Disorder and dissonance: the architectural and utopian ecologies of Sarah Sze

Abstract

Abstract

This article analyses Sarah Sze’s exhibition Timelapse (2023) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and considers how the artist’s materially and spatially expansive installations open new lines of enquiry into utopianism. Against the dominant images of utopia as repetition, minimalism or geometric order prevalent in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, architecture and literature, Sze offers an alternative imaginary. The article argues that Sze’s practice reconfigures the museum space into a site of spatial invention and collective becoming. Her installations not only draw on the surrounding architecture but also reorientate it, transforming place into a mutable ecology of relational forms. Through critical readings of individual works, including Timekeeper (2016) and Untitled (Media Lab) (1998), the article positions Sze’s installations as speculative structures that reimagine utopia not as a fixed ideal but as a contingent, material practice – one grounded in ecology, impermanence and spatial experimentation.

Introduction

The extraordinary worlds of the American artist Sarah Sze (b.1969) have inspired visions of disassembled maps, possible communities and apocalypses as part of an overall imagining of what our society is, has been or may look like in years to come.¹ The curator and writer Okwui Enwezor noted an intangible ‘utopian dimension’ to Sze’s work in relation to Russian Constructivism, an observation that highlights Sze’s visual language of acceleration, movement and perceptual relationships with time.² However, an analysis of the dynamic utopian systems and specific architectures that underpin Sze’s work has yet to emerge.

This article discusses how Sze’s processes extend contemporary debates within utopian scholarship, particularly her spatial ecologism, which engages with oppositional utopias as well as hybridised and material networks. An analysis of Sze’s exhibition Timelapse (2023) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, highlights the unusual architectural languages of Sze’s installations, and how the experience of her work embodies unexpected variants of the place–non-place paradox. This draws on historical utopian architectures and fictions to contextualise how Sze’s works can be understood as exploratory builds. Through an assessment of selected installations, the article explicates how definitions of utopian place-making are advanced within Sze’s otherworldly compositions and how the traditions of utopian architectures are stretched and morphed in her practice. The spatial and material dynamics of Sze’s work are then explored by taking up the processes and languages of cyclical and regenerative ecologies. Finally, it focuses on how Sze’s practice meshes with the Guggenheim’s architecture and how composite architectures reveal paths towards new utopias.

The place–non-place paradox

Timelapse featured a series of paintings, sculptures, sounds, videos, drawings and site-specific works by the artist. It was the first time that the Guggenheim had shown Sze’s works from its permanent collection, some of which date back to 1998. The exhibition began outside the museum and threaded its way into the Guggenheim’s interior space. In the expansive rotunda, Sze’s assembled objects appeared as dense, disorderly gatherings FIG. 1, in contrast to the succinct and minimal language of Frank Lloyd Wright’s modernist architecture.

Comprising splintered objects, interrupted imagery and loose constructions, Timelapse offered a counterintuitive incarnation of utopia. Pendulums, digital clocks, rotating mechanical arms and material fragments were made insecure through a reliance on delicate balance, movement and improvisation. Historically, the visual languages of utopian architecture and literary philosophy have embodied the opposite: order, rationality, stability and mathematically repeated shape and form. Thomas More’s archetypal Utopia (1516) utilised a repetitive pattern of fifty-four identical cities; Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602) envisaged a city defended by seven concentric circular walls; and Étienne Cabet’s Travels in Icaria (1840) demonstrated a striking reliance on perfect symmetry manifested as an architectural language of equal distribution and social benefit.³

Ruth Eaton’s Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)Built Environment (2001) has also traced the significance of order within the design of utopian architectures from the early Renaissance to the 1970s.⁴ Eaton’s comprehensive survey of graphic representations of utopia – in particular, city planning, maps and drawings – records a consistent relationship between social idealism, harmony and geometry.⁵ Eaton highlights the ‘sacred order’ and language of ‘ancient symbolism’, carried forwards from early architectures to the ideal cities of the twentieth century.⁶ Crucially, however, Eaton’s work suggests a consistent association, and perhaps even a paradoxical correlation, between the openness of social imagining and the uniformity of minimal, linear and circular planning. Viewed through this lens, Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin FIG. 2, for example – the architect’s twentieth-century vision for Paris – could be considered a utopian contradiction. The grid-like matrices that structure Plan Voisin can be read as a material language of enforcement and uniformity. Yet Le Corbusier’s system of quadrants and separations also refers to a bold and radical horizon of arterial networks, efficient travel and the freedoms of connectivity.

To establish the utopianism of Timelapse, the work must not be read as a utopian state of order and certainty, but instead as an imaginative exploration of how the exhibition sits within the place–non-place paradigm. At its core, Timelapse offered a highly experimental simultaneous engagement with these two states. It comprised a series of corporeal constructions, but Sze also engaged with ‘elsewheres’ and polarities. In Times Zero (2023) a large painting hangs on the wall, mirrored below by a shredded inkjet-printed replica arranged on the floor. Last Impression (2023) constitutes stretched strings, a tape measure installed underneath and marks of paint extending from the canvas onto the museum wall. In these hybrid works, attention is split between the actuality of the museum as an experience of ‘place’ and Sze’s fictional worlds of tensions and fractures. However, it is in Sze’s installations that the place–non-place paradox is more clearly defined. In Timekeeper FIG. 3 FIG. 4 a complex navigation between the virtuality of emerging technologies and the material world is proposed. A micro-world of streamed information, fleeting images and a makeshift workstation combine in the construction, but there is also a distinct separation between the physical existence of precariously placed objects, crammed forms and physical things, which contrasts with the visual movement of virtual information.

Sze’s explorations give form to a world built on contradiction, proposing a new, unusual kind of utopia – one that departs from historical tradition. The fluctuations in digital imagery signal glitches, apocalypse, abandonment or disrepair – a dystopian world in which communication systems have failed. However, an opposite world of unification is also inferred. Worlds of information meet material reality as digital images caress surfaces and visuals appear and dissipate over time. This duality fulfils the critical function of utopia as the viewer is immersed in a world of possibility – the spectre of a fictional future of technological connectivity or demise – while simultaneously experiencing the ‘now’.⁷ This engagement with unstable cultural transformation also links Timekeeper to earlier histories of utopianism, in which irregular and uneasy forms emerge from efforts to harness a world of alterity.⁸ In a TED Talk given in 2019 Sze described a ‘desire’ and ‘continual longing’ to ‘make meaning of the world around us’. This impulse aligns her performed installations with a utopian principle to ‘map, dissect and understand information’, even if the resultant form is dissonant.⁹

Impossible structures

To search, discover or risk: all of these actions are processes of investigation that aim to record and uncover how the world operates. In Timekeeper these processes are directed towards the built environment, linking Sze’s work to experimental architectures, place-making and impossible structures. Evoking the utopian architect Cedric Price’s focus on ‘indeterminacy […] change, adaptability, progress [and] creativity’ in the air architecture project Fun Palace FIG. 5 and the imagined networks envisaged by The Generator Project  FIG. 6, Sze’s work centres on the potential of structures, rather than their static nature as buildings, and natural forces and materials to produce consequential forms.¹⁰ Described by Amada Cruz as ‘gravity defying, with a sense of movement that flows from one constituent part to the next’, Sze’s structures create interdependencies of balance and pressure; these forces stabilise objects and hold materials aloft in flight.¹¹ Her works are seemingly impractical, impossible, ephemeral structures, which exist only for the duration of, and within, the unique climate of the exhibition.

The recognition of the imminent demise of these objects recalls Price’s theory of the mutability of buildings and architecture’s cycles of life, death and rebirth. Sze explores recurrent systems, ecologies and themes of renewal through her use of recycled and found objects. Her work adapts with every new incarnation: on each site, new materials are found and added. Building tools and other construction materials, for example, an iron bar or a spirit level, make appearances, informing and reforming the overall composition. Sze developed this self-referential process – of making works from the tools that have shaped them – in the 1990s. Her series Second Means of Egress FIG. 7 FIG. 8 demonstrates the genealogy of her references to self-construction, as though her architectures breathe life. The outlines of cranes, viewing platforms and satellites create an operational universe of automation and production; these structures, modelled like machinery, appear to be self-building, adding further layers of construction to the work.

The magnitude of Sze’s assemblies suggests consumption and excess. The writer and critic John Slyce positions Sze’s objects within the language of ‘a disparate and fragmented culture of late capitalism’, a view that is supported by the artist’s use of synthetic, mass-produced objects, which are readily discarded in our throwaway culture.¹² The recycling of ready-made materials, wherein the mundane is transformed when claimed and repositioned within an institutional context, has often been viewed through a modernist lens.¹³ However, Sze’s materiality can more accurately be described as a process of re-emplacement. Objects migrate from their original homes to new structures and networks – a communitarian aim in which the dispossessed and discarded travel from the periphery towards a new state of realignment and belonging. In an interview with Enwezor, Sze recalled:

I remember my mother said to me, ‘By the time you die they won’t have passports anymore’. Our family came from intersectional conflicts. When you’re a family directly grown out of that, you have, I think, a heightened sense of yourself as a product of history and its conflicts […] the volume on that becomes higher when it’s intimately stitched into the fabric of your family, and the potentially utopian project of the coming together of cultures is seeded within that family as well.¹⁴

In Sze’s structures, items become part of a new body of work in which their previous usage, or geographical location, is carried into the work – in contrast to Modernism’s concept of elevation – to reveal a complex life cycle. Described by Enwezor, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Laura Hoptman as ‘hybrid identity’, Sze’s materiality embodies multiple states of transition as objects bring together previous origins and histories – an ideal predicated on the idea of a mutable yet ‘totalising structure’.¹⁵

In this context, a museum – and, more precisely, an installation – provides a unique opportunity to foster landscapes of the imagination, and for bold spatial configurations to function as new worlds. Interior ecologies may test novel affiliations between matter or even anticipate productive versions of ‘elsewhere’. As part of Untitled (Media Lab) FIG. 9 FIG. 10, the earliest work included in Timelapse, webs of activity and interdependent networks and cycles form seemingly self-sustainable and cyclical microcosms. Here, an ecotopian principle comes into focus as Sze’s micro-worlds re-energise resources, rather than exhaust or deplete them. The individual items that Sze bonded together and balanced are inconsequential; however, when placed together, they constitute renewed cycles of evolution and growth. In her own words, Untitled (Media Lab) exhibits the features of a ‘self-supporting life system’ containing all the elements necessary for life: fans create air, plants produce oxygen and water is contained in tanks.¹⁶

Re-emplacement

Twentieth-century urban utopias have historically lacked a sensitivity to the ecologism of place, which is a significant failure in both human and environmental terms.¹⁷ Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin proposed the flattening of the right bank of the River Seine, Paris, whereas Archigram’s Instant City (1968–70) comprises a structure of plug-in cells that encroach upon the historical, social and political aspects of site. Yet, in the production of Slice FIG. 11, abstract forms interlaced by threads of wire responded to the alcoves, nooks and crannies of the Guggenheim’s interior architecture. Sze’s correlations, formed in part by a whiteboard eraser and colour printouts hung over a ladder, referenced a chaotic style of structuring. However, materials are also emplaced within an interwoven chronology of time-specific events, acts and locations – for example, the recording of a collapsing building, or in other works, the documentation of Sze’s sleeping daughter – as well as physical gestures, such as tying and pegging. This performance of structure begets an acknowledgement of frameworks that exist outside of rigid precision – a utopian ecologism highlighted by Donna J. Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kith and Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) as the ‘connectedness of the warp and the weft’.¹⁸ Sze’s process is intuitive but also transformative, as each item relates to the next – an interdependence that draws on histories of social and collaborative making.¹⁹

The potential ‘vitality’ of materialism, highlighted by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), also sheds light on a utopian narrative in which, through the assemblage of materials, Sze enables ‘something new to appear’.²⁰ While warning of the limitations of materials to ignite social change, Bennett’s ‘vibrant matter’ determines a communitarian benefit found in the recognition of non-hierarchical relations and the mutualistic symbiosis of human, matter, flora and fauna:

a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations.²¹

In recognition of the complex circuitry that links matter to humans, a promissory aspect of Sze’s extraordinary structures emerges. In a move towards what Bennett has termed ‘distributive agency’, effect can be understood as a collective generation of human activity, material agents and forces. Sze’s Timelapse was a space where movement occurred, but it was also a space where ‘unlike organisms’ could come together to make things happen.²² Gravity controlled the motion of a dolly, electricity powered air, fans rotated to dislodge papers, bulbs illuminated, human forms intercepted light and shadows moved.

These lines of thought highlight the ways in which material connectivity within museum structures can extend the utopian imagination. Sze’s works are environments composed of objects that present as autonomous worlds, yet they remain subject to the physical and ideological shaping of the surrounding architecture. Acts of relocating and transposing objects into and onto institutional frameworks generate an awareness of the museum’s encasing function. However, Sze’s work goes one step further: her works actively draw strength from, and even depend upon, the structures around them to mould form. In the making of Seamless FIG. 12, for example, Sze hollowed out an exhibition wall to weave sculptural forms through the interior cavities of Tate Modern, London. In Timelapse, she strung wires, poles and lamps up, down and across the museum’s interior spaces. Sze described the Guggenheim’s void as ‘an incredible piece of non-architecture’ – one that the work Diver (2023) cut through with a swinging hammock and heavy pendulum.²³

The ‘unique invitation’ to operate within the Guggenheim’s architecture provided a focal point for the exhibition.²⁴ Visitors entered what appeared to be an ongoing remodelling of the building’s interior, in which structures interrupted and re-rationalised space. The exhibition reorientated the Guggenheim: lines and grids restructured Wright’s original sight lines, producing new vantage points.²⁵ Diver functioned as a plumb line; Untitled (Media Lab) scaffolded the space from ground to ceiling; and Timekeeper bled pools of light into the walkways. When Sze’s work extends in this way, something transformative occurs. Architectures begin to share in the performance of her structures, as surfaces and interiors build, coalesce and reconstruct routes through the museum. Her work grows and meshes within a larger architectural ecology. Even the Guggenheim is subject to evolution and expansion – a sign of flourishing within the vocabulary of urban development.

The Moon’s Gravity Causes the Ocean’s Tides FIG. 13 also marked a development in this exploration; in this case natural phenomena were drawn into the relationship between work and museum. Images found online were projected onto the Guggenheim’s façade, but they only became legible when viewed directly on the surface of the building and in dim natural light. Sze’s images temporarily transformed the city landscape, suggesting a transitory idea of urban construction rather than unchanging architecture.

This model of social utopianism departs from the desirability of the ideal twentieth-century museum described by Brian O’Doherty as a world ‘unshadowed, white, clean, artificial’ and ‘isolated from everything’, and moves towards concepts of the museum as an integrated site.²⁶ Aligned with contemporary experimentations that fuse museum architectures with utopianism, for example, Utopia Station (2003) or The Utopia Project (2008–11), Sze’s digital projections transformed the public façade into a shared wall of information.²⁷ It was both a material and a conceptual transition, as ‘place’ was delineated through the ‘activation’ of a previously overlooked space but also negated through the virtuality that Sze’s images traced. The surface of the museum was converted into a threshold and the durability of the architecture metamorphosed into a state of digital fragmentation and transition. The absence of institutional framing and the removal of edges and barriers created an anomaly – a non-place – as the usual ritual of place (history, materiality, functionality) was suspended.²⁸

Conclusion

Described by Nicole Pohl as a language of ‘strong governmental control’, imposed frameworks of utopian order often evoke systems of coercion and separatism rather than harmony.²⁹ In her article ‘Feminism and utopia’, Alessa Johns went one step further, arguing that ‘fully mapped […] towns which are geometrically organised’ support and boost the organisation of ‘sovereign surveillance’ and connect certain behaviours – rituals, ground authority, discipline – to a standardised or uniform world.³⁰ For Johns, spatial composition, particularly rigid utopias, predisposes citizens to predetermined orders that may effectively curtail individual freedoms and self-expression. Sze’s 2023 exhibition marked a point in which utopia as a source of social criticality emerged through radical and often oppositional workings, signposting the possibility of new utopias in the context of the museum.

Sze’s utopianism resists the visual traditions of ordered utopias and the desirability of apartness, instead performing structures that probe current instabilities. In doing so, her work offers a significant contribution to debates about the evolution of utopian structures. Sze’s worlds are splintered, peculiar and strange – conditions often associated with negation – yet her practice centres on processes of affiliation and constructing material relationships from disjuncture. Timelapse foregrounds the irregular frameworks that network our society, and yet are not necessarily easily understood. Her work proposes a radical rethinking of utopia: one that might emerge through spatial and ecological alliances, through fragmentation and through the cultivation of imperfect worlds.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Professor Siân Adiseshiah, Head of English, and Kathryn Brown, Senior Lecturer, at Loughborough University, for their contributions to this paper. Additional thanks to Monika Parrinder, Design Lecturer at University of the Arts London, for her advice and edits.