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