This month, internationally acclaimed sculptor Alice Aycock will unveil a striking work of public art in downtown Clayton. As the installation nears, we preview the project—and recall an earlier artist in whose footsteps she follows
By Robert Duffy
May 27, 1868, was a fine spring Wednesday in St. Louis. City officials had designated it a holiday, and about 40,000 folks—a little more than a tenth of the overall population—took advantage of the midweek respite and made their way to Lafayette Park, an emerald set in the middle of the most fashionable quarter of the city. Thousands of children came bearing roses and, with their elders, were to witness a moment of civic, artistic and historic importance: the unveiling and dedication of the first public monument in the city. It was an impressive assembly for an impressive work of art, a representation of the redoubtable United States Senator Thomas Hart Benton.
Benton, larger than life in person, was represented larger than life in Lafayette Park as well. In spite of the vagaries of time, the elements of history (including an F4 tornado in 1896) and patina damage from pollution, the character called “Old Bullion” stands there still, his cloak draped around him like a Roman senator’s toga, shod in sandals to complete the classical reference. Benton evangelized Manifest Destiny, and here, in a leafy green, he gazes west in perpetuity from his high granite pedestal in the western precincts of the park.
Though it’s not remarkable now, it certainly was then: The Benton sculpture is a woman’s work. It was created by Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830–1908), a fiercely talented and uncommonly independent woman, and as ambitious an artist as ever took up the chisel. Although Hosmer was a New Englander and her Benton sculpture was modeled in Rome and cast in bronze in Munich, the artist had a special, formative connection to St. Louis. For the sake of technical competency, she wanted to know how the human body operated. To accomplish that, she needed to study anatomy, up close and firsthand. But anatomy lab doors were closed to her in New England. She was, after all, female. In the 19th century, women generally weren’t admitted to medical schools any more frequently than they were admitted to the professional ranks of painters and sculptors.
Hosmer found a more amiable climate in 19th-century St. Louis. Here, she was permitted entry to the old Missouri Medical College (also known as McDowell’s College), one of two institutions that evolved into the Washington University School of Medicine. Wash. U. co-founder Wayman Crow, whose daughter Cornelia was friends with Hosmer from boarding school, cleared the way for her.
With Hosmer and her Benton statue began an unspooling of a slender but noteworthy thread in the history of art in St. Louis—the commissioning of art created by women for installation in public settings. Downtown St. Louis, for example, came close to having a major sculpture by the celebrated artist Mary Miss. It was to have been installed early this century on the east side of the Thomas F. Eagleton Federal Courthouse and would have celebrated the natural and built environments of the city. It was nixed for aesthetic reasons, however, by the architects of the courthouse, Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum.
Miss, however, built an impressive site-specific sculpture for Laumeier Sculpture Park in Sunset Hills. Other notable women artists have created major works of art there as well. Jackie Ferrara was the first artist to install an on-site sculpture there permanently. Miss, Beverly Pepper and Ursula von Rydingsvard followed.
Now comes internationally respected artist Alice Aycock. This month, her brightly colored, abstract sculpture titled The Uncertainty of Ground State Fluctuations (for Clayton, Missouri) will be installed at the entrance to the Center of Clayton, the suburban city’s palace of sport that lies just north of Shaw Park. The curvilinear, asymmetrical sculpture will be approximately 19 feet tall by 20 feet in circumference. The materials are aluminum, steel and Plexiglas, which will be combined in an assembly of elements that suggests geometry and motion—a cone and a pinwheel and a frozen flutter of metallic drapery.
The Clayton Art Commission commissioned Uncertainty with money from various public, private, corporate and individual sources. A panel composed of members of the art commission and the Clayton Recreation, Sports and Wellness Commission selected Aycock from a field of nine local and national artists. Three artists made the semifinal cut. Representations of their work were posted in the center, where members of the community, the center’s staff and Clayton High School students were invited to comment upon them.
Certainly these individuals were only the first to comment. Inevitably, and perhaps productively, the installation of the Aycock sculpture will prompt new conversations about art, public aesthetic policy and money in our community. You can almost hear it now: “They paid $110,000 for that?”
Alice Aycock was born in 1946 in Harrisburg, Pa., where she spent a fascinating childhood absorbing the world. She was told vivid tales by a Southern grandmother and was kept on her intellectual toes by her father’s insistence that he not be bothered, during dinner conversations, with anything he already knew.
Americans like Aycock born into the broad American middle class around boom time, just after World War II, settled into a zone of relative comfort in the 1950s, after the police action in Korea quieted and the kind-faced, stalwart soldier Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, claimed the White House. That historic moment of optimism, innocence, denial or whatever it was spawned a generation of adults who were possessed with a confidence that the world could be tamed and that, in this domesticated world, we’d be free to work as we chose. Ah, sweet illusions. That most of us didn’t, and that we slouched,
however reluctantly, into lives of quiet desperation, is of no consequence here. Aycock did, and the art world has noticed.
In a recent interview Aycock said she longed to run with the “boys”—the so-called minimalists of the second half of the 20th century, gold-standard American artists such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin. With a determination rooted in architectural manifestos of the 19th and early 20th centuries, these artists addressed the visual world with uncompromising austerity, rigor and refinement. Although Aycock had no trouble understanding this world—and, in Flavin’s words, its “psychologically indifferent decoration”—she was, in her way and in relation to the boys and their crisply defined edges, like those little magnetic Scottie dogs. Put them together one way and there’s a snappy congress. Turn one around and they fly apart. “I was trying to be a good minimalist,” she says now. “But walking in the world, I saw content and constantly shifting fictions. I was constantly hearing and seeing history.”
One enduring influence on Aycock outside of the boys’ world has been the artist Louise Nevelson, a one-time production designer for the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis who is the subject of a current retrospective at The Jewish Museum in New York. Aycock recalls seeing an exhibition of Nevelson’s sculptures at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1967, where she was affected by the scale of Nevelson’s work, its architectural qualities and its asymmetry.
“Donald Judd was saying ‘one and one equals two’ in his work,” Aycock says. “Louise was saying otherwise. With Judd, what you see is what you get. Louise Nevelson was not about one plus one. She allowed in nuances. She was steeped in knowing.”
Nevelsonian influences in Aycock’s work are subtle, and one may argue that they’re no more dominant than those of Judd, Serra or Frank Stella. Although Aycock’s work has changed and evolved over the years, it has remained unique to her and unpredictable. One may recall, for example, her evocative Hundred Small Rooms—an idealized village of tiny white cottages stacked one on top of another to make a high-rise, each one surrounded by a white picket fence—which was installed at Laumeier from 1985 to 1992. Compare it with the new Clayton piece, and you’ll understand this element of unpredictability. “I like the expansive stuff,” she says. “The idea is to set up problems and to go after the answers, and I don’t know the answers ahead of time.”
And perhaps there aren’t single answers. Asked recently to describe the new Clayton sculpture, Aycock says it will look like a large musical instrument. Or a spacecraft straight from a 1950s Saturday movie matinee. Or a flowering bush. It’s the viewer’s choice.
In the completed version, the spun aluminum horn element will be a brushed silver with a yellow light in the center. “The horn is trying to listen,” she says. “It is also a vessel, waiting to be filled. It seems to have landed, plopped down in place. It has to do with feelings of unrest or unease. Yet it is also optimistic,directed outward.”
The pinwheel will be golden Plexiglas, and the fluttery Plexiglas ribbon will be frosted on the side and piped in blue. “The pinwheel is whimsical,” she says, “a pinwheel at the center of the earth. It can also be powerful as a turbine.” A part of the sculpture she calls the “potato chip”—a flowing, solid, curvilinear form—will also be blue. All other parts will be brushed or satiny aluminum.
What will St. Louisans make of this colorful, unusual public sculpture? For contemporary-art resisters, it may be propane to fuel their blistering disdain for any art since just before the time of Courbet. For strict minimalists, it will probably be greeted with the rolling of eyes. For free-associaters, it is a Fourth of July sparkler. For Clayton, it has potential for adding a measure of visual sophistication to a boomtown snaggle-scape of largely consequence-free buildings. For our collective regional art history, Uncertainty continues the tradition established by Harriet Hosmer in the mid-19th century.
That Aycock’s site—in front of a gymnasium in an American suburb—is less grand than Hosmer’s is something she’s content with. “What you do is take what you’re given,” she says. “This is a piece I have always wanted to do, and after all these years I want to see it next. I don’t have time to waste, wondering if this is the right place for it.”
Besides, she says, installing work anywhere in this city means joining a rich history. “In the art world, St. Louis means something. It’s Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly. It’s a sophisticated place.” In the world of art, “it registers.”
And of Uncertainty, Aycock is certain: “I am proud of it.”
