Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating

Over the last four decades, Aycock has become known for large-scale public art projects such as East River Roundabout (1995), Strange Attractor for Kansas City (2007), and Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks (2007). Yet the rigorous conceptual underpinnings of her art are only partly visible in the few installations that have been actualized. A clearer development can be seen in the diagrams, computer renderings, and sketches featured here. Aycock has continually employed a complex language of architectural diagram, associative and referential texts, and fanciful or fabulist drawing to create the elaborate worlds of her constructions. Her turn away from minimalism stressed “[t]he deliberately ‘corrupt’ multidirectionality of Aycock’s thinking,” which unites history, science, and personal mythology. Over time her obsessions shifted from “nonfunctional fantasy architecture” (mazes, staircases leading to nowhere) to elaborate systems that engage with occult traditions and theories of the mind and universe. In an efficient essay that discusses Aycock’s catalogue chronologically, Fineberg (Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being) fills out the body of references that inform Aycock’s drawings and emphasizes the capaciousness of her curiosities. Fineberg’s tone is clear and elucidating, while also capturing his subject’s deep sense of play: one diagram “appears to elicit undercurrents of danger while resembling a device for contacting extraterrestrials over the airwaves.” 102 color and 15 b&w illus. (May)