Artist Sarah Sze: ‘We’ve created a system that can destroy us. That’s new’ | Sarah Sze

The Waiting Room is the last UK project for Artangel’s founder-directors Michael Morris and James Lingwood, their final commission before leaving the organisation after three decades.. “Seeing one of Sarah’s Timekeeper installations several years ago was a lightbulb moment – an artist finding a brilliant way to convey how we experience time and space today: the marvellous and the mundane, the fleeting and the fragile, all together,” says Lingwood.

He is not alone. Sze has been described as the perfect artist for the age of information overload, with fans ranging from the sculptor to the writer Zadie Smith. Back in 2012, Serra said that Sze was “changing the potential of sculpture”, describing her work as “Twombly and Pollock in space”. Five years later, Smith, who is a friend of Sze’s, recalled visiting her studio with her children. As “an analogue person”, Smith wrote, she was bemused, but to them it was “almost familiar, simply a sort of exploded iPhone, with all the technology deconstructed and the liberated images floating free in the world”.

But Sze’s art is also physical. In a show currently running at the Guggenheim, in her home city of New York, she has mixed shards of video with ladders, scissors, rocks and houseplants. The wires, rods and clamps that suspend them are as much part of the artworks as the objects themselves. “I think of the projectors as objects, the plugs are objects,” she says.

We’re talking on video, and as she peers through her screen I have the disconcerting sensation that it’s not just me she’s seeing. It turns out I’m right. She’s just as interested in the clutter around me, “like that coffee cup on your table, the plant, things that are not usually supposed to be seen”. She’s also alert to ambient sound and even smells, and their absence from digital encounters. “It would be interesting to be able to smell your perfume,” she says suddenly. “It would change the way I know you.”

It’s noon in New York and 5pm in London, perfectly illustrating Sze’s concern with different realities inhabiting the same space, be it temporal or topographical. My day is slowing down and I’m about to go home, hers is at full throttle. “I dropped my daughter at school, and gave a talk at the Guggenheim. Then I finished off an oil painting that’s been donated for an auction to save Nina Simone’s house,” she says. It stands behind her in her portrait photograph for this feature, which was taken in her studio, but she had to dash home to be interviewed because the studio was too noisy.

The Sotheby’s auction Sze mentions is the centrepiece of a New York fundraising gala later this month (the estimate for her painting is $450,000-$480,000). Sze’s involvement in the project is revealing in two directions. She and her husband, the oncologist and Pulitzer prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, are one of New York’s best-connected couples, cool enough to be featured in a joint profile in Vogue. But they are also people of conscience. As she told the Vogue interviewer, “There was a real social ethic in our family … My mother said you have to give something back – to culture, to society.” Her mother, who is of Anglo-Irish descent, worked as schoolteacher; her father is a Shanghai-born architect, whose family fled China when he was four, and who set up a firm in Boston – where Sze and her brother grew up – specialising in social projects.

Sze, who is now 54, took a first degree in architecture and painting at Yale, before moving on to New York’s School of Visual Arts. She first specialised in painting, and had a brief flirtation with the idea of making documentary films, “just to do something a little more practical, potentially”, before moving into sculpture. She continued to make paintings but she didn’t show them. In recent years, she has incorporated them into her work. “They are very much about how we collect and organise images in our mind, through imagination or memory,” she says, “as opposed to how we experience images externally, with the continuous bombardment of visual information. The paintings come out of the sculptures, and my sculptures helped to inform what I wanted to do with painting.”

Once the general public owns anything that has to do with technology, it’s already out of date

She assembles her installations herself in real time, and will have less than a fortnight in London to bring The Waiting Room together. “It’s about bringing the life of the studio into the place, so you can glean the presence of it being made on site,” she says. “And for the viewer, that’s interesting, because you know that it was an experiment in real time in real space. It’s like a performance, but without the actor.”

It sounds like a high stress way of working. Does it keep her awake at night? Though she never starts with an empty palette, because the work is generative, accumulating images and ideas with each project, she says, it does mean that “every day, it’s either two steps forward and one back or the other way round, and you just pray that it won’t be three in a row going backwards when you need to keep it moving in the right direction. But, you know, sometimes those are the most interesting times, because it forces you to make some very radical decisions.”

As we talk, her mind is constantly zooming in and out from observing to considering how this particular moment, across time zones and continents, belongs to a bigger picture that can be funnelled back into the work in progress, so as to transform the old station waiting room in south London into “a kind of planetarium”. She has worked on railways before, creating a permanent installation for a New York subway station. “Did you know Einstein was once a patent clerk?” she asks. “He was looking at patents for systems that would make a universal time clock, and he used the speed of a passenger train as a kind of metaphorical tool to imagine how the speed of light would work. So the train is one of the oldest tools in recent history that we use as a measuring stick to locate ourselves in time and place.”

Mukherjee has said that it was “that cosmos-like mind of hers”, which he had observed in her work, that propelled him on a mission to meet her. They have two daughters, now 13 and 17. “Without them,” she says, “I would not be making the work that I’m making. You know, they’re five years apart and just even within those five years you see how quickly the conversation is changing, and the way people communicate is changing. It’s fascinating to me.”

[Covid] was a really important time for the expression of what it was to be a human to be put into artistic form

Since Smith’s evocation of the exploded iPhone, in a piece written to accompany a 2017 show in Munich, the Covid pandemic has been and gone and AI has arrived, creating the mind-bending effect of slowing everything down at the same time as speeding it up to such an extent that the iPhone metaphor itself seems from a past age. “Once the general public owns anything that has to do with technology, it’s already out of date,” says Sze, who remembers arriving back in the US from Europe with her first mobile phone in 1998 – “everyone thought it was so pretentious”. In her own work, she adds, “the technology is by far the most ephemeral thing, but people always think it’s a toothpick, or the string”.

She has written that “we are in the middle of an extreme hurricane where we are learning to speak through images at an exponential pace”. Reading about the use of emojis by Japanese teenagers 10 years ago, she says, she thought she was never going to put a smiley face at the end of a text. Now she is utterly at home with them. Only this morning she sent a gif to one of her daughters instead of writing to tell her she had managed to get hold of tickets for an event. In her work, she is constantly collecting and buying images, she adds. “If I want a volcano, I’m going to buy a volcano, and I can use it in my work the same way that I can buy and use a hammer.” (An erupting volcano is the promotional image for the show.)

As Sze was wrestling with the logistics of stringing thousands of images of the New York sky up in an airport, Mukherjee was dealing with the medical fallout of the pandemic. What, I wonder, can medicine and art teach each other? She settles first on 3D printing, saying, “There is interesting 3D printing coming out in sculpture, but I think in very practical ways, in medicine and health it has changed the game radically, and in a much faster and more effective way.”

But when it comes to the ethical questions raised by a rampaging technology, particularly involving AI, she believes that a parliament of skills is needed to address such essential questions as, “How do you teach an AI to be empathetic? How do you challenge it to be creative?” “These are actually humanities questions,” she says, “and I think it’s really important that they are cross-discipline: you have to look at history, at art, at the development and squashing of ideas over time – and also, how they’ve been made operative or not operative.”

She circles back to the question of what keeps her awake at night. “Apart from whether I remembered to pay the phone bill, it’s the development of international intellectual institutions that have freedom of speech between humans across the globe, where we can really grapple with these extremely important ideas about what we will or will not do in our lifetimes,” she says. “Because one of the main things that has changed is that we’ve created a system that can destroy us. We know that, right? And that’s new. We’ve never had that before.” With this thought, it’s back to creating new firmaments in her studio.