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Beyond Infinity
John Haberin New York City
Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze clings to every shred of civilization and her studio. With it, she takes on some of the big boys, in an era of big-box stores and big-box installations. She also makes the results very much her own, at once boisterous and vulnerable, sprawling and intimate. Who knows how long the work took to assemble and whether it will survive?
Is this found art or a life in the making? One could call any of her shows a retrospective, an installation, a preparation for one, or its falling apart. Her Chelsea gallery in 2010 summed up work from around New York, inside and out. Asia Society dubbed its show a mini-retrospective soon after. A decade later, Sze has to settle for the top floor of the Guggenheim, 
but for her messiest yet. For all their refusal of chronology and massive overlap, take them each in turn.
The use of wondering
That show in Chelsea already piled up enough debris, not all of it personal. Just for starters, where does a piece begin or end? A pile by the gallery front desk seemed a work apart, and yet its lines lead into an installation filling the entire main hall. It appears to contain any number of tall sculptures, until one notices the narrow bridges leading from one to another. Sze calls it The Uncountables (Encyclopedia), but I gave up counting. Will a work like this ever end?
If the question sounds familiar, it should. The Way Things Go, the Rube Goldberg device on video by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, rolls ever so improbably along. Sze, too, has one holding one's breath. Born in 1969, she piles objects on shelves and shelves on objects, with stuff stuck under legs to level them. Unlikely cantilevers and weights hold it all in place, at least for now. Landscape for the Urban Dweller marks boundaries in thread on the floor, but visitors become a part of its delicate balance all the same.
Just down the street, Patrick Jackson and his Tchotchke Stacks came with warnings not to touch their tenuous towers of shelving and kitsch, and I can only hope that no one at Sze's openings gets too drunk. That had me wondering, too. What sets her apart from last year's model, that whole trend for overblown trash heaps? And she does have it all—milk cartons, Windex, portable fans, stepladders, dead rats, and drafting tools. Still, for all the macho displays of creative destruction, Sze wants ever so much to hold things together. She is making architecture, just as her Corner Plot mediated between Central Park and Fifth Avenue.
It is also the encyclopedia of her life—or at least her past lives. One critic compared it all to a Walmart, while a friend thought instead of the cramped exotica in Chinatown storefronts. Both are right, but these items are also the materials of a studio, where the Windex might help clean up. The dead rats curled up on a shelf are plaster, and the shiny blue poison that apparently did them in is simply pigment. Sze also takes the frailty to heart. In the back room, a torn black stretcher survives as if from an emergency vehicle.
Boys at play like Andy Coolquitt and Michael Mahalchick may look on with envy, but women in Pop Art mine the same cultural landscapes. Like Phoebe Washburn, Jessica Rankin, and Jennifer Stockholder, Sze gives a comic twist to household items. Like Tara Donovan, she transforms them by the sheer scale of their accumulation—or by fluffy clouds painted on the milk cartons. Like Julie Mehretu in Mehretu's politically charged abstraction, Ingrid Calame, or Judy Pfaff, she creates a dense weave of thin lines between two and three dimensions. For all its fragility, each airy installation allows anyone to enter, much like the gallery itself. Still, I had to wonder how long they will last.
She is not exactly pleading for a feminine or feminist art—not when she is taking on the Enlightenment encyclopedists. And the Enlightenment project continues to self-destruct in her 2010 Planetarium, a loose sphere of bent wood slats from which lights project onto the floor like drops of water. Projectors, the dated sort used for transparency masters, help illuminate images of planet earth, in soil and greenery. Like the materials, not so much discarded as treasured, Sze is down to earth. Like her watery contraption at the 2004 Biennial, her work rises and falls with planetary rhythms all her own. More than anyone since Fischli and Weiss, she preserves a sense of wonder.
Constructing dimensions
Sze called her work at Asia Society "Infinite Line." And indeed to a mathematician, as opposed to an artist, a line is always infinite. Once again, though, its appeal lies in its intimacy. Rather than one big work stretching out to infinity, it contains quite a few smaller works that talk directly to the viewer and to each other. One could almost get to know her. All one has to do is to look along the walls and into the fragments that have fallen to the floor.
Unlike a mathematician, Sze is never all that at home with idealizations anyway, especially the one dimensional. She does deal in line, but it spins out precariously and unpredictably. A floor away from U-Ram Choe, one room at the Asia Society adds a second dimension, in works on paper from as far back as 2001. Spirals appear everywhere, as in deep orange on deep blue, accompanied by light blue disks. Other images might pass ambiguously for twin tornados or stacks of LPs, but even a ruler refuses to run in a straight line. They hint not just at lines run out of control, but also of globes and planets as open and unsteady frameworks—already the subject of her Planetarium.
Line may veer off course in a second way as well, as linear perspective. In a second room, for the third dimension, lines converge into or out of a wall in wood, string, or black cut paper. Eye charts lie about, all the more unfamiliar for being easy to read, and Sze has compared their shrinking letters to perspective as well. Other skeins of colored thread come down off the wall in parallel as if scrolling off an unseen machine, and the sense of motion is an illusion not so very far from perspective's illusion of space. Other tokens of motion range from a seismograph to New Jersey Transit tickets. She could almost have assembled everything the day before, only to see it fall apart—and she has the coffee cups, pliers, and Magic Marker caps as tools of the artist's trade to prove it.
Like everything else in her art, the line between two and three dimensions is less than stable. The room for drawings includes lined paper that scrolls down, one of a handful of allusions to the artist's Asian American heritage that I should not overplay. It serves not for writing, drawing, or portraiture, as for contemporary artists like Wei Ja and Salman Toor, but for a cutout, taking the shape of a fire escape to the gallery floor. Assemblage in turn includes the flatness not just of eye charts, but also a tiny star chart made out of what looks to me like an obsolete floppy disk, while a deconstructed Asian rock garden bears the title Random Walk Drawing. Circular sheets of paper are suspended vertically above or beside their cutout color pieces, and circles of paper or light on the walls could be the moon or stars. Photographs further mediate two and three dimensions, with images of rocks or trees in daylight and in sunset.
They mediate, too, between nature and culture. That is humanity's fate as well, not to mention that of artists out to negotiate the space of painting, but Sze takes it personally. She may seem to veer to one extreme or another, but never for long. Her 2006 Corner Plot picked up Fifth Avenue architecture a bit too neatly, but as a pyramidal ruin next to the greenery of Central Park. Her 2011 addition to the High Line, Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat), offered a temporary home for birds, but its title alone bridges everything from nature to urban architecture. It just happens to be a nature and an architecture touched by art and human debris.
She still has a fondness for subtitles and afterthoughts, and those at the Asia Society picked up much the same themes. They speak of day and night, months from a dark time of year, and another kind of spiral in The Guggenheim as a Ruin. Speaking of the Guggenheim, the museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, they do not give up on Wright's utopianism either. She creates "portraits" by asking people for the "twelve seminal events" in their lives, which she then turns into sketches. Perhaps she still believes that fine art can embody a moment of transformation. I cannot pick out the events, lives, and transformations from the teeter-totter of horses, the Chrysler Building, a math class, and apartment complexes, but that says something, too. For Sze, in more ways than one, memory is a construction.
Step carefully
One can hardly see her installations apart from a context of trashy installations and consumer America. Now, though, one can better spot the architecture, and one can see the nostalgia in recycled objects like a Rolodex as a longing for connections or for home. Drawings run to unreal cities and offices, higher than the eye can see. One sculpture amounts to a bird's nest of sticks striped in color, and placing an assemblage between photos of nature may allude to Wright's Fallingwater.
And that brings her to her latest retrospective, in Wright's vision of a place for art, the Guggenheim. Sze leaves her mark all over it. Projections on the façade outside are easy enough to overlook, but not thirty-eight channels' worth in and around her installation. For once, too, she offers a place to rest, only not for you. A hammock drapes over the fountain in the lobby rotunda. Threads hang loose from every side without every quite falling in.
A second hammock introduces her packed installation on the top floor. It is just as colorful, just as inviting, and just as off limits. Another of her familiar motifs, paint chips, gets a rest there, but rest is the last thing that springs to mind. The curator, Kyung An, dubs the show "Timelapse," and it is not standing still. You may ascend the ramp past a retrospective of Gego, who did so much to define postwar sculpture and Latin American art. That should prepare you for lines pointing every which way, but nothing like this.
Formally, the show consists of three works, including Timechanger from 2016, but is it a game changer? Surely I had seen all this before—the paint chips and plastic bottles, the tripods and stepladders. Once again, they point to their origins in the artist's workspace while serving a purpose, as support for projectors and more studio junk. Is it site specific or a window onto her life? Sze planned it out by first recreating the museum's bays in her studio. Imagine if Jackson Pollock tried out his drips on the Guggenheim's slanted floor.
A text half hidden amid the chaos has a further clue. This is art about "how it was made and how it will fall apart." It is also decidedly low tech and handmade. The museum calls her meditative, joyful, and elated, but never mind the contradictions. They are what make her art a delicate construction. It was a long time in coming together, and it may yet fall apart.
Projections add another point of reference—at once more natural and just as artificial. They float above the ramp as clouds and skies. Projections on the floor lead or bar the way into the tower gallery. They give the illusion of pools of water, much like the ones that I had stepped over back outside on a wet spring day. An artist for whom anything goes runs the risk of going nowhere, and an artist who recycles the same props runs the risk of becoming herself. For now, step carefully and wade right in.
Sarah Sze ran at Tanya Bonakdar through October 23, 2010, at Asia Society through March 25, 2012, and at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through September 10, 2023. Patrick Jackson ran at Nicole Klagsbrun through October 23, 2010, and Judy Pfaff at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe through October 16. Related articles describe Sze's "Corner Plot" more fully, in context of women architects in 2006, and her addition to the High Line. Plainly this review has been a long time coming together, and I apologize for the difficulty that has to cause.