Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating

Major Retrospective of More than 100 Works from 1971 to the Present
A Collaboration between Santa Barbara Museum of Art and 
Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara

On View:

            Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara              January 25 – April 19, 2014

                           Santa Barbara Museum of Art             January 26 – April 20, 2014

December 5, 2013 – The Santa Barbara Museum of Art and UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum present Alice Aycock Drawings: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating¯the first comprehensive exploration of this vital aspect of the renowned sculptor’s creative process. The exhibition has been organized by the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, and curated by Adjunct Parrish Curator Jonathan Fineberg, Gutgsell Professor of Art History Emeritus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and traces Aycock’s career from 1971 to the present, highlighting the major themes that have governed her artistic practice.

While Aycock is best known for her large-scale installations and outdoor sculptures, her drawings capture the full range of her ideas and sources. Consisting of approximately 100 works, the exhibition will be presented in two parts. The 48 works on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (January 26 – April 20) cover the later years, when Aycock developed an increasingly elaborate visual vocabulary, drawing upon a multitude of sources and facilitated in part by the use of computer programs. The works on view at the AD&A Museum (January 25 – April 19) focus on the beginning of her career, including detailed architectural drawings, sculptural maquettes, and photo documentation for both realized and imagined architectural projects.

“Aycock is an artist who thinks on paper,” writes Terrie Sultan in the catalogue introduction. “Her spectacular drawings are equal parts engineering plan and science-fiction imagining. As in all of her work, fantastic narrative writings weave in and out of her images, inspiring her production of sculptural objects, drawings, and installations.”

Santa Barbara Museum of Art – Later Work

Language and architecture have informed Aycock’s drawings in ever-more imaginative ways. At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Rosetta Stone City Intersected by the Celestial Alphabet (1985) and The Garden of Scripts (Villandry) (1986) show how Aycock uses as architectural elements, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Native American pictographs, and Chinese and Sanskrit characters. Board games are another source of inspiration for the artist. The Celestial City Game (1988) is based on the heavenly city of Jerusalem, with snakes and ladders in a central checkerboard, surrounded by a city plan derived from an eighth-century illuminated manuscript. The deep whirlpool in the middle of The Glass Bead Game: Circling ’Round the Ka’ Ba (1985) was inspired by a photograph of people whirling in a rapturous, hypnotic dance around Mecca’s sacred site. Instead of the actual Ka’ Ba, however, the black structure hovering above the center is a depiction of a wooden shanty the artist saw in Cairo’s City of the Dead.

Both Aycock‘s built projects and her drawings achieved new complexity in the 1990s with the advent of computer graphics programs, which enable her to view forms from multiple perspectives, create mathematically perfect curves, generate precise construction drawings, reduce and enlarge at will, scale a piece perfectly in a site, and imagine points of view that are extraordinarily accurate. The way in which her several vocabularies of drawing mirror the multivalent simultaneity of her sources and trajectories of thought manifest both her conceptual clarity and her formal depth. But her drawing practice also anticipates how today’s emerging artists are employing systems-based drawing as an increasingly important venue for cultural speculation.

Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara – Early Work

Alice Aycock first produced working drawings for imaginary projects in the early 1970s, at the same time as she began creating site-specific structures on an architectural scale. The AD&A Museum’s installation includes a broad selection of drawings, ranging from conceptual idea-making to detailed working documents for the construction of intricate and challenging monumental installations, as well as photographic documentation of projects realized during the 1970s and 1980s. Just as the early constructions choreographed the viewer through a mixture of psychological sensations, the early drawings from this period, among them Project for a Vertical Maze (1975) andProject for Five Wells Descending a Hillside (1975), depict imagined architectural constructions designed to elicit feelings ranging from comfort and security to anxiety and distress.

In the late 1970s, language began to figure more prominently in Aycock’s work, in the form of increasingly elaborate and allusive titles and narratives that reflected the many sources she mined for ideas—contemporary and obsolete science, philosophies and belief systems, mythology, fantastic architecture, archeology, family history, literature, and clinical psychology texts, especially those dealing with the language of schizophrenia. Several major drawings from this period are on view, including Project Entitled “The City of the Walls: A Narrow City, A Thin City…” (1978) which is complemented by a disjunctive, free-ranging text set in the Middle Ages and referencing multiple sites such as Cairo’s City of the Dead; Bloomfield, Indiana; Sarajevo; and Reykjavik.

During the early 1980s, Aycock’s interest in machinery and mechanics—cross-bred with imaginary science of the Ghostbusters variety—intensified, resulting in a series of works that are represented by drawings and maquettes. These include The Miraculating Machine in the Garden (1980); From the Series Entitled How to Catch and Manufacture Ghosts: “Collected Ghost Stories from the Workhouse” (1980); Rotary Lightning Express (An Apparatus for Determining the Effects of Mesmerism on Terrestrial Currents)(1980); and The Savage Sparkler (1981). Commenting on The Miraculating Machine in the Garden, Fineberg writes, “It is a romantic scientific apparatus, like something from an old Frankenstein movie, seemingly capable of harnessing awesome natural forces.”