One of the most persistently inventive artists to have emerged from the Conceptual days of late modernism is the shockingly undervalued Alice Aycock. A native of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Aycock came to New York in 1968. She studied with Robert Morris at Hunter College and quickly became a leading light of the experimental downtown scene of the ’70s, a community that questioned the whole nature of art. Since the end of that decade she has pioneered a brand of large-scale public sculpture that often combines the appearance of the industrial with suggestions of weightlessness, as well as a wealth of references spanning the scientific, the cultural, and the cosmological. Aycock made her name with these quasi-architectural sculptures and continues to produce them prolifically: Last year alone, she completed Strange Attracter for Kansas City, Ghost Ballet for East Bank Machineworks (in Nashville, Tennessee), The Uncertainty of Ground State Fluctuations (in Clayton, Missouri), and A Little Cosmic Rhythm (at 654 Madison Avenue, New York City).

This month, however, New York art-goers can get a rare glimpse of how Aycock arrived at her signature style. A re-creation of her 1971 piece Sand/Fans (a kinetic piece in which four electric fans are turned on a pile of fine sand) is up through this Sunday, July 20, at Salomon Contemporary Warehouse in East Hampton in collaboration with the Parrish Art Museum exhibition “Sand: Memory, Meaning, and Metaphor,” and several works including the 1974 piece Stairs (These Stairs Can Be Climbed) are included in “Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s” on view at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City through July 28. Last week ARTINFO spoke to Aycock, both in her SoHo loft and out at East Hampton, about her early work, its relationship to current values, and how she’s seen the art world change.

Alice, how important is it for you that Sand/Fans, a piece that you made in 1971, has been reconstructed?

In 1971 I was 25 years old, and even though I had no idea back then what the span of my work would be, I do see my journey beginning with this piece. For all the 37 years since I made it, this is the piece that I return to and say, “Yes. This was the beginning of a certain sort of obsession.”

Can you explain why?

I always loved the way the fans looked. I love the blades, the metal, the spinning. And I love the form, the notion of power, and the notion of a whirlwind as a generator. If I were to say that there were images that I was imprinted with for whatever reason, then it was the hurricane, the tornado, the generator, the vortex, the whirlpool. It’s an image that has prevailed; it’s not in every piece, but it has cropped up again and again.

Yes, your imagery has stayed consistent, but the world you work in has changed considerably, hasn’t it?

In the late ’60s and early ’70s the New York art world was still very small, and we were doing these things for each other. Bob Morris would write something in Artforum, for example, and we’d have a conversation about it in class, and then you’d go home and think about it. People say now that things were very linear, and in fact they were. It was like somebody threw out the baton, and you picked it up. Or they moved the pieces on a chessboard, and then you made a move. You could do that then.

And “the public wasn’t invited,” to use Tom Wolfe’s phrase?

Even though there were events like this one [Sand/Fans], and we wanted people to see them, we weren’t thinking of vast hordes. Even though the very word “exhibition” implies that we’re all exhibitionists — we want people to see what we do — it wasn’t the same as it is now, either in the public or the private art world.  

Has that changed for you?

Even now I don’t think my work is seen by that many people. Or if it is, it’s not recognized as art. For example, the piece in Nashville [Ghost Ballet for East Bank Machineworks] is seen by a vast group of people who happen to drive by: That’s a mass event, there’s no two ways about it. But the number of people who look at it and actually get it and engage with it intellectually is still very small.

I’m not sure I understand your attitude toward audience.

When we re-enacted Sand/Fans this past weekend, I wanted a lot of people to see it, but the piece is really best when there are just one or two people watching it happen. Everybody was standing around it, waiting for some huge dust storm. But it’s far more Zen, it happens over time: Little piles of sand make ripples and waves and little dunes. It takes hours. It’s not a crowd-pleaser, not like a football game.

The other piece that’s recently been reconstructed is Stairs (These Stairs Can Be Climbed). How do you feel seeing these two pieces at the same time?

In my mind there was a direct route from Sand/Fans to the Stairs. Sand/Fans was done in 1971, I did the Maze in 1972, and then I did the Low Building With Dirt Roof (For Mary) in ’73, and the Stairs in ’74. So I made the transition to architecture. I shifted to something more permanent. It was more of an object than my earlier work, it wasn’t so ephemeral, and it felt more solid, more obdurate. I guess my love was architecture. Not functional architecture, but architecture as an umbrella from which you could hang many things — psychology, history, or culture. But I remember an artist coming to my studio at the time and saying, “How could you do this? You’ve gone backward!”

Because you’d gone from an event to an object?

When I was talking theoretically back then — it was a very theoretical time — I would use the philosophical terms “the necessary structure” and “the contingent event.” The structure was the sand and the fans, for example, and the event was turning them on and allowing whatever happened to happen. In the case of the architectural pieces, the structure was the maze or the stairs, and the contingent event was the encounter with it. When people physically entered it or moved through it, they had whatever experience they were going to have. And it was an active experience. I suppose these days we’d say an “interactive” experience.

It was entirely dependent on the individual visitor’s response?

No. It’s not like when people say, “Oh, however you feel about it, that’s OK with me.” I designed these things to have a certain character, but within that you have an experience that’s personal. Stairs is a very extroverted piece, for example. It’s steep. It was as steep as it could be in 1974 and still be legal, in fact. Someone who loves to climb will just charge right up it, but someone else will have a sense of, “Ooh, it’s high. I’m going to be careful.” There’s a spectrum of feelings available within something that I’ve designed very carefully.

If you were going to say how the early ’70s were different from now, how would you do it?

Well, of course there were dumb things done back then, just as we can say that some of the things that are being done now are dumb and wonder why people are literally buying into them. But there was so much idealism then, and I think in many ways it was the last blast of so many things: the experiential and the sensory; the actual experience of things as opposed to the virtual; the romance of the landscape — the American paradise — and the notion that our earth was still in some ways virgin, and that we could preserve it; that we could once again be a great nation, if only… ; and that art was about ideas and not about the commodification of objects that simply get sold like futures on the stock exchange.

Nowadays people call some of those ideas “elitist.”

Oh my God, we were even embarrassed if we ended up in Time magazine. You’d sold out! We wanted to be elitist, you know. I still do, to be honest with you. I love elitism. And the more the word gets thrown around in the political arena, the more I say, “Yes! I’m an elitist! Does it mean I’ve still got a few brain cells up here? Yes! Do I know something you don’t? Yes!” The world has changed so much.

But I think the real difference isn’t that the public for contemporary art has increased, it’s that the market for it has.

I do, too. And when I say this, I am not, believe me, a suffering artist. I have made a living, and I have been paid for my work. But I also think that if you get too close to the capitalistic monster — no matter what the medium is, whether it’s music, film, theater, or art — if you get too close to the flame, or adopt this notion of so-called democracy, which really means dumbing down for the market, then you have truly sold your soul. Politics can destroy art, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s socialist communist politics or capitalist politics. It eats it up, devours it. Once you start playing to that monster, it steals away the whole thing.