sze

Sarah Sze at the Guggenheim

I saw Sarah Sze’s show at the Guggenheim on Sunday with M, C, and K. We walked up the ramp. C had two free passes and I paid for one. K (age 2) found the first piece in a little alcove by one of the bathrooms, it had torn paper, little screens with swimmers, a ladder, a fan, lights, little packets of kleenex, a plant.

K stopped at the bathroom and then we saw the piece with a little solar system and strings, medicine caplets, dice, so much string, torn pieces of paper. Pieces of pieces.

This work said something true to me about the human experience, about what happens in the little spaces of time and of our minds where we need to arrange the world. Remember twirling the phone wire in your fingers? Taking the stickers off fruit? The lil dining table pizza box holder?

Making art means changing the environment. When you talk on a telephone and doodle, you change the environment—the environment of plastic, the environment of the conversation, the environment of your mind—There’s a difference between a conversation across a table and a conversation side by side while walking.

When you dance one person leads and one person follows or all the people rehearsed before and try to move synchronously or you make it up as you go along but you’re a different person before the movement and after the movement and that is what art is; motion through time.

Have you ever walked into a New York City subway and been subdued by everyone being subdued? I saw a wild toddler become calm and peaceful in that presence. And we live in a world that tells us to ignore all of this, that only what is said or what is written or what is recorded or what is proven is true or worth noticing or worth remembering or worth thinking about.

There is also something rhythmic and orbital about the ways we change the environment, pacing into a rut like a barge mule or like electrons or like planets orbiting the sun, there is a cosmos present in each step of the hoof which God’s hand shaped perfectly, in the human heart working to make a life, in the air traffic control system that prevents plane crashes and brings little boys to visit pop pop for a few days, or in spending a day with people you knew in the year 2000 or 2008 or 2018 or today; their lil bodies keep orbiting one another and making sounds, notes, beats, whether in a bassoon or in pots and pans from the drawer in the kitchen on the left, no, your other left.

Screen projectors, epoxy tubes, wires wires wires, lil pieces of orange tape, a leaf brushing over a tub of water, a gif of a sunset, our world is full of the world: HP printer cartridges, rushing metal train trellises taking people to jobs in New Jersey, dentists offices committing health care fraud and Yankees games and Van Halen being played on tinny speakers of super computers that have sapped our strength and clutched our attention for the profit of people who do not let their children use the devices they sell—it is all here, it is all the world, it all contains as much potential beauty as our minds and hearts are willing to dedicate to it.