Aspects: Fred Sandback's Sculpture

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 2017

By Edward A. Vazquez

Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major study of Sandback, explores the full range of his art, which not only disrupts traditional conceptions of material presence, but also stages an ethics of interaction between object and observer.

Drawing on Sandback’s substantial archive, Edward A. Vazquez demonstrates that the artist’s work—with all its physical slightness and attentiveness to place, as well as its relationship to minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s—creates a link between viewers and space that is best understood as sculptural even as it almost surpasses physical form. At the same time, the economy of Sandback’s site-determined practice draws viewers’ focus to their connection to space and others sharing it. As Vazquez shows, Sandback’s art aims for nothing less than a total recalibration of the senses, as the spectator is caught on neither one side nor the other of an object or space, but powerfully within it.

Details

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Artist: Fred Sandback

Contributors: Edward A. Vazquez

Publication Date: 2017

ISBN: 9780226407906

Retail: $50 | £37.50

Status: Not Available

Binding: Hardcover

Dimensions: 8 ½ × 10 in | 21.6 x 25.4 cm

Pages: 240

Reproductions: 30 color, 46 halftones

Artist and Contributors

Fred Sandback

Beginning in the late 1960s, Fred Sandback (1943–2003) developed a singular, minimal formal vocabulary that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity. He largely dispensed with mass and weight by using steel rod, elastic cord, and acrylic yarn to outline planes and volumes in space, creating an extensive body of works that inherently address their physical surroundings, the "pedestrian space," as he called it, of everyday life.

Edward A. Vazquez

Edward A. Vazquez is associate professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Middlebury College

$50