A work of non-functional architecture, Aycock’s structure evokes personal memories and associations to the ancient past.
Alice Aycock, Low Building with Dirt Roof (For Mary), 1973/2010, earth, wood, stones, 12 x 20 feet, entrance 30 inches high (Storm King Art Center, Hudson Highlands, New York) © Alice Aycock. Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker
0:00:05.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York, looking at a work that isn’t sculpture. And it’s not quite architecture in the way that we generally understand it. The artist Alice Aycock titled it Low Building, but she called this non-functional architecture.
0:00:21.9 Dr. Beth Harris: Which is a term that makes sense since it would be difficult to use this as a form of shelter. It’s very, very low to the ground. The opening is tiny and maybe you could sit inside it, but you certainly couldn’t do much more than that.
0:00:38.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: Architecture is first and foremost something that you can enter, something that you can use. But here it’s been transformed into something that is primarily about meaning and feeling. So maybe we should start by just describing it.
0:00:53.9 Dr. Beth Harris: It’s got a pitched roof with earth on top on which plants are growing. The pitched roof is supported by planks of wood, and underneath that, stones held together by mortar and a small opening in the center.
0:01:06.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: But I’m so trained to look to the use value of a work of architecture that I try, I strain, to think about how this could be practical. Would it be for storage? Is it actually taller than we think it is and it’s simply somehow sunk or the earth has risen around it? But once I’m able to sort of work through that internal argument, I start to think about the references that the artist is drawing on.
0:01:29.7 Dr. Beth Harris: I think architecture has a very important place in the human psyche. The spaces in which we grow up, the spaces of our dreams. I think it’s those kinds of spaces and the feelings that they evoke that Aycock is honing in on.
0:01:47.0 Dr. Steven Zucker: This work was first produced in 1973, so a very early work in her career on her family farm in Pennsylvania. And when she’s spoken about this work, she’s talked about memories of seeing a house where her great great grandparents had lived, a simple building where they slept in the attic under the rafters. And here’s a building that in a sense is only a low attic.
0:02:09.9 Dr. Beth Harris: But I think we shouldn’t see this as an illustration of a direct childhood memory—instead a kind of psychic space, one that’s overdetermined, that’s filled with various memories and associations. And we know that the artist was looking at ancient architecture, for example, tholos tombs built by the Mycenaeans in Bronze Age Greece. And those are enormous stone structures that are overwhelming in their scale, very different from this, but they both evoke a similar feeling of something very primal, something related to the cycles of life and death. If you think about a Mycenaean tomb, they’re covered in earth the way that this is. And there’s that feeling of an embeddedness in the landscape.
0:02:58.3 Dr. Steven Zucker: But there are other references here as well. There’s a reference to the sod-covered farmhouses of the American prairie in the 19th century. But inevitably, there’s an association with the tomb. This seems permanent, it seems immovable. And it seems solemn.
0:03:13.6 Dr. Beth Harris: This immediately, I think, taps into the imaginary because it is non functional. But what does it mean to make a work of art on a farm far from the New York City art world?
0:03:26.1 Dr. Steven Zucker: In 1973, that was a radical idea and one that had been forged by an artist that she’s actually quoting, Robert Smithson, who had taken an abandoned building in Ohio and had covered it in dirt. So that was a building that was pre-existing. Here she’s constructing anew.
0:03:42.2 Dr. Beth Harris: So something that her peers in the art world would only likely see through a photograph.
0:03:47.9 Dr. Steven Zucker: A kind of art that we’ve come to know as earth art. Art that exists outside of the gallery system. A kind of art that cannot be easily bought and sold in the way that a painting or sculpture can be. And yet this non-functional architecture was remade so that it could be here in Storm King.
0:04:04.3 Dr. Beth Harris: So perhaps we can think about this as a reaction to minimalism from the 1960s and early 1970s and the use of repetitive industrial forms. The idea of not referencing anything other than the formal aspects of the art itself. And here I think a kind of feminist aesthetic, one which calls on emotion and memory.
0:04:26.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: There’s this wonderful tension. The opening is an invitation. I want to look in, I want to crawl in. And yet at the same moment, I don’t want to go near that entrance. I don’t want to be inside. The interior is dark and strikes a sense of fear in me.
0:04:41.4 Dr. Beth Harris: We could also think about ancient Olmec structures where openings like this were understood as openings to another world.
0:04:49.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: And now it’s starting to really pour. And I kind of wish that we could actually go inside.
