Great (January)

Wouldn’t it be great to make a film detailing every slow colour of the spectrum in objects? To devise a play that heals the wound? To construct symphonies using 100 iphones as instruments? To invent new artforms that only work using solar? To blow glass flowers of all Australian species? To draw such drawings as would distract people, permanently, from their pompous inclination to destroy? To sing a song so amazing everyone forgets to applaud, the silence at the end is so big? To tie together the garden with Sze wool? To complete the universally agreed definitive text on January?

Sze (July)

Sarah Sze starts with the grid but her work scarcely reminds us of crossings and corners. Buttons on wires curve like a million mobile calls. A stub of old Athenaeum tickets are set in lines: July, July, July. Loyalty cards mark imaginary intersections. Some objects have the now trademark Sze biographical touch: her Venice Biennale program. Typically with ‘Grid’ Sze introduces a material rare to the site, in artificial form. In this case snow in drifts of kapok, rumples of white satin, and samples of carded wool. Elizabeth Street’s a stretch of galvanized guttering with pump set to flood unpredictably.

Tyvek (Sze No. 5)

Sze No. 5

The brickline of fences in Cheltenham, medium and low, then ragged crumble where a vehicle crashed into a letterbox, and it is indeed cold Monday. That was a while ago but this is Monday. The networks of wires above the highway and their random lights are training the eye to rest on clouds of white and rose and lemon. Ragged objects in vacant fields could be papier-mâché. Junked computers on a corner, no one is reading this at the moment. Tickets after the show scurry for the carpark corners. The headache continues and the capsule packet is empty.

The body is carrying a painful argument that it wants to put off then wants to resolve and a little dream of Venice in this cold wind will help. The Venice of pink and white brick walls, sudden stone bridges over canals, motor launches of varnished splendour is in my mind. We could, we could find a little time to step across the white stones, their hand carvings centuries in the making.

But that is hardly going to last. It is the meteorites that we don’t notice in our argument. They are buried in the earth in big round grey shapes to a depth of miles and they hurtle elegantly above the evening clouds like wrapped-up parcels somewhere over near Jupiter. Advertising at railway stations behaves as though nothing will happen like a vast grey ball of stone five hundred miles across crashing into Highett or Hawksburn or does it really matter by that stage. Tyvek is so cute and water can pass right through it.

Found (Sze No. 4)

Sze No. 4

the emergency exit

gravity-defying structures

photograph of rock printed on tyvek

 trees

 moss

 rocks aluminium

wood steel bricks stone sandbags outdoor pump

 outdoor lights mixed media

a teetering structure

models machines

salt water stone string projector

 video pendulum mixed media

archaeological remnants

experiments

photographs of stone architectural materials

 Venice

tickets from the local water taxis

black tape

points enough information

 drawings sculpture

the tape is made of sticks

 movable tables

 engineering project

a ball of grass

explosion

 sticks

 a 3-D line rendering of rectangles

the disco ball

 a tripod the paper ball

 landscape snapshots

 a maze of disparate materials  arrangements

realization of form

elaborately arranged sculpture

 a swinging pendulum

 a walk-through

 workbenches the wall  fake tools

plasticine D-rings nails

eraser shavings

the room

 a wall of mirrors

echo chamber

installations

intricate sculptures the minutiae

domestic detritus

 office supplies

 fantastical  fractal-like installations

 architecture  electric lights

 fans

 water systems

houseplants

aluminium plastic

 photograph of rock printed on tyvek
photo

wood steel plastic stone string fans overhead projectors photograph of rock printed on tyvek

 mixed media

simulations of rocks and boulders

 rooftops balconies shop windows

toothpicks sponges light bulbs

 plastic bottles

paint cans  ladders sticks

 aluminium rods

 branches  espresso cups tape measures

 bags of sand

 gaffer’s tape

 lamps screw drivers

 clay  plastic tubs napkins  a sleeping bag

Italian stone existing shelves

 found materials exhibition catalogs napkins stone string clay mixed media

teetering scaffolding sticks ladders tape

mass-produced ephemera

the emergency exit

Found words for Found objects on blogs and reports of Sarah Sze’s installation in and around the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2013

Embankment (Sze No. 3)

Sze No. 3

As the express train comes round the Jolimont tunnel and out onto the magnificent nineteenth century embankment that extends a mile and more from Richmond north to Clifton Hill, inner Melbourne is seen shining through the rain, standing bright against the darkness of night, squares and filaments of light.

Through the windows can be seen the walls of lit windows that constitute the appearance afar of the lost dreams of twentieth century architects, keen to construct buildings of thirty and forty storeys they had learnt about in architecture school, the wall cladding gone grungy and replaced by new luminescent cladding.

Over to the left glare the rings and batteries of highpower lights above the greatest football ground in the Antipodes, for a game is in progress and the glow of the ground in the dark afar is a sign that roaring and cheering will go on for some time, and the results will be unimportant.

Richmond, with its bends of little lights and highrise glitter, comes to view and with it the tangle of unpolled trees, the broken down walls of ephemeral graffiti, and below them the trash along the backlanes, the cars that were picked up and dumped down again in vacant lots, windows fractured.

The carriage itself is a Sarah Sze, old MX newspapers strewn in order across seats, a can of something rolls across the floor, and an empty packet of headache caplets has been lain carefully with a mineral water bottle packet against the soft seat upholstery, an abstract design of colourful oblongs, zigzags and streak lines.

The embankment is built of consolidated earth, but who knows what else down there below the tracks, bricks, crockery, boulders, whatever was solid enough to be ground into ground, rests there now, and then bluestone chips hold the sleepers in place above ground, and the steel rails riveted by nails thicker than thumbs.

Skyline of supermarket packets topshelf in the dark, streets lined with boxes of fertile imagination down there in the shadows, a townhall clock that hasn’t told the right time for years, a police station cordoned off with plastic orange tape like it were a crime scene but is in fact (only) a workmen’s site, impinge on the solid fragility of the retina.

Streetlights with their cones of glow, amidst tree branches bare, and the wires upon wires linking and lifting and drifting from one pole to the next and into recesses toward the river, or up the air toward the heavy-housed slopes of old Fitzroy in the dark.

Impossible sometimes not to notice how all of the buildings serve the coated bodies going past, buildings for travel, buildings for rest, buildings of drugs, buildings of food, buildings made for analysis, buildings made for reverence, and so forth for the bodies at ease in the carriages warm and mobile, express speeding along the embankment.

Dark outlines of the hills of Kew are invisible in the rain and closer, halogen lights grip the park paths and feature the speeding raindrops, while hands rummage inside through a brand carrybag for a biro, a book, a packet of throat lozenges, and meanwhile reflections of lights and shapes change in the spacious windows.

Except even if the train were to stop the movements continue, even when the traffic comes to a red light in Hoddle Street other traffic is turning with the green arrow, or reversing to park, or idling behind the bus, and as the train goes over the iron bridge not stopping for the thousandth time, it’s that time of the week again.

Inevitably, as they say, half-lit gravel yards are empty in the drizzle so that, now gates are closed, working machinery cannot be differentiated from obsolete machinery, and great funnels and conveyor belts, if they are conveyor belts in fact, lose their hardness.

The freeway too goes under us, a pattern of permanent need as cars their red lights their dark interiors maintain perfect straight lines and perfect veers both ways, forever it seems, and no one knows when it will end or what will happen when it ends, not even the wealthy designers of those shiny wet machines.

Past the foursquare heritage warehouse of Victoriana, its shelves of wrought iron objects and porcelain doorknobs and encaustic tiles all quiet now that the lights are out and everyone’s gone home, thence up Clifton Hill past the yards of timber fragrant in the rain, and the Darling Gardens, speckled with litter of different sizes.

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

Fragile (Sze No. 1)

Sze No. 1

Fragile

Like an encyclopedia

The work is fragile

Out of date

The minute you complete it

It’s fragile

Out of date

So the important thing

Important

Is that they are fragile

Remnants of that fragile ambition

Rather than themselves

Themselves

The success of that ambition

They’re all important

All very fragile

So fragile

I hope to reflect

The absurdity

The very important absurdity

Of the idea

The fragile idea

As well

Remnants

Like a dated encyclopedia

The work is a minute

A fragile date

The minute you complete it

It’s remnants

Out there

So the important ambition

Important

Is that they are an absurdity

Remnants of that fragile ambition

Rather than themselves

Themselves rather than

Success

The success of that ambition

They’re all ideas

All very fragile

So fragile reflections

Remnants of

A very important reflection

Of the idea

The fragile idea

As well

From the remnants

of a fragile encyclopedia

The minute is

Out of date

So the important thing

Important

Is that they are fragile

Remnants of a fragile ambition

Rather than success

I hope to reflect

Found text in Sarah Sze interview (Artforum, Summer 2013): “Like an encyclopedia, the work is out of date the minute you complete it. So the important thing is that they are remnants of that ambition rather than themselves the success of that ambition. They’re all very fragile, so I hope to reflect the absurdity of the idea as well.”