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All images © Sarah Sze, Courtesy of the Artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging
Sarah Sze, "Triple Point (Observatory)," 2013
Published: May 29, 2013
Sarah Sze, "Triple Point (Gleaner)," 2013
American installation artist Sarah Sze’s offering for the 55th Venice Biennale would make for a fantastic gallery show. It would make a great museum show too, save for the constraints of the relatively diminutive rooms of the neo-classical, Palladian-style United States Pavilion. As a national statement offered on the world’s largest stage for contemporary art, however, the pavilion leaves one with a slight feeling of anticlimax. The blame, however, rests less on Sze or her work than on the realities of biennale positioning, where quality often gets drowned out amid cacophony.
Commissioned by the Bronx Museum of the Arts and curated jointly by the museum’s executive director, Holly Block, and critic and independent curator, Carey Lovelace, “Triple Point” — a reference to the chemical stage at which a substance is simultaneously solid, liquid, and glass — presents a series of artistic experiments in Sze’s delicate, nearly obsessive-compulsive style of arranging quotidian objects. Vaporetto tickets, images of waterfalls, rocks, sand, jars, buckets and much more are brought into constellation by web-like forms of string, wood, and metal. Delicate in material and construction, the installations that Sze has developed over the past two months in Venice poses a refreshing weight and quietude.
Approaching the pavilion, more robust iterations on her signature sculptural forms appear to crawl organically up its surface and onto the roof. Boulders have been covered over with gravel such that only their crests appear, while faux rocks sit on the structure’s roof and in front of what has traditionally served as its entrance. Sze reroutes foot traffic in a clockwise half-circle starting at an entrance on the left wing.
Each room presents a unique experiment in formal construction and material investigation. The initial installation harks back to her 2010 Tanya Bonakdar show’s “360 (Portable Planetarium)” — the exhibition that largely brought Sze front and center as a force on the New York scene — in its orb-like amalgamation of objects, each of which offered a reference to the water cycle. A central sculptural molecule seems to be exploding, spurting rays of plywood and unprocessed sticks that draw the eye on a circular path through inkjet printed rivers, down into a glass oven baking dish on which lamps shine and a fan blows, metaphorically initiating the alchemical process once again.
The following room presents a laboratory-like environment in which stones, pebbles, and sand are arranged in piles and lines both on the fragmented lab tables and on the floor where outlines of painter’s tape seem to mark out the previous existence of solid forms in a manner reminiscent of a crime scene. A black T-shirt sits crumpled on one table next to an array of ampules holding orange and green granules. It’s as if Sze or her Venetian assistants may come back to continue their uncanny experiment at any moment.
In the room that is typically the pavilion’s entryway, a single boulder sits off-center, and one corner door is left open revealing a supply closet holding elements present in each of the exhibition’s experiments. An array of objects in the following space — stacks of jeans, cacti, water bottles, nails, tools, and yet more rocks among them — lay in a circular orientation around a pendulum, which rotates at varying velocities as if creating a centripetal force to order the knickknacks.
It’s in the pavilion’s final room, however, that Sze truly makes her mark. All the elements out in front of the pavilion, which from that viewpoint appeared entirely entropic, are here revealed to be an extension of an indoor installation, continuing along patterns on the glass-paned wall. The effect is to create a peaceful (and inaccessible) alcove. An array of bags of earth for gardening mark the transition from outside to inside, while shelves of further plant life, stones, and Ziploc-bagged artifacts wall off the recess.
In retrospect, Sze’s pavilion is remarkably good. So, why does it underwhelm to an extent that will likely be characterized as an overcorrection from Allora and Calzadilla’s bombastic 2011 U.S. Pavilion, “Gloria”? In an increasingly event-oriented art landscape, in which the glitz of each successive fair, biennial, or art week must be turned that much further past 11 to get a commercial response, a certain appetite — addiction, even — has been created for spectacle. It’s a lot easier to gush about your jaunt through the woods in pursuit of video or your cup of artfully brewed tea (elements of Jesper Just’s and Jeremy Deller’s pavilions both equally worthy of praise) over a Bellini in the evening than it is to rave about a nuanced and quiet encounter with a set of works that doesn’t readily tie itself up in a package of experience or narrative.
Bu, let’s not conflate showmanship with the creation of quality shows or forget the purpose, however anachronistic, of these pavilions in the first place: to exhibit a high quality artistic statement that on some level takes the temperature of a country’s cultural sphere. As the latter, Sarah Sze is right on point.
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