| Batteries, pasta, cables, Q-tips, pencils, chopsticks, gum, nails, birth control pills, towels, ribbons, toothpicks, cans, candy, razors, straws—the list of materials in a Sarah Sze installation would take up most of this article. Sze chooses materials that are all variations on the same theme—the flotsam and jetsam of a modern capitalist lifestyle. They are the readymade, replaceable, overlooked and marginalized domestic refuse in our lives. Sze installs these pharmacy-bought objects in a deceptively haphazard manner, which grants the objects a new status. |  |
Sarah Sze – Elizabeth Fodde-Reguer
Batteries, pasta, cables, Q-tips, pencils, chopsticks, gum, nails, birth control pills, towels, ribbons, toothpicks, cans, candy, razors, straws—the list of materials in a Sarah Sze installation would take up most of this article. Sze chooses materials that are all variations on the same theme—the flotsam and jetsam of a modern capitalist lifestyle. They are the readymade, replaceable, overlooked and marginalized domestic refuse in our lives. Sze installs these pharmacy-bought objects in a deceptively haphazard manner, which grants the objects a new status.
The way that Sze uses her materials is not to glorify them or to raise them on a pedestal. She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to use everyday materials in art. In her work, the objects remain functional, much like a Duchamp readymade. However, unlike the readymade, the materials are not transformed into art because of their context within the gallery, they are art because of their context and role within the installation that Sze manages. The artist plays with the object status of art by allowing the objects to retain their everyday identity but also redefines the object through the context of the installation. Sze transforms the objects from their reality-based definitions through the installation, but at the same time, the objects remain what they are.
Sze uses a shifting sense of scale to redefine objects. The kaleidoscopic installation is an explosion of materials that resemble cityscapes and entire microcosmic ecosystems. She creates entire cities out of the refuse of our fragmented lifestyles. Sze plays with scale by using materials that retain their own natural scale, but the arrangements of the objects create a microcosmic city. For example, potted plants become giant trees and forests for the micro-city, but yet still remain potted plants. This is because the objects remain recognizable. The definitions of our everyday objects are shifted back and forth from the “Sze definition” to our everyday experience of the object forming a layering of definitions.
The whirlwind installations take over the entire space. Sze has been known to rip holes in gallery walls and uses electricity and moisture to transform the white box into a new universe. The objects are arranged to flow into one another, creating a pattern of texture and color from afar, and returning to their inherent everyday object-based definition up close. Sze uses compositional movement in her work to activate the space, and to create a dynamic within the static walls of the gallery. She added the element of spotlights that produce dramatic shadows. The shadows tremble in the breeze of people passing by and focus our attention on various spots but also serve as a tool to control the environment even more.
Sze leaves behind ladders and glue guns to show the viewer the means of the installation process, and in order to restate the temporary existence of the work. The works are dismantled and the materials are reused from installation to installation. Sze also exhibits photographs of her installations alongside drawings of segments of architectural schema on continuous rolls of paper. The photographs further the play with scale so that the viewer can understand the scale of the photographs only by looking at the work itself.
Her choice of materials not only addresses our everyday experience of objects, but also represents the theme of reusing the metaphoric fragments of modern existence. Sze’s early works displayed the fragmented residue of modern life with the quality of a visual list. Her more recent work uses the fragments that are in the process of becoming something else, of shifting their shape or of breaking apart even further through the rhythmic flow that Sze controls. She is creating her own order on the fragments of the everyday, but at the same time it is simply a new kind of chaos. Visiting a Sze piece is like entering an alternate space where all objects are of equal importance, leaving you with the residue of Sze’s transformation of the everyday.
