Alice Aycock

Photo by Gary Layda, courtesy the artist

Alice Aycock, "Ghost Ballet for East Bank Machineworks" (2007), installation view, Nashville, Tennessee

Courtesy Alice Aycock

Alice Aycock

Robert Morris Alice Aycock Show Me the Money Robert Morris Installation at Tate Modern Leaves 23 Injured Goshka Macuga Robert Morris to Reinstall 1971 Work in Tate Leader of the Pack Red, White, and Bored?

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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.