Maison Hermes 8th Floor, "Le Forum"
Closes May 11
What a mess. What a brilliant mess. Thirty-eight year-old American artist Sarah Sze has turned Maison Hermes 8th Floor "Le Forum" exhibition space in Tokyo's Ginza into a giant rec room. While the artists at MOT are unraveling store-bought objects, Sze piles them — lamps, pillows, cardboard boxes, thread, sheets of paper, chemistry sets, humidifiers, toy cranes and more and more and more — precariously toward the high ceiling and spreads them meticulously across the floor. Look at any one spot and you come across an inexplicable scene, as if from the corner of an art student's disorganized room. Then step back and the circus of bric-a-brac turns into a giant, teetering sculpture.
The intention of Sze's work is to make you look anew at everyday objects. But that is probably less important — they are what they are — than the compositions that she arranges them in. You could spend hours looking at the work; whether you learned anything new wouldn't matter as much as the enjoyment you experienced doing it.