Sarah Sze: Improvisation

"The spontaneous is always where it's the most interesting for the artist and for the viewer." —Sarah Sze

At the 2013 Venice Biennale, artist Sarah Sze has transformed the United States Pavilion with a site-specific installation, Triple Point, commissioned by The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. With Triple Point, Sze continues her approach of building installations from the minutiae of everyday life, imbuing mundane materials, marks, and processes with surprising significance.

Art21 filmed Sze in 2010 as she was reinstalling her work, The Uncountables (Encyclopedia) (2010), at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, France. In the resulting episode from Art21's Exclusive series, featured here, the artist discusses the importance of improvisation and spontaneity in her installation process.

"Improvisation is crucial," says Sze in the episode. "I want the work to to have this feeling that it was improvised; that you can see decisions happening on site the way you see a live sports event—the way you hear jazz."

Additional videos featuring the artist, including the full episode from Season 6 (2012) of Art21's PBS-broadcast series, Art in the Twenty-First Century, are available on Art21.org.

IMAGES: Sarah Sze, The Uncountables (Encyclopedia), 2010. Installation view at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France, 2010. Production stills from the Art21 Exclusive film, Sarah Sze: Improvisation. © Art21, Inc. 2012.