Playing with Fractals
The Art of Sarah sze
I first encountered Sarah Sze - whom I hadn’t yet heard of - at a cocktail party in New York. She was about to leave for Paris to do an installation “with ladders.” “Ladders you can climb?”I asked. “Like a jungle gym?” She smiled, politely. No, one couldn’t climb them. Not physically, anyway. For Sze’s sculptural works are, indeed, playgrounds. Monkey bars for the mind. Invitations to play, and, in doing so, to comprehend the nature
of play in an entirely new context. These are seductive and deceptively unthreatening vehicles for transformation. They force to reevaluate the role of play in the evolution of species, culture, and spirit. We can’t reckon with the implications of Sze’s transformative energy by getting abstract or exploring historical precedents. No, we’d just get lost in the morbidly retrograde cartography that passes for contemporary art criticism these days - a booby prize if ever there was one. Instead, we have to go