Two big things you might not be aware of: the planet’s dying, and we spend too much time looking at screens. Well, good thing American artist Sarah Sze is here to really ram all that down your throat in her new Artangel installation, where she’s taken over an abandoned Victorian waiting room above Peckham Rye station.
She’s welded steel rods together into the shape of a globe and filled it with dozens of screens. They show volcanoes, traffic, wildlife and furnaces. Behind it, wires are twisted into branches as projectors spin around them. The whole thing feels like you’re browsing infinite tabs, doom-scrolling the apocalypse, exploring a desktop exploding with a billion screenshots and a mess of folders. It’s visually impressive enough, if a little unwieldy and ugly, like a judgemental, miserable disco ball.
The thing is, whacking images of a burning world and traffic on a big globe and soundtracking the whole thing with a ticking clock is insanely heavy handed. And like so much contemporary ecologically focused art, it serves no purpose other than lecturing you about something you’re already on board with. We’re the choir, we’re the totebagging, reusable-coffee-cup-sipping bozos who bother coming to this kind of exhibition, we don’t need to be preached at. Put this on an oil platform or something, somewhere it might have a point.
It’s not all ecology though. This is also about living in an age of mass visual communication, screens and technological connectivity. But ‘there sure are a lot of screens around these days’ is one of the most mundane, banal observations you could possibly make in 2023.
This is about memory and images and time and how the planet’s dying and you look at your phone too much, but this art won’t make the slightest bit of difference to any of that.
