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relies on paradigms, cybernetics, phenomenology, physics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, information overload, outdated scientific thinking, and computer programming to create a "complex" that is architectural and sculptural as well as mental and emotional.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

Alice Aycock: Sculpture and Projects (Mit Press)

Arts & Photography

Hobbs, Robert

Individual Artists

The MIT Press

Art of the Red Earth People: The Mesquakie of Iowa

Torrence, Gaylord

History & Criticism

Univ of Washington Pr

Mark Lindquist: Revolutions in Wood

Neither entirely Eastern nor definitively Western in its outlook, the work of Hong Kong artists oscillates between these two traditional polarities and shows how postcolonial artistic production is an ongong negotiation of differences, a tentative resolution of contradictions, and an ironic doubling of mainstream strategies that mimic and undermine the established modes.Hong Kong Now! presents the works of nine contemporary Hong Kong artists: Lucia N. Y. Cheung, Simon Go, Oscar Ho, Ho Siu-kee, Leung Chi Wo, Ellen Pau, Grechen So, Wong Shun-kit, and Yu Tsz Man. Working with the freedoms and constraints created by the opposing forces of possible totalitarian rule, now that the 153-year-old British crown colony of Hong Kong has been transferred to the People's Republic of China, with the seemingly unlimited freemarket economies already in place, these artists have developed a spectrum of possible identities that exhibit the complex and even contradictory values that are endemic to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong Now!

Robert Motherwell, Abstraction, and Philosophy (Routledge Focus on Art History and Visual Studies)

Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this book breaks new ground by considering how Robert Motherwell's abstract expressionist art is indebted to Alfred North Whitehead's highly original process metaphysics. Motherwell first encountered Whitehead and his work as a philosophy graduate student at Harvard University, and he continued to espouse Whitehead's processist theories as germane to his art throughout his life. This book examines how Whitehead's process philosophy--inspired by quantum theory and focusing on the ongoing ingenuity of dynamic forces of energy rather than traditional views of inert substances--set the stage for Motherwell's future art. This book will be of interest to scholars in twentieth-century modern art, philosophy of art and aesthetics, and art history.

Routledge

30 Americans

Sirmans, Franklin

Wallace, Michele

Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois

Ligon, Glenn

Roselione-valadez, Juan

Rubell Museum

Over the course of the past 40 years, painter John Wesley has created a remarkably singular body of work whose subject is no less than the American psyche. While many artists of his generation have used popular images to explore the cultural landscape, Wesley has employed comic strip style and compositional rigor to make deeply personal, often hermetic paintings that strike at the core of our most primal fears, joys and desires. In this first volume ever to collect the entire iconic Bumstead series, which spans from 1974 until the present, we are introduced to several paintings that have never been reproduced before. These are dark and erotic works, sly and witty without ever giving too much away. Linda Norden described them thus in Parkett 62: "The Bumstead paintings--whether detailing scenes of domestic misunderstanding, zooming in on off-camera moments of bafflement or simply scanning empty halls and walls for private memories--are excruciatingly specific representations of the gulfs between feeling and comprehension… smart, funny, startling, irreverently empathetic and often heartbreaking, they are a welcome antidote to more laborious discourse." With an insightful new essay by Robert Hobbs.

John Wesley: The Bumsteads

Fredericks & Freiser

In 2005, the New York–based Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan created “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want”: a four-ton block of sub-Arctic ice, shipped to his Nassau elementary school and housed in a solar-powered refrigerator unit. Themes of transformation, presence, and absence, and the human ability to withstand pressure caused by quick changes of altitude, have been recurrent concerns for Strachan. His experience at the Russian Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City and skill as a master diver, have both played a role in his art. This monograph focuses on Strachan’s recent sculpture of white neon tubing, simulating a stop-action photograph of imploding or exploding words to either affirm or refute its statement about identity. Strachan has been selected as the first representative of the Bahamas at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Tavares Strachan: I Belong Here (CONCEPTIO UNLIM)

Gregory, Stamatina

Conceptio Unlimited Publication

Robert Smithson: Sculpture

Smithmark Pub.

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Books by Hobbs, Robert