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Sarah Sze
With her uncanny ability to monumentalize the miniscule and to give permanence to the ephemeral, Sarah Sze has become one of the most original and ambitious artists working today, with solo exhibitions at major art musuems. As the first monograph to span the course of her career including sculptures, site-specific installations, and drawings, Sarah Sze reveals the artist’s working process and gives insight into the thoughtful precision and care that goes into each and every one of her creations.
Elaborately transforming everyday materials into elegant sculptures and installations, Sze eloquently finesses the line between sculpture and architecture. In her essay, writer and curator Linda Norden explores the question of how matter takes on value, both temporally and spatially. With its stunning photography, Sarah Sze makes it clear that the exhilarating and challenging aspect of this artist’s work lies in all of its minute details.
Elaborately transforming everyday materials into elegant sculptures and installations, Sze eloquently finesses the line between sculpture and architecture. In her essay, writer and curator Linda Norden explores the question of how matter takes on value, both temporally and spatially. With its stunning photography, Sarah Sze makes it clear that the exhilarating and challenging aspect of this artist’s work lies in all of its minute details.
- GenresArtArt Design
224 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2007
23 people want to read
About the author
Linda Norden
14 books1 followerLinda Norden is an independent curator, art historian, and writer who serves on the faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. A former associate curator of contemporary art at the Harvard University Art Museums, she has organized landmark exhibitions featuring artists such as Ed Ruscha, Pierre Huyghe, and Sharon Lockhart. Notably, she served as the commissioner for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Her scholarship includes numerous publications and essays for Artforum and Parkett, focusing on figures like Eva Hesse, Cy Twombly, and Sarah Sze.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 28, 2015
I've had the pleasure of seeing one of Sze's works live, namely the Chicago installation of "Proportioned to the Groove". I found it immediately captivating, and I think reading, but even more viewing, this book gives me an occasion to get into why.
Let's pretend that we don't see what is good about Sarah Sze's work and attempt to make the case. "It's a confusing pile of everyday bric-a-brack. Why can't we just have nice paintings?" What is aesthetic about it?
We know there are two easy categories of aesthetic appeal: they are beautiful, having pleasing and harmonious patterns, and they are sublime, having a overwhelming intensity or scale. It is my argument that Sarah Sze's work does both.
First, to beauty. The recipe undertaken here is sculpture + photography = painting, making a book of photographs an extension of the overall scheme. There is a light and spirited composition to many of the works, turning end-over-end and crossing space gracefully, light in the way a painting by Miro or Klee have lightness, but accentuated by immediately seeing these are objects that aren't typically honored with this placement or suspension.
Next, to the sublime. Sze's work overwhelms with the sheer number of objects and the many arrangements that they are apparently subject to, while manipulating scale itself with grid and spiral systems, creating a sense of disorientation as multiple scales are simultaneously suggested. Even if we don't consider multiple coordinate systems, these arrangements work in five dimensions, spatial, light/color, and symbolic. Even the titles are frequently both spatial descriptions and cultural references. One wonders if even the photographs themselves, scattered through commercially-sold objects, continues the work by projecting it further.
Having hopefully explained some of what I find about compelling about Sze's work, let's turn to this volume itself. It starts with a short, complimentary essay of art-critic Arther Danto. I think Sarah Sze's work presents an interesting counter-argument to Danto's end-of-art argument, which is as I've heard it secondhand, when a work is no longer serving the point of representation, it becomes increasingly possible to reduce the content of the work to a description of the work's concept, at which point the art itself becomes irrelevant. The counter-argument that Sze's work poses is that there are concepts that are purely spatial, communicated directly through our faculty of geometry, not interceded by, for lack of a better word, symbols. It speaks, in terms of Schopenhauer, to an entirely different root of sufficient reason.
The text then proceeds to a longer essay by Linda Norden (still short enough to be read easily in a single sitting), proposing that Sze's work both shows and hides, on one hand consisting a large number of objects personally familiar to the artist and presenting them clearly in definite relations, while on the other hand not giving them exact personal or social meanings. This essay was very helpful in pointing out several features of Sze's work useful to my own thinking about them, leading to my extradimensional view of them.
And after this, there are pictures of the work itself, mostly sculpture, but a few paintings that suggest how closely coupled the two practices are.
I cannot promise that, without seeing the work, the pictures will have their spatial effect, though some positive responses from friends suggest it might be possible. Otherwise, if you've seen a few, be prepared to enjoy getting inside those spaces again.
Let's pretend that we don't see what is good about Sarah Sze's work and attempt to make the case. "It's a confusing pile of everyday bric-a-brack. Why can't we just have nice paintings?" What is aesthetic about it?
We know there are two easy categories of aesthetic appeal: they are beautiful, having pleasing and harmonious patterns, and they are sublime, having a overwhelming intensity or scale. It is my argument that Sarah Sze's work does both.
First, to beauty. The recipe undertaken here is sculpture + photography = painting, making a book of photographs an extension of the overall scheme. There is a light and spirited composition to many of the works, turning end-over-end and crossing space gracefully, light in the way a painting by Miro or Klee have lightness, but accentuated by immediately seeing these are objects that aren't typically honored with this placement or suspension.
Next, to the sublime. Sze's work overwhelms with the sheer number of objects and the many arrangements that they are apparently subject to, while manipulating scale itself with grid and spiral systems, creating a sense of disorientation as multiple scales are simultaneously suggested. Even if we don't consider multiple coordinate systems, these arrangements work in five dimensions, spatial, light/color, and symbolic. Even the titles are frequently both spatial descriptions and cultural references. One wonders if even the photographs themselves, scattered through commercially-sold objects, continues the work by projecting it further.
Having hopefully explained some of what I find about compelling about Sze's work, let's turn to this volume itself. It starts with a short, complimentary essay of art-critic Arther Danto. I think Sarah Sze's work presents an interesting counter-argument to Danto's end-of-art argument, which is as I've heard it secondhand, when a work is no longer serving the point of representation, it becomes increasingly possible to reduce the content of the work to a description of the work's concept, at which point the art itself becomes irrelevant. The counter-argument that Sze's work poses is that there are concepts that are purely spatial, communicated directly through our faculty of geometry, not interceded by, for lack of a better word, symbols. It speaks, in terms of Schopenhauer, to an entirely different root of sufficient reason.
The text then proceeds to a longer essay by Linda Norden (still short enough to be read easily in a single sitting), proposing that Sze's work both shows and hides, on one hand consisting a large number of objects personally familiar to the artist and presenting them clearly in definite relations, while on the other hand not giving them exact personal or social meanings. This essay was very helpful in pointing out several features of Sze's work useful to my own thinking about them, leading to my extradimensional view of them.
And after this, there are pictures of the work itself, mostly sculpture, but a few paintings that suggest how closely coupled the two practices are.
I cannot promise that, without seeing the work, the pictures will have their spatial effect, though some positive responses from friends suggest it might be possible. Otherwise, if you've seen a few, be prepared to enjoy getting inside those spaces again.
May 3, 2008
great artist... uses found everyday objects to create mini worlds/instillation/a sort of object painting. This book has a great essay by Danto that addresses Sze's work within the concerns of poetry and meaning.... followed with many great images of the artist's work.
August 18, 2008
Totally incredible art installations. Piles of beautiful shit. A 3-D version of Julie Mehretu's type of work, which I really like.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews