Join us for a conversation with scholar Edward A. Vazquez, on occasion of his new work Aspects: Fred Sandback’s Sculpture. Vazquez will be joined in conversation by Courtney J. Martin, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Dia Art Foundation, to discuss artist Fred Sandback’s artists’ books in relation to his sculptural practice, and the shifts between the two. Exhibition copies of the four publications Sandback produced in his lifetime will be on view during the event.

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More about Aspects: Fred Sandback’s Sculpture: Stretching lengths of yarn across interior spaces, American artist Fred Sandback (1943–2003) created expansive works that underscore the physical presence of the viewer. This book, the first major monograph 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-responsive 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.

Published by the University of Chicago Press.

Edward Vazquez is associate professor of modern and contemporary art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Middlebury College.

Courtney J. Martin is Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York