Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects. Cambridge and London: M.I.T. Press, 2005; pp. 1-8. Text © Robert Hobbs 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. sculptures 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.