosophers? self-evident content attained through their Mindful of the difficulty, Aycock, who went through physical bodies, which would ideally be situated in a conceptually oriented phase in her early work, the pristine white galleries in which these works first brings viewers close to her work before were then frequently exhibited. distancing them from it. She encourages them to One of Aycock's early important contributions come to terms with contradictory ways of to sculpture was to focus on the repetitive shapes of perceiving it so that they straddle traditional light and relatively easy balloon-frame wood boundaries by working both within and outside construction, which optimistically reflected the the limits of established media. In this way she skeletal frames of new buildings. She used this differs from conceptual artist Douglas Huebler, nineteenth-century type of construction-first who was willing to dispense with the importance developed in the United States to replace ofthe art object. As critic and art historian Jack cumbersome, half-timbered work-together with Burnham writes, Huebler minimalism's hybrid sculptural/architectural forms and conceptual art's emphasis on language. propos fed] that the percipient is the "subject" ofart And she reconfigured these diverse elements, engaged in a self-producing activity through using ordinary lumber as her favored material, to language, that has, itself, replaced "appearance" engender a heretofore unparalleled complexity and become the virtual image of the work. and freedom that could be as daunting and Perception then, not being available through normal disorienting as it was exhilarating. One might say sensory experience, shifts ''empiricism" to that she employed these carpentered formalist "metempiricism": concepts and relations conceived elements to attract viewers to lightly constructed skeletal forms that appeared domestic, or at least

5 familiar, without being sentimental. She augmented Aycock's artistic contributions are part of a this '7os balloon-frame art with poured concrete momentous transition separating modern from and concrete block construction, again relying on postmodern art that was undertaken by a number a readily available building vernacular to create her of artists coming of age in the early '7os. In sculptures. In creating these works she used addition to Aycock, members of this nonaffiliated minimalism to make viewers aware of their own group include Vito Acconci, Siah Armajani, Chris bodies, and conceptual art to help them think Burden, Gordon Matta-Ciark, Mary Miss, and epistemologically about their experiences while George Trakas, among others. The innovations of trying to reconcile the often contradictory clues her these artists, together with the work of minimalists art provides. I believe her tact has been to turn the and conceptual artists, presage the major direction perception of sculpture into an apperception of art has taken in the past three decades, when its the spatial and mental stages involved in former autonomy has been undermined, making approaching it. Only after moving through these works more open-ended and meaning an ongoing, processes are viewers equipped to frame these dynamic arbitration between artists and their intentionally disjunctive experiences so that they viewers. Today, the change from an acceptance of might become meaningful for them. styles based on formal similarities to an awareness From the beginning Aycock has believed of such designations as often highly artificial tags in using her writings either on their own or in is widely accepted, even though the overall reasons combination with a series of quotations as a for this transformation are not yet fully understood. means for elaborating on her drawings and As curator Donna DeSalvo has pointed out, sculptures. In her early work these conceptualist "Understanding the shift in art from the late '6os descriptions, which were affixed to gallery walls, to the '7os is one of the key problems facing art were clear-cut ways to enumerate process and historians and contemporary art curators today."9 calculate measurements, particularly for outdoor Elements of this change are no doubt due in installation pieces that were represented in the part to the increasing respect for Marcel gallery by photographs. Soon Aycock began Duchamp's work, including his notes, that followed fantasizing about pieces as she was making them, in the wake of his revived reputation, beginning in and these reveries were in turn appended to the the late 1950s and continuing into the '6os. It is work in the form of extended labels. In 1977 the texts also evident in the epistemological turn in '6os assumed the form of elaborate and strange art indebted to his work, which was subsequently stories, again presented on gallery walls, that transformed into an overall, verbally articulated complicated and enriched the possible meanings program by such conceptual artists as Kosuth. for a given work. Although not all of her sculptures This move from art's formerly intuited ontology to were shown with texts, most of them were an epistemology of its strategies was also a driving displayed this way, either separately or together in force of the poststructuralist French theories of the form of an exhibition. Moreover, preliminary Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel studies would often contain texts that were Foucault. Reviewing Ferdinand de Saussure's connected to them by labels or actual writing on structural analysis of the symbol, Barthes and the drawing itself. This penchant for joining art Derrida focused on ongoing insights formulated by with allusive writing and suggestive titles, which readers. Differing in his emphasis, Foucault has continued over the years, is a distinctive historicized epistemology while examining it in quality of this art. terms of specific sets of codes that have wielded inordinate power on the human body when

6 information has been unquestionably accepted as Seen from a slightly different perspective, knowledge. The net effect of these new critical artistic intent is a wily and unreliable force. Writing views was to render empiricism problematic by almost a century apart, both Charles Baudelaire regarding it as a consequence of a socially and and Mark Rothko describe the element of surprise historically constructed universe and not a direct occurring to artists at the completion of a work. mode of perceiving. ·while museum educators­ At that point they find themselves cut off from still a relatively new profession in the 1g6os-were their art, and they recognize that their subsequent relying overwhelmingly on empirical theories when comments will be relegated to the category of demonstrating the power of art, artists were informed viewers and no longer accepted as those beginning to reassess this presumed bedrock of of the indisputable creator. We might go further unmediated knowledge as well as their own and question artistic intent before the work's reputed role in disseminating it. completion as well. Since so many different and As a key player in the modern/postmodern often contradictory ideas occur to artists during divide, Aycock is of interest for her reassessment the creative process, which may extend over of the work of art's presumed autonomy, as part of months and years, how, we might well ask can one the widespread crisis of the art object following in idea be privileged over others? Aycock refuses to formalism's wake, when it could no longer be solve this conundrum and instead exacerbates it at regarded as the sole conveyor of meaning. This times, providing a series of quotations or crisis was predicated on the concomitant problem statements about a given piece or several works of the artist's role, which was changing from in an exhibition that may or may not represent modernist mythic form-giver to postmodern her intent. Rather than identifying the work with agent provocateur. the artist and with her stated though often Since the early 1970s, the parameters of any contradictory intentions, viewers are placed in the discussion about postmodern works of art and preeminent position of postmodern readers who their producers appeared to have been clearly are encouraged to rethink and reorient the work in drawn by Roland Barthes's 1968 essay "The Death the process of interpreting it. of the Author." 10 Spelled with a capital "A;' for irony, This book is predicated on the internal Barthes's Author may have been an esteemed rupture initiated by the proclaimed death and individual in the past, but in the mid-twentieth continued survival of the author, particularly in light century this personage was being reduced to the of Aycock's own fascination with schizophrenia function of a scrip tor who predictably conformed as a subject and also a strategy for making art. As to a set of ongoing conventions. In his essay's an approach to art, schizophrenia provides a raison conclusion, Barthes goes beyond this polarity to d'etre for this study's necessary disparateness, in empower a new protagonist-the reader-and he that meaning will be considered in terms of an predicts that "the birth of the reader must be at ongoing dialectic between scriptor as an assigned the cost of the death of the Author:''' The situation, function and author as a distinct individual. This however, is not so easily resolved as his coup de dialectic is particularly apparent in the ways grace urbanely suggests. Although subjectivity may artists fulfill certain expected roles that are already well be constructed through ongoing social scripted for them-presenting a heightened view practices, based on deeply ingrained ideological of the world, for example, while provocatively formations, it still assumes distinct forms that are refusing to provide a conclusive meaning for their one among a number offactors affecting the work. In this situation, significations are posed disposition of works of art. without being entirely resolved, forcing critics

7 and art historians to look further afield for The Complex: Sculpture as the Expanded Field interpretive frames and encouraging them to focus on different contexts, each suggesting a range of interpretations. This approach of looking both In 1979, two years after it appeared in Aycock's closely and from a distance is crucial to Project Entitled "The Beginnings ofa Complex .. . ," understanding the mechanisms for meaning central critic Lucy Lippard used the term "complex" in the to this type of art. title of an essay on eleven younger artists working The problem facing anyone investigating with the concept of shelters. 12 A few months after Aycock's work is ultimately how one deconstructs Lippard's piece, minimalist critic and scholar a deconstructionist. How does one cope with an Rosalind Krauss appropriated "complex" as the iconography of slipping signifiers that are explicitly central term for one of her most highly lauded presented as part of the structure of the work of essays about new art, "Sculpture in the Expanded art? In many respects Aycock's art is iconographic Field:'13 Although she focuses only on its landscape in a traditional as well as in a striking new sense. and architectural references rather than on the Its many references, which take great effort to psychotic dimensions Aycock enumerates, Krauss's unravel, do not seem pat and formulaic after one choice of the term is a fitting tribute to Aycock. has analyzed them. Like involved mazes seen with After bemoaning the historicist category of clarity from a bird's-eye view, they again confuse modernist sculpture, which transforms new art and confound once one starts to traverse them. into endless permutations of old ideas, thereby An artificer of intricate spatial and semiotic diminishing its radicalness, Krauss argues: networks, Aycock in her mature work fabricates literal and figurative mazes that astonish viewers There is no reason not to imagine an opposite term with a sense of the modern world's inordinate [for sculpture}-one that would be both landscape contingent "haphazard" complexes that are at and architecture-which within this schema is once architectural, sculptural, and mental. called the complex. But to think the complex is to But like mazes, Aycock's complexes can be admit into the realm ofart two terms that had circumscribed and cogent pieces, even though formerly been prohibited from it: landscape and their unity encapsulates the wrong turns, dead ends, architecture-terms that could function to define and backtracking that often both fascinate and the sculpture. ... Our culture had not before been frustrate viewers accustomed to works of art with able to think the complex although other cultures less recondite and more readily transcendent have thought this term with great ease. Labyrinths meanings. Coming soon after the hegemony of late and mazes are both landscape and architecture. ... formalist works that quickened viewers' perceptions The expanded field is thus generated by with gestalts intended to stamp themselves at problematizing the set ofoppositions between which once on observers' minds, Aycock is part of a the modernist category sculpture is suspended. 14 generation of artists who wished to slow down perception in order to draw out the complexities Krauss's analysis updates Jack Burnham's of apprehension. Derrida's dijfl!rance is again "unobjects:· Describing these new constructs in 1968, apposite here, suggesting the puzzling and sustained Burnham points out, "A polarity is presently route of reception central to Aycock's work. developing between the finite, unique work of high art, i.e., painting or sculpture, and conceptions which can loosely be termed 'unobjects; these being either environments or artifacts which resist

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