Sarah Sze and the New Materialists
Why making objects still matters
Written: November 5, 2004
It is rare to hear an articulate person discuss their intuition. Equally rare is a creative that embraces a conceptually balanced and intuitive approach in their process. As a speaker amidst a mind-cluttered academic art world, Sarah Sze is a breath of freshly destroyed car exhaust to the fakely fresh and pinesol disinfected hallways of strict conceptualism. Sze is willing to give a little to the biology of her unconscious and forgo a rationalization for her love of tinkering with what the art looks like.
She alludes to her intuitive freedom emerging from roots as a painter. But this view relies on an outdated way of pigeon-holing creatives. Whether a sculptor or painter, intuition will always remain a viable artistic resource.
Instead of being a painter transformed into a site-specific sculptor, I see her as a materialist never wavering from her experimentation and enjoyment of object fragments. She explores materials as a director searches for actors. The perfect ones will have the look, the voice, the experience, and the heart. These styrofoam pieces, bits of string and plastic tubing are fragments torn from the world of function and thrown into her beautiful tornado to tell their story as materials combined articulately.
She chooses materials carefully based on the function (its traditional use) structure, color, weight, strength and associative qualities. My own reading of her later work is that she uses the very tools of installation, ladders, levels and tape measures, as aesthetic material for her installations. This generates a ludacris hall of post-modern mirrors for the conceptualists to loose themselves within. For the rest of us, we stand enchanted by the meticulous wisps and waverings of an artist that loves the look of manipulated material.
A lightly sipped beauty, like the tiniest dragonfly wing that catches your eye with its reflection of the enormous sun.