10 December 2024

A thesis presented to the Department of Art at Carthage College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Bachelor of Art in Art History 

Sarah Sze’s installations function as “memory machines” that merge personal, cultural, and historical approaches to memory and archiving.

In describing her 2018 show Afterimage at the Victoria Miro Gallery, Sze remarked...

Combining elements such as photographs with found objects and digital screens, her works transcend personal narratives to reflect on collective memory in an era shaped by digital culture and information overload.

Sze’s fragmented, non-linear approach, inspired by Modern and Postmodern traditions, highlights the instability of memory. Using time-based media and everyday objects, she suggests memory is shaped by both personal experience and cultural forces. Her ephemeral and interactive installations challenge traditional sculpture’s permanence, blurring boundaries between art forms and redefining sculpture as an evolving process rather than a static object. 

Positioned within the collage, surrealism, and assemblage lineage, Sze reimagines these traditions to address memory’s fluidity in the digital age. Her work reflects contemporary concerns about perception, impermanence, and the overwhelming information landscape, marking a departure from the Materialism of fixed sculptural forms.

In Times Zero (2023), from Sarah Sze’s exhibition Timelapse at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the immersive scale immediately engulfs viewers, placing them within what Sze describes as an "interior landscape." This spatial experience reflects the expansive, often overwhelming ways memories inhabit our minds, with images and moments accumulating emotionally rather than chronologically. Sze uses a combination of collage and painting to create a vortex-like composition that fragments and layers memory, guiding the eye toward a central, swirling point—a visual method similar to Surrealist techniques that seek to draw the viewer into dreamlike or subconscious spaces. The torn photographs, with images of scenes like a sunset or a hand reaching outward, suggest memories that remain emotionally vivid but fluid, forming an inner reservoir of experience. The juxtaposition of these images—the fleeting sunset, the reaching hand, and the sleeping daughter—constructs a personal yet fragmented view of life’s essential moments. 

These images recall Dada and Surrealist or postmodern assemblage approaches like Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg, who also emphasized found materials and fragmented forms to explore memory and material fluidity. Yet Sze’s use of digital elements and immersive scale pushes beyond the bounds of 20th-century collage, recontextualizing these historical techniques to reflect contemporary relationships with memory in an era dominated by digital culture. In an Art21 interview, she reflects on the idea of "images as debris" (Sarah Sze: Emotional Time | Art21 "Extended Play"), a result of today's visual culture, where the authorship and origin of images are often unknown, and they are endlessly manipulated and disseminated. In contrast to this fragmented world, Sze’s art creates a physical, material engagement with the world, granting viewers to connect with the tactile experience of images, much like encountering ancient works of art—objects that have been touched by generations before us and carry layers of human history.

 This tactile relationship aligns with her desire to create artworks that evoke "emotional time," a concept she describes as time marked not by chronology but by emotional resonance. Sze’s Emotional Time resonates within the chaotic arrangement of paint and photos, visually representing how memory defies linearity, existing instead as a complex, overlapping “interior landscape.” By presenting memory as a layered, ever-evolving composition, Sze invites viewers to consider how images shape personal perception and identity by creating a space where their instability is made tangible through their changing spatial relationship to the viewer. No two people see the same arrangement because each person’s height, perspective, and associations create meanings differently, and the slightest movement changes the landscape of images and meanings (or something).

In Triple Point (Pendulum) (2013), Sarah Sze constructs an immersive installation reflecting the fleeting and precarious nature of memory, materiality, and perception. Exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale, where she represented the United States, the piece borrows its title from the scientific concept of water's "triple point," where it simultaneously exists as steam, ice, and liquid. (MoMA, Sarah Sze. Triple Point (Pendulum)) This notion of fluctuation mirrors the work’s form—a web of found objects in a dynamic state, hovering between order and chaos. The pendulum at the center introduces both motion and threat, marking the installation’s boundaries while suggesting the work’s potential collapse. This sense of fragility is central to Sze’s exploration of the overwhelming presence of objects and information in contemporary life, reflecting the unstable and fragmented quality of modern memory.

Sze’s approach recalls historical practices of assemblage, seen in the works of Duchamp and Rauschenberg, who used found objects to comment on material culture. Yet Sze moves beyond these traditions by integrating motion and temporality; the pendulum’s swing adds a layer of tension, embodying the unstable balance between wonder and anxiety in a world oversaturated with information. This tension aligns with Cubism’s exploration of multiple perspectives and constructivism’s focus on spatial relationships, yet it departs from these movements by immersing viewers in a shifting experience where perception is as unstable as the artwork itself.

The installation’s fluidity reflects Sze’s view of memory as evolving and layered, mirroring the way objects and ideas coexist in complex, often clashing states within human consciousness. Unlike permanent sculptures, Sleepers and Triple Point (Pendulum) create ephemeral environments that expand on the legacies of earlier art movements. By incorporating found objects and fragmented materials, Sze’s works recall the Dada tradition of Kurt Schwitters, whose Merzbau transformed every day remains into immersive, chaotic structures. Yet, Sze extends this lineage by incorporating technological elements, like digital projections, to reflect contemporary modes of information saturation and the fluid boundaries between the physical and virtual.

Sze’s installations also spatialize the visual logic of expressionist painting and cubist-then-surrealist collage. Her compositions, with fractured imagery and layered materials, evoke the disorienting perspective shifts of cubism, where multiple viewpoints coexist in a single frame. However, Sze reinterprets these ideas in three dimensions, creating environments where viewers physically navigate fragmented spaces, transforming the act of viewing into an embodied experience. Similarly, her use of materials, such as hand-torn paper, parallels the impermanence and dreamlike quality of surrealist collage yet grounds it in the immediacy of lived experience.

Sze’s work not only redefines sculpture as an evolving, participatory form but also generalizes and expands upon these historical practices.

Sarah Sze’s Afterimage, Rainbow Disturbance (Painting in its Archive) (2018) exemplifies the intersection of personal and universal experiences within a layered, immersive format that challenges conventional artistic boundaries. The work's multi-media composition, combining oil and acrylic paints, found objects, collaged images, and architectural elements, underscores Sze’s exploration of temporality and fragmentation. Central to the piece is a swirling vortex populated by intricate symbols such as abstract forms, natural elements, and detailed phases of the moon. The moon’s phases, rendered in varying states of waxing and waning, evoke the passage of time and the cyclical nature of memory and experience, subtly reminding viewers of their own temporal existence within the gallery space. These layers suggest a deeply personal narrative while simultaneously engaging broader themes of digital saturation and fleetingness, resonating with the argument that contemporary art often navigates the liminal space between individuality and shared cultural experience.

The interaction between absence and presence is a recurring motif, with Sze's use of adhesive tape and tacked-on prints of gallery spaces evoking both the archival process and the impermanence of memory.  These features invite the viewer to question where the art ends and where their own experience begins. Is the adhesive tape merely a functional tool, or does it hold meaning as a visual element?

The ambiguity compels the viewer to engage more deeply, asking: What is at the edge or end of art? Where does art end and archive begin?

This question extends to the work’s multi-planar approach, which bridges wall-mounted and floor-bound elements, disrupting the boundary between painting and installation. By dissolving traditional categorizations, Sze aligns with broader trends in contemporary art that challenge static interpretations of space and time.

Further, Sze’s fragmented visual language draws from Dadaist precedents, echoing Kurt Schwitters’ and Hannah Höch’s use of collage and found materials to disrupt familiar visual hierarchies. This strategy reconfigures historical methodologies to critique and reimagine the constant flux of information in the digital age. By weaving the physical and the digital together, Sze encapsulates a tension central to my argument: the coexistence of tangible, personal artifacts within the overwhelming deluge of temporary, online imagery coalesce to create the “memory machine,” a highly personal archive of the artist’s particular experience and, in parallel, the human experience of consciousness and time.

Among the works in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago group exhibition, The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020,  Afterimage, Rainbow Disturbance distinguishes itself through its immersive qualities and detailed complexity. This duality, of chaos and precision, the fleeting and the concrete, supports the idea that contemporary art fosters a space where viewers must reconcile fragmentation with Interconnectedness, challenging their expectation of art as a purely aesthetic experience.