Attention's Loop: A Sculptor's Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit

Authors

Elizabeth KingFollow
Katherine Wetzel

Files

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21974/BAT0-GP77

Publication Date

2025

Description

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 Katherine Wetzel’s 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, a philosophical essay in image and text. The recognizably figurative sculpture that serves as the focus of the book is both subject and speaker, and performs in a sequence of brief stories that address and enact the complexity of representation, and of consciousness itself. This artist’s book was first published in 1999 and anticipates questions now at the heart of today’s efforts to distinguish human from artificial intelligence.

Author Biographies

Elizabeth King
Elizabeth King is a sculptor and writer interested in the ways artists and artisans have crafted the human form, from sculptural traditions across cultures, to medical models, puppets, and automata. Her own works in wood, porcelain, and bronze, conjure the movable body, and she often animates her sculptures on stop-motion film.

Since the publication of this book over 25 years ago, King’s work has garnered significant national attention and was most recently featured in the two-person show De Anima (2025) at Manhattan’s Swiss Institute and in the group exhibitions Anonymous Was A Woman: The First 25 Years (2025), Grey Art Museum, New York University, and Airhead (2024), P•P•O•W, New York. Solo shows include Radical Small (2017-18), MASS MoCA, and The Sizes of Things in the Mind’s Eye (2007-09), which traveled to five venues in the U.S. King’s work is held in such major museum collections as the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among many others. Recognition of her artistic excellence also includes awards, fellowships, residencies—most recently at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017)—and the documentary Double Take: The Art of Elizabeth King (2018) by filmmaker Olympia Stone.

King taught in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at the VCU School of the Arts for three decades, retiring in 2015 as professor emerita, where she helped bring national and international attention to this top-ranked department. Her second book is a richly illustrated, scholarly study entitled Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend, co-written with W. David Todd and released by Getty Publications in 2023.

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Katherine Wetzel
In this remarkable collaboration between a sculptor and a photographer, Katherine Wetzel applies her extensive photographic expertise to render stunning images of Elizabeth King’s figurative sculpture, sensitively enhancing the persuasive illusion of human presence conveyed by King’s work. Wetzel joined the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ photography staff in the early 1970s and not long thereafter was promoted to department head. As the museum’s lead photographer until her retirement in 2011, she documented the impressively diverse artworks held in its permanent collections, making images featured in numerous VMFA books and catalogues. Additionally, Wetzel partnered with other Virginia institutions, providing photographic services for such important projects as A Share of Honour, Virginia Women 1600-1945, Virginia Women’s Cultural History Project; Before Freedom Came, African-American Life in the Antebellum South, American Civil War Museum; and The Common Wealth, Treasures from the Collection of the Library of Virginia. Over more than three decades, she was also a consistently sought-after photographer of original artwork by many contemporary artists in the region.

Publication History

Attention’s Loop: A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit, by Elizabeth King, with photographs by Katherine Wetzel, was published in hardcover by Harry N. Abrams Inc. in 1999. The book was designed by Judith Hudson at Abrams, who won a design award for it in the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ “AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 1999” Competition, and a Merit Award for Design in the 1999 New York Book Show. Longtime Abrams editor in chief Paul Gottlieb had often published experimental books, many by artists; he called them his “UFOs.” In 2001, his last year at Abrams, which had been acquired in 1997 by the French company La Martinière Groupe, he granted the rights to the book to King, giving her control of the inventory and the book’s future.

In 2020, King approached the book’s original designer Judith Hudson, now an independent book designer, to create a high resolution digital edition of the book. Katherine Wetzel supervised the scanning of her original negatives at Laumont Photographics in New York. Jeff Glotzl produced digital positives matched to Wetzel’s prints. Hudson transferred the book’s layout from its original Quark software to current InDesign, for output to a PDF format that closely matches the original, preserving her hallmark quiet adjustment of font sizes and weights to the tone of the voice within each spread. She revisited colors, values, scaling, and page transitions for optimal screen viewing, and reproduced the dust jacket text as page 2 of the PDF file. Completed in 2025, the PDF is best viewed with the most current version of Adobe Acrobat, in “full screen” mode.

Notes

Pupil (Elizabeth King, 1987-90), the sculpture featured in Attention’s Loop, is in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. The museum granted the loan of the sculpture to VCU’s Anderson Gallery, where King and Wetzel were given time and space to create the photographs for the book in the summer of 1997. That fall, with the loan extended, the sculpture was included in the biennial School of the Arts Faculty Focus show, where it was shown with a selection of Wetzel’s just-finished silver gelatin prints for the book.

For additional information on the origins of the book, see Elizabeth King's website.

In 2025, Katherine Wetzel donated her photographic negatives and original prints for the book to Special Collections and Archives at VCU Libraries.

Rights

Copyright © 1999 Elizabeth King. Photographs copyright © 1999 Katherine Wetzel. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the author.

Digital Publisher

VCU LIbraries

Keywords

Mind and body; Psychology

Disciplines

Photography | Sculpture