Big Little Things

Sarah Sze’s interstitial worlds take over the Guggenheim.

- JERRY SALTZ

IT’S ALWAYS WONDROUS when an artist is allowed to play with the idiosyncrasies of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, a spaceship laboratory whose interior is all spiraling ramps, sloping floors, and secret stairwells, topped with a Cyclops-like oculus. It is also a huge void, an empty vessel for filling with meaning and looking inside ourselves. In 2002, Matthew Barney scaled its parapets dressed in a tartan kilt. In 2013, James Turrell turned it into a chapel where viewers peered up at spectral colors that echoed the northern lights. Now, using only a fraction of the building, Sarah Sze has given its swooping white curves something like a consciousness.

Sze, a 54-year-old winner of the MacArthur “genius” grant, has taken over the top floor of the museum with large-scale paintings adorned with torn printouts and photographs, which stand alongside ephemeral sculptures composed of bamboo sticks, stainless steel, Morton Salt canisters, cardboard boxes, potted plants, electric fans, thread, and quite likely a thousand other materials. These strange accretions look like termite mounds climbing the walls or the guts of an exploded hardware store. Sze also projects images on the façade of Wright’s grand encircling vision on Fifth Avenue, while a hanging installation is poised over the fountain on the ground floor and a separate piece from the Guggenheim’s collection, Timekeeper, occupies the uppermost gallery. Together, these elements are a single organism that crawls over the building’s exterior and into its crevices.