CREATIVE CHAOS
Chinese American artist Sarah Sze’s work looks like it’s been thrown together — but everything has been thought through in minute detail
At first glance, the show can seem like so much detritus, as if a bomb went off in a hoarder’s home
It is morning in Manhattan. Most of the art world is still asleep or out of town for an August vacation. But at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery on West 21st Street in Manhattan, the artist Sarah Sze debates the placement of dried paint strips.
For many artists, installing an exhibition is simply a matter of transporting their work from studio to gallery. For Sze, the installation — in this case, of her first solo gallery show in the United States in five years, which opens Sept 10 — is an integral part of her creative process.
Sze has budgeted a full month for the installation and not just because her pieces — which include broken glass, torn paper and coloured string — are so delicate and detailed.
It is a crucial, fertile period during which her pieces will evolve, both in terms of their location in the space and their physical attributes. (Does that rock need more rubble? Should that plywood slab stand, lean or hang?)
“To me, this is the most interesting part,” Sze said as she allowed a reporter to observe her in the midst of this typically private protocol. “The pieces are telling me what to do.”
At first glance, the show can seem like so much detritus, as if a bomb went off in a hoarder’s home, scattering items as confounding as fragments of glazed clay; as prosaic as a wrench. But Sze knows exactly what she’s doing.
“The randomness of all these things is actually really precise,” she said.
Sze’s strong inner compass has been affirmed by critics, curators and collectors. She has received a MacArthur “genius grant”, had a sculpture featured on the High Line and represented the United States in 2013 at the Venice Biennale, where she returned this summer with her gossamer hammock installation (which will be featured in the New York show).
Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim; her commissioned pieces sell for more than US$1 million (35.5 million baht).
A Chinese-American who grew up in Boston, Sze (pronounced zee), 46, graduated from Yale in 1991 and earned a master’s at the School of Visual Arts in 1997.
On this particular day, about a week after she started moving in, Sze had already spent hours tweaking a piece that has its own room on the gallery’s second floor: a desk overflowing with objects, from crumpled tinfoil to an actual meringue cake.
Now she was focusing on the flow of the exhibition, how the location of pieces would affect a visitor’s experience. She wanted the circulation to foster a sense of serendipity and discovery, so that people would feel as if they were stumbling upon things instead of being steered in one particular, invariable direction.
“When you come into the space, you feel like you’re wandering,” she said. “But there are moments where you find relief from the anxiety of wandering.”
She also wants to provoke uncertainty with the everyday objects she regularly employs — in this case, cardboard on the floor, draped plastic, hanging lights and hardened paint strips. Is it art?
“I think that’s a good question if we’re making contemporary art,” Sze said. “How do we define what a piece of art is? How does something become valuable? What does it say about our culture?” Sze seeks to counter the presentational quality intrinsic to a gallery: a white-walled stage. Her hope, instead, is for people to feel as if they stopped by her studio, and she had only recently left the room.
“I wanted the rawness of seeing a work develop in front of your eyes, but to do it in a way that doesn’t feel contrived or theatrical,” Sze said. “Because it is live. I spend a month here and change it enough — that is really happening.” During the weeks of installation, Sze moves things around, adds elements and subtracts them, gives her creations temporary, descriptive monikers — like “burgundy stand” — before settling on their titles.
“The names will change several times,” she said. “Some of them stick, and some of them don’t.” Because Sze is acutely aware of the built environment (her father was an architect), the specifics of the space influence her installation.
Since the gallery’s ceilings are higher than those in her studio, for example, she toyed with keeping two ladders that had been brought in to hang work lights.
“The space is so tall, it’s one way to bring the ceiling down,” she said. “But, like I said, this could be gone in three weeks as we shift it around.”
As Sze talks about her work, various artist influences populate the conversation — Richard Serra, Ad Reinhardt, Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin.
She also makes references to science: “You want to have all of the information, then you want to titrate it.” The computer on the desk is connected to the Nasa site that measures in real time the distance between Earth and the Voyager 1 spacecraft. This is an area of interest she shares with her husband, Siddhartha Mukherjee, the physician and scientist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2010 book, The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer. They have two school-age daughters.
Some artists might feel unsettled by having so much in flux just days before the public comes through the door. But Sze said that the license to tinker was energising and necessary.
“All of the decisions are being made in relation to the work,” she said. “Why wouldn’t you change everything up to the last minute?”
Only once the show has opened does Sze say her work will truly be done. “Then I won’t change anything,” she vowed.