This is a fine mess you've got me intoSarah Sze Victoria Miro london
Sarah Sze's chaotic-appearing installations actually address the oldest question in Western sculpture
It is difficult to know where to begin with Sarah Sze, that being rather her point. My hot tip for the American's latest show, at Victoria Miro in London, is to start with a cushion stuck up in one corner of the gallery's ground floor. So many questions suggest themselves about this that I'll pluck one from the air, namely: is the cushion really stuck up there at all, or is it being held back? Are the orange wires that join it to the rest of Sze's structure - a typical jumble of cushions, Q-Tips, Anglepoise lamps, alligator clips, mineral water bottles, houseplants, salt cellars, jotter pages, etc etc etc - holding it aloft, or are they stopping it from floating away, stymying its bid for freedom?
Now, I'm going to risk an appearance in Pseuds' Corner here. What we're looking at when we ponder Sze's cushion is the oldest preoccupation in Western sculpture, which is to say, contrapposto. Literally, contrapposto is that off-axis posture common in Greek figure-sculpture, a gentle torquing of the hips and body. This in turn became an obsession of the Renaissance, reaching a mad apogee in Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne - a work whose extreme torsion marks a contrappostal point of no return. An inch further and the whole composition would become unseemly, overblown. And the precision of Bernini's balance suggests other exactnesses, too: the precise moment at which stone becomes flesh and flesh wood, when the tastes of the High Renaissance slip into those of Mannerism.
Photo by pwka
http://www.flickr.com/photos/piwonka/1367347725/sizes/m/
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