Attention's Loop [Hardcover]

Elizabeth King (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1999

"This is a book about attention and memory. I am a sculptor, so it is also a book about size, dirt, artifice, work, and eye. The text is a set of stories and interruptions that pile up to make a play of overlapping loops. My organizing principle is the image of the round-trip, so one may open the book and step into it at any point. Most of [the] photographs are of a single sculpture. It is a self-portrait, a particular kind of round-trip, and it is small: one-half life-size. Called Pupil, it is jointed and movable and I pose it. I think of it as an instrument."

So writes the sculptor Elizabeth King in the foreword of her book, Attention's Loop. Both book and sculpture grow out of King's interest in finding ways to articulate how the mind experiences time. A philosophical essay in image and text, this artist's book challenges the expectation that an image will only illustrate the writing that surrounds it. The recognizably figurative sculpture that serves as the focus of the book is both subject and speaker. Attention's Loop simultaneously addresses and enacts the complexity of representation, and of consciousness itself.

Attention's Loop won a design award in the American Institute of Graphic Arts "50 Books/50 Covers 1999" competition, and a Merit Award for Design in the 1999 New York Book Show.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Elizabeth King is an artist whose work combines sculpture, film, and installation. She makes objects, sets them in motion with stop-frame film animation, then presents object and film together to challenge the boundary between actual and virtual space. Intimate in scale -- she speaks of a theater for an audience of one -- and distinguished by a level of craft that solicits close viewing, the work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature's host of legends in which the inanimate or artificial figure comes to life.

Awards for her work include a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1996-97 Bunting Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Harvard University. Her work is in permanent collections in the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She is represented in New York by Kent Gallery and by the Allan Stone Gallery. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University as School of the Arts Research Professor in the Department of Sculpture.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: Harry N Abrams (April 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810919982
• ISBN-13: 978-0810919983
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #759,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crystaline romp, June 2, 2000

By 

Kelly Davis - See all my reviews

This review is from: Attention's Loop (Hardcover)

A crystalline romp reflecting tension and reverie involved in the creation of that which is in our image. King's prose is elegant, pithy, never prolix, illuminating topics from the Golem to ETA Hoffman's Olympia while passing on the way thorough Jacquard's loom and Vaucanson's creations.

Throughout this shimmering work are dispersed aching photographs of King's Pupil, a jointed movable sculpture; her Galetea, who seems, at any moment, about to spring to life.

I without reservation recommend this work to anyone interested in the creation of works in the image of "Man," from sculptors to professors of AI.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A truly original modern artist, June 17, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Attention's Loop (Hardcover)

Ms. King is not only a great artist but an original thinker. Her sculptures, mechanical self-portraits fashioned from wood and metal, are amazingly realistic and beautiful yet at the same time a step beyond reality. As a craftsman, she is truly gifted with her hands. As a writer, she is able to examine the fields of history, philosophy, and science through the lens of her art and make us rethink the meaning of the human brain and senses. Especially fascinating was her research into the history of the homunculus.

As an added bonus, the book is beautifully designed (even won an award for book design).

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming Excentricity, November 8, 2008

By 

Christopher Smothers "smothers" (Monkton, MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Attention's Loop (Hardcover)

I was fortunate to hear the author speak the other night at an exhibition and she is charming and articulate. Her sculpture and her thoughts are wrapped in layers of subtlety. This book is very much like the author.