“Corner Plot” by Sarah Sze will be open for view tomorrow on Doris C. Freedman Plaza at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street in Manhattan. (Photo by Hiroko Masuike.) Read more here.
The photograph shows a piece of a white-brick building, like so many others in Manhattan, except that this one is buried in the pavement. I say buried rather than emerging because the interior, one learns, shows signs of settled domesticity. “Stacks of white towels, tissues and toilet paper. Soap and salt. A cardboard iPod, a BlackBerry and a microscope. Flowers dissolving through notebook paper. A carpenter’s plumb line. Lamp fixtures with paper light bulbs. A tiny spiral staircase floating in the ether. A hole in the room’s back wall through which, with a sudden seismic shift, all the objects might flow.” Also four books, which the reporter found the artist was carefully wrapping in white paper to hide their covers; Sze told the reporter, “I don’t like to include language in an artwork… People inevitably make references.” (Nevertheless, she revealed two titles: “All That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor, her favorite author, and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” which she considers a masterpiece. As for the other two, according to the reporter, the artist only said, “You’ll never know.”)
Every work of art is, or ought to be, a careful study in speech and reticence. I enjoyed reading that this visual artist is cautious about using words. But the opposite argument also holds. Words add to the range of references that are always there in any work, even if they are visual pieces, and if used properly can lead the viewer into a richer, more stimulating world. Sze’s inspiring idea is the buried building. The surprise is in the pedestrian’s sudden encounter with another space. But another life? I don’t know. I’d have prefered sculptures of human beings inside. Although we’d be peeping into their private space, they would remain divided from the viewer by glass windows, and therefore the figures would always have the reserve or mystery of silence. Paper towels and a carpenter’s plumb line are all right, but in my own wrestling with the question, I like people instead, people giving or withholding bits of their lives.
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