How we experience time and memory through art Sarah Sze
I want to start with a question.
Where does an artwork begin?
Now sometimes that question is absurd.
It can seem deceptively simple,
as it was when I asked the question
with this piece, “Portable Planetarium,”
that I made in 2010.
I asked the question:
“What would it look like
to build a planetarium of one’s own?”
I know you all ask that every morning,
but I asked myself that question.
And as an artist,
I was thinking about our effort,
our desire, our continual longing
that we’ve had over the years
to make meaning of the world around us
through materials.
And for me, to try and find
the kind of wonder,
but also a kind of futility
that lies in that very fragile pursuit,
is part of my art work.
So I bring together
the materials I find around me,
I gather them to try
and create experiences,
immersive experiences that occupy rooms,
that occupy walls, landscapes, buildings.
But ultimately,
I want them to occupy memory.
And after I’ve made a work,
I find that there’s usually one memory
of that work that burns in my head.
And this is the memory for me –
it was this sudden
kind of surprising experience
of being immersed inside that work of art.
And it stayed with me
and kind of reoccurred in my work
about 10 years later.
But I want to go back
to my graduate school studio.
I think it’s interesting, sometimes,
when you start a body of work,
you need to just completely
wipe the plate clean,
take everything away.
And this may not look
like wiping the plate clean,
but for me, it was.
Because I had studied painting
for about 10 years,
and when I went to graduate school,
I realized that I had developed skill,
but I didn’t have a subject.
It was like an athletic skill,
because I could paint the figure quickly,
but I didn’t know why.
I could paint it well,
but it didn’t have content.
And so I decided to put
all the paints aside for a while,
and to ask this question, which was:
“Why and how do objects
acquire value for us?”
How does a shirt that I know
thousands of people wear,
a shirt like this one,
how does it somehow feel like it’s mine?
So I started with that experiment,
I decided, by collecting materials
that had a certain quality to them.
They were mass-produced,
easily accessible,
completely designed
for the purpose of their use,
not for their aesthetic.
So things like toothpicks, thumbtacks,
pieces of toilet paper,
to see if in the way that I put my energy,
my hand, my time into them,
that the behavior could actually create
a kind of value in the work itself.
One of the other ideas is,
I wanted the work to become live.
So I wanted to take it
off of the pedestal,
not have a frame around it,
have the experience not be
that you came to something
and told you that it was important,
but that you discover
that it was in your own time.
So this is like a very,
very old idea in sculpture,
which is: How do we breathe life
into inanimate materials?
And so, I would go to a space like this,
where there was a wall,
and use the paint itself,
pull the paint out off the wall,
the wall paint into space
to create a sculpture.
Because I was also interested in this idea
that these terms, “sculpture,”
“painting,” “installation” –
none of these mattered in the way
we actually see the world.
So I wanted to blur those boundaries,
both between mediums
that artists talk about,
but also blur the experience
of being in life and being in art,
so that when you are in your everyday,
or when you are in one of my works,
and you saw, you recognized the everyday,
you could then move that experience
into your own life,
and perhaps see the art in everyday life.
I was in graduate school in the ’90s,
and my studio just became
more and more filled with images,
as did my life.
And this confusion of images and objects
was really part of the way
I was trying to make sense of materials.
And also, I was interested
in how this might change
the way that we actually experience time.
If we’re experiencing time
through materials,
what happens when images and objects
become confused in space?
So I started by doing some
of these experiments with images.
And if you look back to the 1880s,
that’s when the first photographs
started turning into film.
And they were done
through studies of animals,
the movement of animals.
So horses in the United States,
birds in France.
They were these studies of movement
that then slowly,
like zoetropes, became film.
So I decided, I will take an animal
and I’m going to play with that idea
of how the image is not static
for us anymore, it’s moving.
It’s moving in space.
And so I chose
as my character the cheetah,
because she is the fastest
land-dwelling creature on earth.
And she holds that record,
and I want to use her record
to actually make it kind of
a measuring stick for time.
And so this is what she looked like
in the sculpture
as she moved through space.
This kind of broken framing
of the image in space,
because I had put up notepad paper
and had it actually project on it.
Then I did this experiment
where you have kind of a race,
with these new tools and video
that I could play with.
So the falcon moves out in front,
the cheetah, she comes in second,
and the rhino is trying
to catch up behind.
Then another one of the experiments,
I was thinking about how,
if we try and remember
one thing that happened to us
when we were, let’s say, 10 years old.
It’s very hard to remember
even what happened in that year.
And for me, I can think
of maybe one, maybe two,
and that one moment
has expanded in my mind
to fill that entire year.
So we don’t experience time
in minutes and seconds.
So this is a still
of the video that I took,
printed out on a piece of paper,
the paper is torn and then the video
is projected on top of it.
And I wanted to play with this idea
of how, in this kind of
complete immersion of images
that’s enveloped us,
how one image can actually grow
and can haunt us.
So I had all of these –
these are three out of, like,
100 experiments I was trying with images
for over about a decade,
and never showing them,
and I thought, OK, how do I bring this
out of the studio, into a public space,
but retain this kind of energy
of experimentation
that you see when you go
into a laboratory,
you see when you go into a studio,
and I had this show coming up
and I just said,
alright, I’m going to put my desk
right in the middle of the room.
So I brought my desk
and I put it in the room,
and it actually worked
in this kind of very surprising way to me,
in that it was this kind of flickering,
because of the video screens, from afar.
And it had all
of the projectors on it,
so the projectors were creating
the space around it,
but you were drawn towards
the flickering like a flame.
And then you were enveloped in the piece
at the scale that we’re all
very familiar with,
which is the scale of being in front
of a desk or a sink or a table,
and you are immersed, then,
back into this scale,
this one-to-one scale
of the body in relation to the image.
But on this surface,
you had these projections on paper
being blown in the wind,
so there was this confusion
of what was an image
and what was an object.
So this is what the work looked like
when it went into a larger room,
and it wasn’t until I made this piece
that I realized that I’d effectively made
the interior of a planetarium,
without even realizing that.
And I remembered, as a child,
loving going to the planetarium.
And back then, the planetarium,
there was always not only
these amazing images on the ceiling,
but you could see the projector itself
whizzing and burring,
and this amazing camera
in the middle of the room.
And it was that, along with seeing
the audience around you looking up,
because there was an audience
in the round at that time,
and seeing them, and experiencing,
being part of an audience.
So this is an image from the web
that I downloaded
of people who took images
of themselves in the work.
And I like this image
because you see how the figures
get mixed with the work.
So you have the shadow of a visitor
against the projection,
and you also see the projections
across a person’s shirt.
So there were these self-portraits
made in the work itself,
and then posted,
and it felt like a kind of cyclical
image-making process.
And a kind of an end to that.
But it reminded me and brought me back
to the planetarium,
and that interior,
and I started to go back to painting.
And thinking about how a painting
is actually, for me,
about the interior images
that we all have.
There’s so many interior images,
and we’ve become so focused
on what’s outside our eyes.
And how do we store memory in our mind,
how certain images emerge out of nowhere
or can fall apart over time.
And I started to call this series
the “Afterimage” series,
which was a reference to this idea
that if we all close our eyes right now,
you can see there’s this flickering
light that lingers,
and when we open it again,
it lingers again –
this is happening all the time.
And an afterimage is something
that a photograph can never replace,
you never feel that in a photograph.
So it really reminds you of the limits
of the camera’s lens.
So it was this idea of taking the images
that were outside of me –
this is my studio –
and then trying to figure out how
they were being represented inside me.
So really quickly,
I’m just going to whiz through
how a process might develop
for the next piece.
So it might start with a sketch,
or an image that’s burned in my memory
from the 18th century –
it’s Piranesi’s “Colosseum.”
Or a model the size of a basketball –
I built this around a basketball,
the scale’s evidenced
by the red cup behind it.
And that model can be put
into a larger piece as a seed,
and that seed can grow
into a bigger piece.
And that piece can fill
a very, very large space.
But it can funnel down into a video
that’s just made from my iPhone,
of a puddle outside my studio
in a rainy night.
So this is an afterimage
of the painting made in my memory,
and even that painting can fade
as memory does.
So this is the scale of a very small image
from my sketchbook.
You can see how it can explode
to a subway station
that spans three blocks.
And you could see how going
into the subway station
is like a journey through
the pages of a sketchbook,
and you can see sort of a diary of work
writ across a public space,
and you’re turning the pages
of 20 years of art work
as you move through the subway.
But even that sketch
actually has a different origin,
it has an origin in a sculpture
that climbs a six-story building,
and is scaled to a cat from the year 2002.
I remember that because I had
two black cats at the time.
And this is an image of a work from Japan
that you can see
the afterimage of in the subway.
Or a work in Venice,
where you see the image
etched in the wall.
Or how a sculpture
that I did at SFMOMA in 2001,
and created this kind of dynamic line,
how I stole that to create a dynamic line
as you descend down
into the subway itself.
And this merging of mediums
is really interesting to me.
So how can you take a line
that pulls tension like a sculpture
and put it into a print?
Or then use line
like a drawing in a sculpture
to create a dramatic perspective?
Or how can a painting mimic
the process of printmaking?
How can an installation
use the camera’s lens
to frame a landscape?
How can a painting on string
become a moment in Denmark,
in the middle of a trek?
And how, on the High Line,
can you create a piece
that camouflages itself
into the nature itself
and becomes a habitat
for the nature around it?
And I’ll just end with two pieces
that I’m making now.
This is a piece called “Fallen Sky”
that’s going to be a permanent
commission in Hudson Valley,
and it’s kind of the planetarium
finally come down
and grounding itself in the earth.
And this is a work from 2013
that’s going to be reinstalled,
have a new life in the reopening of MOMA.
And it’s a piece that the tool
itself is the sculpture.
So the pendulum, as it swings,
is used as a tool to create the piece.
So each of the piles of objects
go right up to one centimeter
to the tip of that pendulum.
So you have this combination
of the lull of that beautiful swing,
but also the tension that it constantly
could destroy the piece itself.
And so, it doesn’t really matter
where any of these pieces end up,
because the real point for me
is that they end up
in your memory over time,
and they generate ideas beyond themselves.
Thank you.
(Applause)