Podcast #140: Sarah Sze on Scale, Gravity, and Value
Sarah Sze is a visual artist best known for challenging the boundaries of sculpture, painting, and architecture. She is a Macarthur Fellow and has shown at museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum. This week for the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Sze discussing scale, gravity, and value in her work.
Speaking of her piece Portable Planetarium, Sze described the way that scale works in viewing Earth:
"I knew I wanted to make something that felt like this kind of very desperate attempt to understand the earth and it almost cobbled together in a pathetic way but in a very beautiful way and it really felt like it was on the edge of growing beyond its own capacity to support itself. But I didn’t know this about the piece, which I think that video a little bit shows, which is that when you came into the room you recognized it immediately as this image that we often have seen photographically or filmically from very, very far away and we immediately feel as if we’re incredibly small in time and space and usually it kind of pulls back from the earth and there’s this amazing sense of both the significance and lack of significance. But with this piece you came in and and as you moved towards it, there was this very surprising moment where the piece actually became like a nest around you and engulfed you and you stood there, it was just enough room for one person and instead of having that feeling of being pulled away, you had much more of a kind of Vitruvian Man feeling of being the center of the earth and this surprising moment."
Sze spoke about the importance of gravity to her pieces. She couched her discussion in images of gravity working on objects and her own manipulation of gravity in painting:
"When you talk about gravity, it always has implications about gravitas, I think, too, but that this idea of, you know, of how everything is—gravity, coming from being a painter, gravity is this incredible thing to play with in the work, so everything, even the plants having the gravity pull them down, the peregrine falcon floating in this image, this idea of wondering how gravity is affecting what’s going on and the inevitable collapse of any of these things over time because of gravity is something I think it’s a sort of a tool that is something I play with all the time."
In reference to Measuring Stick, Sze related the story of how she played with value in a charity auction:
"I was thinking about the idea of measurement and how we measure things in terms of value, in terms of time, in terms of location, in terms of an object. And these are—so these are portraits that I did, because I was actually asked to give a donation to a nonprofit and I didn’t have like an easy thing to give to an auction. And so I said, 'I’ll do a portrait, and whoever buys the portrait they need to give me in a sealed envelope twelve of the most important events of their life, and I will draw a picture of each of those in no particular order,' so this idea that they’re all sort of cobbled together historically, and one falls into the next and then I’ll tear up that and then I’ll give them back this drawing. And, you know, it had something to do with this idea of measurement, and how we create meaning, how we measure things, how we even have a portrait of our own lives, and how we find meaning retrospectively, you know, ten years from now if I asked you the twelve events would they be the same, and also about I think about how a conversation or what a portrait is and how you find meaning in another person. It was a kind of incredible relationship with the person too."
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