Objects (Sze No. 2)

Sze No. 2

Sarah Sze, up in the air, over by the window, locked into place, free as a bird. All those wires like thoughts we never had before. All those empty containers, the ones we left behind that we could have enjoyed for what they are. All those colours, humouring us like new found witticisms. An internet we can see in one room. Connections that make us want to go out and do it ourselves.

Sarah Sze, right at home with Miro. Prevert in the stationery shop. What happens when Cornell's boxes are turned inside out. 3D medieval Persian calligraphy floating near the ceiling. Sesame Street on acid. The siesta daydreams of Frank Lloyd Wright. What Alice Liddell might have said to Lewis Carroll, translated into objects.

Sarah Sze, the takeoff of biomechanics, the shimmer of the alkalines and acids. A thousand faux pas outside the playground in the playground of a skyscraper atrium. The Oldenbourg faux pas of a flaccid toothpaste tube. The recommended blog at the end of a million hardwires.

Sarah Sze, Sesame Street on a Sunday afternoon. Sesame Street for the millions of newyorkers going over the curvy bridges to the cereal boxes of Manhattan. Sesame Street today was brought to you by the letter S and the number Millions. S like a great loop up through the the the the the the the the mezzanine and out into the night. Million like the impossibility of anyone ever imagining what a million people could be. Sesame Street, somewhere between Haight-Ashbury and Occupy Wall Street.

Sarah Sze, sponges up poles and cables through ducts and fixtures down manholes and tapes between windows and orange plastic fencing around workzones. Bollocks that seep where we sleep, that rest where they ride, that itch and require a response. Every day like the art world that parallels the desire in our hearts.

Sarah Sze, super special, so so something sensational. Sarah Sze, drawing the streets of my city with a ton of stuff from the hardware shop. Sarah Sze, reorganising the stray micro objects of my house into patterns and projects. Out into the garden, where lengths of wool tie trees together and the birds are a mystery. Sarah Sze, spectacularly simple

Sarah Sze, older and wiser? Who knows. Take the detritus and make it a feature. See these offcuts of a civilsation running on empty? Put them in the public square, beautiful like they were meant to be from an inventor who spent his whole life perfecting them, back in 1953. Sarah Sze knows better? Better than who? Alice? Going down the rabbit hole?

Sarah Sze, is she an American? America, land of the free download, land of the freeway. For example, isn't it funny watching a grown man like Calder kneeling on the ground winding up toy trains? Or hanging oblong shapes in space so they look like peak hour at an airport? Or painting his huge country house black? Decades of turning wires and joining dots and cracking open spheres so they look like galaxies of solar systems. In this respect it's not altogether different in New Zealand.

Sarah Sze, seriously is not me. Sarah Sze is a woman who lives most times on the eastern side of the New Found Land. Never met her, never spoken to her. Hundreds of lugubrious cables down the street and over the hills and bipping off satellites are how I know the twisty lady who nails stuff to the ceiling. Nor am I Sparta Rotterdam. Never been to Rotterdam. Never been to New York. We make up Sarah Sze stuff at home: coat hangers from cootamundras, vaulting boxes down the path.

Sarah Sze, the microcosm of our delusion, not. She points accusatory fingers, um maybe not sure, sometimes possibly. She makes the world a better place, you should see our front garden. Sarah Sze chose a career path and no one can do what she does, not that that's important. Doing it is important. She forgot to live a low-impact existence. She doesn't leave any footprints. Not sure she even leaves a signature. I guess sometime she discovered that lego is more fun than 24 hour news services.

Sarah Sze works with twigs. Twigs tied together into warped Buckminster Fuller walk-throughs that hang from a fountain of tubes. Twigs in the form of paint brushes, stomach pills, chewing gum wrappers. Maybe they fell from the gruesome trees of consumerism, anyway she has picked them up and placed them in lines like in some musuem of natural history. Twigs and petals of rampant consumerism fall to the ground and she notices them. These days though she seems to buy more stuff herself.

Sarah Sze is apparently going to Venice, the serene home of installations. Great curtains across rooms and in cul-de-sacs paintings of glistening princes or stodgy hunting scenes. Lacquered tables covered in cards and underneath the creaky floorboards held in place with 9 inch nails surges of lagoon water are a permanent Eno loop. Sarah Sze's object reflections in the clumsy canals near the ghetto. And have you noticed how many ladders and steps there are?

Sarah Sze, being a bit of a doer helps a bit too. Being a bit of a 24 hour worker. Knowing the right people never put ladders up skyscrapers. Getting reviewed didn't make the next work happen. Being a bit of a visionary helps a bit too. Knowing the right people might be a highway to hell. Climbing a ladder to the stars is not what you do if you are the right people.

Sarah Sze, my kitchen looks different. My passageway of homebound presents takes on a life of its own. That's just inside. When Christo put his curtain across California he wasn't thinking of the walls and walls and walls that line every freeway of the world now. Christo had to bargain with the authorities and justify the expense. Now those curtains are paid for with our taxes, that run across the country keeping up with speed heads. Song sung, Sarah Sze, fourteen bloggy lines, time for tea.

First appeared as a series of blogs (“The recommended blog at the end of a million hardwires.”) in an English newspaper, June 2012