 |
|||
   |
|||
| Home | ||
| About ISC | ||
| Membership | ||
| News & Events | ||
| Awards | ||
| Sculpture Magazine | ||
| Sculpture Community | ||
| Sculptor's Portfolio | ||
| Artwork for Sale | ||
| Destinations | ||
| Resources | ||
| Site Map | ||
| Store | ||
| FAQ | ||
| Donate Now | ||
| Join Email List | ||
|
Sarah
Sze rises on a two-story power lift to the very center of the entryway
atrium, where a flexible rod arcs out from a pillar at the top of the
escalator. She begins to work on the end of that rod, which has diminished
to a flexible wire. The sculptor fixes a stalk of dried yarrow flower
to a tiny electrical clamp, attaches it to the wire, and weighs the balance,
seeing how its weight changes the height of the arc. She gives the joint
a shot with a pink glue gun and moves on to the next dried yarrow, creating
a single-file procession of flowers, diminishing in size across the space. Sze was installing
one of her complex, unique pieces in the Gund Wing of the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts, the second in the museum’s “RSVP” series,
which invites artists to create a work outside the usual galleries. At
33, this native Bostonian has an international reputation for astounding,
world-class work. Although her style is distinctive, it is difficult to
photograph, describe, or categorize. A Sze piece can remind one of the
emptied-out contents of a medicine cabinet or a kitchen drawer, except
that all the objects come in multiples, or it can resemble something between
a Rube Goldberg contraption and a giant Erector Set. Sze is seldom idle.
Just before the Boston MFA installation, she developed three outdoor pieces
on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. One of
her installations was included in “The Moderns” (2003), a group
show at the Castello di Rivoli in Torino, Italy. An outdoor piece that
premiered in the summer of 2003 in the sculpture court at the Whitney
Museum of American Art in New York has been a critical and popular success.
Critics find in Sze’s
work a metaphor for today’s dizzying, protean urban fabric, an analogy
to the cyberworld, and a commentary on the multiplicity of quotidian objects
that constantly pass used but unnoticed through our hands. The curators
at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris, where
Sze produced a major installation in 1999, wrote, “She offers a world
where neither emptiness nor saturation dominates, where chaos is as relevant
as order, and where the common is as important as the extraordinary.”
For all its complexity,
The Letting Go at the MFA is simple in relation to other recent works
such as Everything That Rises Must Converge, installed in Paris in 1999,
or Things Fall Apart, created at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
in 2001 and now in the permanent collection. At SFMoMA, Sze had a full-sized
SUV sawn into sections, painted red, and hoisted to strategic points on
the museum’s four-floor exposed staircase. She then filled the components
with intricate details and connected them with her signature arrays of
string and arching, spiraling rods. In Paris, Sze united Everything That
Rises Must Converge with ladders hung and balanced in space.
The Boston atrium
offers a bonus Sze has not had before, an escalator. Experiencing a Sze
work is a process of discovery: she tantalizes with a glimpse or a simple
element and beckons the viewer into the entire assemblage, piece by piece,
until one is left dazed trying to comprehend the whole. “The escalator
is an interesting opportunity,” she said. “I like to engage
the space, so the piece is revealed to you as you move through the space.”
The artist dropped a plumb line down through the center of the atrium,
ending with a shaped piece of paper (with a hole in it) that can be blown
about by random air currents. Directly below it is a water glass (exactly
the same size as the hole), sitting in the middle of a pile of flower
petals. “I wanted a
quiet entry into the piece,” she explained. “Then it gets more
complicated and busier as one ascends. Usually when you’re moving,
you have to navigate space physically.” Here, gallery-goers riding
the escalator “can move through this piece, without having to look
down, and watch it unravel.”
For her commissions,
Sze always reconnoiters and reacts to a given space. In Boston, she chose
the cavernous, sterile atrium because it would not be “a place where
there would be such a shock, a contemporary installation up against Old
Masters.” A Sze work is not seen all at once, or even in a few minutes.
It demands time. The viewer is initially attracted by the colors and textures
of an array of small, identical items. One is impelled to identify and
marvel at them minutely, amazed that an artistic sensibility could create
an aesthetic mass from such mundane objects. A nearby detail insists that
the eye wander through the conglomeration to find that same detail repeated;
finally one is caught by a web of strings and catapulted off onto a ride
in space through the whole. That done, one is enmeshed in another nest
of objects and must halt to repeat the process. Initially a painter,
Sze develops her installations intuitively. She begins with a minimal
cardboard model of the space—in this case, her basic design was represented
by two spirals of silver wire, the intricate agglomerations at the corners
indicated by starbursts of cutout paper. “I make up the details as
I go along,” she said. It’s kind of like a painting process.
I do an underdrawing; then it’s improvisational.” Sometimes
she “erases,” ripping out a batch of elements and installing
others.
Curators at both
the MFA and SFMoMA liken Sze’s work to the Internet, in that it links
small bits of discrete information into a complex network. The analogy
is valid: like bytes of cyber information, her bits are precisely placed
in order to cohere into readable imagery. It makes sense that in San Francisco
her installation was part of 010101, an exhibition of cyber art. Yet another
influence entirely is ikebana, the rigid, ritualistic Japanese art of
flower arranging, which she studied informally during a year-long stint
in Japan after her graduation from Yale. In Sze’s installations,
as in ikebana, massed foci generate simpler secondary ideas that tail
off, in a linear way, into space. Sze says that the Japanese concern for
the use and arrangement of all kinds of objects seeped into her practice
as a sculptor. Her father, Chia-Ming
Sze, a Boston architect, imparted to her his interest in the manipulation
of space; she grew up a regular visitor to the Boston MFA. Sze further
pursues the Asian look by using “planes parallel to the earth that
seem to float, planes instead of a one-point perspective.” She says,
“Frank Lloyd Wright stole this from Asian architecture—and painting—and
I stole it from Frank Lloyd Wright.”
For The Letting Go
(the title refers to the line from Emily Dickinson), Sze sent into the
atrium space two arcs that don’t quite meet. A tiny void is at the
center of the piece; the details are on the periphery. “Things that
disperse, that disintegrate outward, are central in the Asian aesthetic,
in Asian painting,” Sze mused. “Asian art has less of a hierarchy.”
While Sze clipped yarrow onto wire, her assistant David Ramirez worked
on an assemblage attached to a cement column. A carpenter and a writer,
he has “run her installs,” he says, for two years. They have
been friends for eight years; he used to be a building contractor. Ramirez
explained that the intricate conglomeration was supported by a steel armature
and plates fabricated at Sze’s studio and bolted to the wall. From where Ramirez
stood, the stainless steel rod curved up, diminished and ended, leaving
a small space before it resumed and grew larger, leading the eye to the
other point of interest, a wall corner on the edge of the atrium. The
gap in the unifying rod was a point of tension, which Sze decorated minutely
with squared-off matchstick forms and springy wire ending in details such
as two dead bees, one plastic daisy, and a little electric clamp holding
a rectangle of cloth stretched like a canvas on a tiny stretcher. In the
end, she camouflaged the gap with another sheet of paper with a hole in
it, a whim that lends unity (another cut-out or two can be found at far
ends of the piece) but reduces the central tension. The lines were designed
to feel weightless, Sze said. “Then they trickle off to different
locations, offshoots to places with a lot of activity.” Ramirez was adding
bits to a structure that resembled a little bamboo house squashed against
one corner of a square concrete column. Closer inspection revealed that
the roof and floor of the “house” were specimen drawers, their
fronts painted bright blue, their chrome handles still centered on the
front. Big square notches were cut out of the drawers so they fit wrapped
around the corner. Before she was finished, Sze sliced one drawer-front
in half and stuck it to the pillar elsewhere.
Inside the finished
structure are, among other things, Styrofoam packing materials shaped
like pasta shells, massed and suspended in an illusion of stratocumulus
clouds. Other shells, snipped so they morph into calamari rings, trickle
out into space. Small clamp-lights shine into and out of the structure,
and a white mini-fan blows a strong breeze across artificial daisies.
Blue strings fan out to suspend a bamboo arc punctuated by fungi on stick-stems,
and the unifying stainless steel rod arches out into the space of the
atrium, leading the eye on and on. “The essential
forms are meant to represent the structure beneath the surface—like
the framing of a house,” Sze commented. “There’s a tension
between the structural and the decorative; the structure becomes the surface.
It’s really all decorative, but it looks structural. It makes the
piece seem more fragile.” During the installation,
various materials waited in boxes for the installers: dried, flat-topped
yarrow stalks, clumps of moss, small designer clothespins in blue, red,
and gold, plastic ferns and flowers, flat tan fungi. Sze haunts five-and-dime
stores, stocking up on the most quotidian materials imaginable to use
as her “paints.” She adds hints of autobiography by collecting
things she comes across every day, incorporating, for example, a few small
pill bottles and an array of hotel sample shampoos. In other installations,
she has relied heavily on Q-Tips, packing peanuts, moss, lichen, aspirin,
foam, balsa wood, aluminum siding, plastic spoons, soap dishes complete
with soap, wire trash baskets, thimbles, funnels, vacuum cleaner hose,
pills in rows, matches, bon-bons still in their wrappers, and measuring
tape. Although color and texture determine most of her choices, she selects
materials that have practical uses as well. Visual puns result, in which
the viewer suddenly realizes that the small forest of mushrooms is made
of packing shells stuck atop toothpicks.
The Letting Go’s
other point of energy and activity, on the wall corner, is built of more
drawers, sliced and layered, and such substantial elements as a blue student’s
desk lamp, clear clamp-lamps that display their electrical innards, more
fans, the filaments of a broken light bulb, and a wealth of smaller bits:
tiny orange spirit levels and yellow box cutters, blue plastic bottle
caps, blue seal-strips, the kind you pull off when you open a gallon of
milk, plastic grass “growing” in some of the small compartments
in the drawers (and in an upside-down, grass-planted drawer), and a series
of remarkable strata cut from rigid translucent plastic sheets in shapes
reminiscent of paleontological skeletons or Hiroshige’s waves. Rather
than attempt to hide the mechanisms, Sze looped cords and wires, tacked
them to the wall, decorated them with leaves and flowers, and emphasized
the brass floor plug with cut-out paper. She also tucked discarded light-bulb
boxes into one of the assemblages. A literal edginess,
a touch of menace, imbues her works. In San Francisco, the reference to
an auto wreck is inescapable. At the Whitney, water in its three forms
is the reference point. At the MFA, artists’ cutting tools stand
dangerously upright: an X-acto knife is suspended like Damocles’s
sword, and each balsa-wood box in one series contains a single-edged razor
blade. Natural materials such as moss form a counterpoint to the heavy
industrial stuff, as well as flat leaves and lichen-tipped twigs that
appear to play a supporting role. What saves these
accumulations from chaos is Sze’s insistence on the individuality
of each component. The milk-bottle rings exemplify what she does: each
is held up in perfect, matching horizontality. They are all blue, fitting
into the color scheme, yet each recurs at a rare but satisfying interval.
One can peruse the piece just for milk-bottle seals, or one can look for
the tiny erect spear points of leaves.
Sze does in three
dimensions what Jackson Pollock did in two. From an initial impression
of chaos, she instinctively organizes a composition in which the viewers
can lose themselves, tracing the threads of unity. Hidden behind incoherence
and ostensible disorder is a classic formality: repetition, color unity,
contrast of textures, unifying linear design. To this, she adds two more
formal issues, gravity and scale. Born in Boston in
1969, Sze grew up there, attended Yale University and then the School
of Visual Arts in New York. While at Yale, she began stuffing complicated
little sculptural installations into the rafters and corners of the sculpture
building or out on the grass of the green. “They already had that
quality of congregating or sprawling in space,” she recalls. “They
were also made up from small objects that accrued into a larger whole.” Following her debut
at the SoHo Annual in 1996, she had solo shows at White Columns in New
York (1997), at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (1998), the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Fondation Cartier in Paris
(1999), the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig (1999–2000),
Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York (2000), San Francisco MoMA (2001),
and Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center (2002). She has participated
in numerous group shows, including the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie
International. Her pieces have appeared in Avignon, Thessaloniki,Vienna,
Luxembourg, and Berlin. For six months in 2002, Sze was the resident artist
at the Atelier Calder in Sache, France.
Sze says that she
still loves the immediate, improvisational process of painting and tries
to preserve it in her sculpture. She would rather be termed a sculptor
than an installation artist. “I was seduced by sculpture’s ability
to bleed out of the frame, play with the line between life and art, and
engage with the scale of architecture or landscape.” Cheryl Brutvan, who
oversaw Sze’s installation at the Boston Museum, commented that when
viewers “become absorbed in examining the details of her newly created
worlds,” they discover that her artistic materials are “the
odds and ends which proliferate in our lives. Sarah Sze ignores all boundaries.” Marty Carlock is a writer living in Boston. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||
| TERMS AND CONDITIONS |
|
||