Passage III

HUMANITIES: Passage A is adapted from the article "A Million Little Pieces" by Andrea K. Scott(@2012 by Conde Nast Publications). Passage B is adapted from the article "Everything in Its Right Place" by Karen Rosenberg(@2011 by The New York Times).

Passage A by Andrea K. Scott

The artist Sarah Sze stood in the foyer on the second floor of the Asia Society, on the Upper East Side, amid dozens of crates, plastic storage bins, plastic tubs, and plastic bags. It was a late afternoon in December, and she and six assistants were completing the installation of eight new sculptures. The process was so labor-intensive that it had taken more than three weeks.

Sze arranges everyday objects into sculptural installations of astonishing intricacy. She joins things manufactured to help build other things (ladders, levels, winches, extension cords) with hundreds of commonplace items (cotton swabs, push-pins, birthday candles, aspirin tablets), creating elaborate compositions that extend from gallery walls, creep into corners, and surge toward ceilings. Duchamp paved the way for Sze's work when he made a sculpture by mounting a bicycle wheel on a wooden stool. But her virtuosic creations are equally indebted to the explosive energy of Bernini's Baroque masterpiece "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, " a marble statue that seems to ripple with movement.

Sze's show was about the relationships between landscape and architecture, and sculpture and line. She walked from the foyer into the galleries, and stood by a floor-to-ceiling window that had been concealed by a floor-to-ceiling window that had been concealed by a wall for a decade—the museum had uncovered it at her request. She began to confer with her studio manager,Mike Barnett. Sze was wondering about a branch that she had placed in the installation by the window, after pruning it from her roof-top garden, in downtown Manhattan. It rose from the floor like a sapling emerging from a crack in the sidewalk. Twilight had turned the window into a mirror, but in daylight the branch would compete with a view of Park Avenue median greenery, traffic, and apartment buildings.

"There's a nighttime view and a daytime view," she said to Barnett. "I want that to be a plus. not a minus. Is this getting lost?"

Barnett said, "I think it works."

There was a pause so long that it should have been awkward. Sze finally said, "Even if it's a loose end. that could be interesting. I like that it looks like a fragment—like it could just drift away."

Passage B by Karen Rosenberg

"Infinite Line. "Sarah Sze's midcareer solo show at Asia Society Museum, promised a new angle on Ms. Sze's mesmerizing, minutely detailed installations. And it delivers one, though the art—much of it made for the occasion—doesn't always rise to the challenge.

The show makes the case that Ms. Sze, who is Chinese-American, has been profoundly influenced by many forms of Asian art. It also emphasizes her drawings, which have rarely been exhibited, and encourages you to see her three-dimensional artworks as drawings in space.

Implicitly, it de-emphasizes the prosaic nature of her art materials: the cotton swabs, toothpicks, bottle caps and other throwaway objects that she fashions with gee-whiz structural ingenuity, into rambling landscapes and galactic spirals. Over the years viewers (myself included) have had a tendency to focus on all of this stuff—to see Ms. Sze's art as embodying a quintessentially American consumerism.

"Infinite Line" presents a more nuanced, intellectual and worldly artist: one who talks about space like an architect and vision like an ophthalmologist, who rhapsodizes about the shifting perspective in Chinese painting and makes her own Asian-inspired drawings on long scrolls of paper.

But while Ms. Sze says some fascinating things in a catalog interview, she's not at her best in these galleries. Nothing here is quite up to the level of her solo at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery last year, which used cantilevered shelves laden with rocks, plants and office supplies to evoke a topsy-turvy green house or curiosity cabinet.

That's especially true of the works on paper, which are installed in a separate room and look physically and spiritually cut off from Ms. Sze's signature installations. Most of them find her in doodle mode, drawing clusters of architecture and tiny figures that can be expanded or contracted to suit any scale or purpose.

Pure drawing, as a medium, does not seem to excite Ms. Sze. It takes a hint of found objects, or a flirtation with the third dimension, to bring out her imagination, as in the collage "Guggenheim as a Ruin," which envisions a crumbling, entropic version of that museum, or the pop-up drawing "Notepad," whose laser-cut and folded pages form a series of cascading fire escapes.