Susan Sze

I was surfing along and came across this at the Villiage Voice:

Sarah Sze's Return of the Real
The sculptor conjures a low-budget cosmos.
By Christian Viveros-Fauné

Stuck between a recession and a recovery, the art world is predictably game for eating and hoarding cake, too. A perfect example of the current cupidity is Dan Colen's windily hyped exhibition at Larry Gagosian's big tent......Other gross-out manifestations of the art world's gluttony include, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the return of "the collector-cum-investor" (again?) and the upcoming October rehanging of Jeff Koons's 1990 porn paintings (not again!). Second servings of gut-busting excess, developments like these compare to excellent art as Marie Antoinette's high spirits do to Bishop Desmond Tutu's compassion. Expressions of sheer vulgarity, they conversely magnify the work of artists whose generosity exposes the lie that contemporary art is a members-only club for rich, superficial, faddish assholes.

The present antidote to piggish tidings is Sarah Sze's blooming, bounteous installations of stuff we regularly overlook, which she effortlessly transforms into far-out Lilliputs and down-to-earth Space Odysseys. A modest character—despite being a MacArthur Fellow—Sze has long pointed the way to Whitmanesque freethinking through her interpretations of democratic consumerism. Cast from the bins at Target, Walgreens, and Home Depot, her sculptures convey both the epic and mundane integrity of Leaves of Grass.

Sze came seemingly out of nowhere in the late 1990s as a full-blown original artist. Since then, she has been marshalling disposable objects such as matchsticks, water bottles, and office supplies to make three-dimensional paintings that double as sculpture, and sculptures that look like all-over Jackson Pollock paintings. Using shop-bought debris to confect experiences of visual overload, she has essentially made a metaphor of life's disorders...

Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
521 West 21st Street
212-414-4144, tanyabonakdargallery.com
Through October 23

I like Sze's work best when she incorporates space into them. Those are the ones that have more of the Jackson Pollock sense about them. Some of her pieces have more of a sense of a messy desk. The ones that I like are the ones where it seems that gravity is defied and there is all of this stuff of life floating around, yet interconnected.




_______________________Her 360 (Portable Planetarium) does this.



I prefer the practice of going to recycling places or Goodwills, Restores etc., to get all of the "stuff of life" to assemble - rather than buying up a bunch of new crap from Targets and Walgreens. Some things may be too difficult to find used - but it adds nothing of value to the pieces for them to be part of the cycle of buying a bunch of unnecessary Stuff.

HermesFrontpage

While I enjoy Tara Donovan's work - often installations, as well - one thing I like about Sze is the huge variety of things that she uses in each piece. It's interesting the way in which Donovan will use just plastic cups, or sheets of paper piled up to suggest a landscape. But in a way, Sze's work seems more natural, even though she also uses man-made stuff, because of the variety of textures and materials.

And while one can enjoy seeing the photos of the works, these are works to be experienced. Walking around and considering how they look from many angles and distances, etc. is part of the fun. With the ease of images that we can get on the internet and other media, art such as this keeps galleries and museums relevant.