Sarah Sze: Many a Slip
Many a Slip, set up in the MCA’s Project Room, is the debut museum exhibition by this 30-year-old Brooklyn-based artist. This piece and others she’s done in Berlin and London–described in a miniature catalog put out by the MCA and the Chicago art magazine Whitewalls, featuring thoughtful essays on Sze by Staci Boris and Francesco Bonami along with photographic details–make it clear the artist has carved out a niche for herself between sculpture and installation.
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Sze’s work combines the mechanics of a Rube Goldberg contraption, the implacable menace of the machine described in Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” and the vacant determination of amateur artists’ office-supply art (paper-clip palaces, rubber-band balls). The result is closer to an apparatus one might find in a really crazy aquarium than to its art-history precedents, Jean Tinguely’s “meta-matic” drawing machines and Jessica Stockholder’s sculptures of junk, both organic and man-made.
Drawing you into its depths, Sze’s installation pulls you along its twists and detours from one room to the next. A museum guard limits the number of people in the second room (to five), telling you whether you’re allowed to proceed–a sensible measure given the fragility of the construction, but it adds to the Kafkaesque experience Sze has designed. Many a Slip offers a few surprises in the second room, including photographs of snakes, before escaping into a third room through an opening too small for a human being. Peering through the “doorway” into the room, you feel certain it holds the greatest delights of all, a feeling heightened by the frustration of being unable to get in. Beyond this third room is a fourth, even less visible through the same doorway, which appears to hold nothing but a scattering of pink Styrofoam packing peanuts.
