Book artists of all times and types have taken literally the idea that we experience books as buildings. Gutenberg’s first Bible was laid out according to the architectural proportions of the golden rectangle; title pages of many early printed books featured etchings of highly wrought façades. These archways invited readers to step through a manifest “door” and into the imaginary spaces—even entire worlds—that books have always provided. More recently, both architecture and literature have been influenced by the philosophy of deconstruction, and contemporary book artists have been reconstructing the book to give new physical forms to old “volumes.”

Into this history comes Sarah Sze, a sculptor and installation artist whose delicate Notepad blends her interest in architectural spaces and everyday materials with the book artist’s fetish for anything related to paper. Sze describes her piece as “a handmade lined pad of paper that folds out into a descending fire escape” (New York Times Style Magazine, December 8, 2008). In this piece, Sze cuts into the pages of a pad of blue-lined, 11 × 14 inch notepaper, and manipulates the altered pages into a cascade of waves whose edges, seen from the side of the pad, form paisley shapes. Meticulously fabricated models of the classic New York fire escape are tucked between the loops, connecting to form a pathway into the whirling maze, or out of it. The result is a miniature universe—half urban grit and half fantasy filigree—where the linear tectonics of the landings and ladders intercept the painterly whorls of bent paper. The piece speaks of the precariousness of our control over events—the paper seems to be on the brink of destruction by fire—while Sze’s careful crafting restores our focus to the preciousness of life. And all this from a pad you can buy at your local stationery store! Or so it seems. . . .

The piece is not made from an ordinary notepad; those pages would be too flimsy. Notepaper could not preserve the rolling shapes Sze has created, and it would not be strong and rigid enough for the tiny slivers of paper that remain between some cuts to maintain their structural integrity. So instead, Sze reproduces the pad using a thick Somerset bookweave paper on which she has lithographed the typical notepad’s blue lines. She uses archival board for the cardboard back of the pad, and Bristol board to construct the ladders and fire escapes. These added elements, and the geometric patterns excised from the pages of the pad, are carved with a laser, and the heat from this process leaves a toasty halo along each cut line. Some paper slivers between laser cuts are so narrow that even the thicker paper sometimes breaks. In these cases, the slivers stick out from the piece like “hanging chads” from a 2000 Florida presidential ballot.

Chads come up elsewhere in Notepad: different sizes of small paper rectangles lie scattered on the floor below the piece (or in the bottom of the Plexiglas box in which the piece hangs—with the artist’s permission—when it must be protected during display). The chads are the cut-out leftovers from the project, and they come in an envelope tucked into the box Sze specially designed for storing and transporting Notepad. A sheet of instructions in the box directs the owner to “sprinkle” the chads “on floor below long ladder”—the degree of randomness depends on the tosser. While a disciple of John Cage would insist on leaving the chads in whatever configuration they happen to land, dealer Carolina Nitsch acknowledges, with a wink, that sometimes her installation team will rough up the pile if it lands in too much of a clump.

Deliberate rearrangements of the sprinkled chads must be done with a light touch, or the resulting pile will look overdetermined. Such artful effort in the midst of random forces is a theme of the entire piece. Notepad pits the coherence of construction against the random destructiveness of nature—yet the construction (represented by the architectural forms) cannot be too solid because it will seem as if we humans are actually invulnerable to hazards. The open-rung ladders and fire escapes are precarious and offer no reliable refuge. Even the landings have large holes (where the stairway to the next fire escape attaches) through which it would be easy to fall. Danger whirls all around: the paper looks as if it is browning like a marshmallow held high over a campfire, and the last ladder descends . . . yes, down and away from the threatening scene, but also out over disconcertingly empty space. If you were to climb down it, you would have to jump into the void to avoid the maelstrom above; when your eye travels down and jumps off, it vaults into the space of the room.

This spatial element connects Notepad to the rest of Sze’s work. Sze assembles the unremarkable flotsam and jetsam of ordinary life into vast arrays that not only take over spaces—such as a second-floor landing in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2002—but become worlds in themselves. Her most recent exhibition (Fall 2010) in the rooms, corners, and bookshelves of Manhattan’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery extended her imaginative reach into the cosmos, as in her piece 360 (Portable Planetarium). At the back of this work, large fire escapes (scaled-up versions of the main form from Notepad) hang in a hidden corner: even the universe needs an emergency exit. But in Notepad, Sze uses book-art techniques to create effects similar to those she usually achieves more fancifully with drinking straws, toilet paper rolls, plants, clementines, tiny lights, whirring fans, and other daily detritus. Thematically, the printed lines of the writing paper replace the doodads as a structuring device. They are also like a net for the mind, and offer a platform on which to collect and express scattered thoughts.

To achieve her visual and material structure, Sze worked with master printer Megan Foster, at Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. Then a team of twelve graduate and undergraduate printmaking students assembled the edition of forty in six months. (Neiman Center Artistic Director Tomas Vu-Daniel asked Sze to create a piece while she was teaching at Columbia. Four to six artists are chosen by advisory board nomination per year, and proceeds from sales benefit the Neiman Center—fifty percent to student fellowships; the rest to future projects.) Sze was chosen because it was hoped she would give the center an interesting challenge. Indeed, Sze came with many ideas and ended up using technologies in unexpected ways. The laser machine was on site; the student workers carefully fabricated every detail, including putting gum at the top of the notepad.

The closest kin to Notepad, in my opinion, is a pinwheel. A pinwheel is made from a standard flat shape whose sections are formed into arcs that catch the wind (another unpredictable, and potentially destructive, force of nature). Also like Notepad, it has a whimsical spirit that lets us regard soberly constructed geometries with childlike wonder. In the book arts community, that combination can be most readily found in pop-up books, but works by “pop-up queen” Carol Barton seem garish and didactic in comparison with Sze’s cool white undulations. Even Ronald King’s Alphabeta Concertina (London: Circle Press, 1983), a pop-up book of all-white pages with letters of the alphabet emerging from each opening spread, comes off as elementary. A more subtle and original work in the pop-up genre is Mei-Ling Hom’s In the Morning (Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1990), whose all-white pages open to reveal pop-up architectural forms of the city seen by the author while wandering in search of a morning pastry. Still, the physical context of the codex itself makes these shapes, lovely as they are, more conventional than Sze’s. And though Julie Chen’s book sculptures are conceptually more sophisticated than most pop-up books, they are too word-heavy and heady to make a good analogue for Notepad. A better comparison is Dan Kelm’s Earth III (Easthampton, MA: The Wide Awake Garage, 1989), an artists’ book made of an assortment of square and triangular “pages.” Its specially constructed box and pieces of binding hardware are, like many publications from Kelm’s Wide Awake Garage, engineered intricately enough to match Sze’s architectural aesthetic.

But all of these examples allow for—even require—viewer participation. Pop-up books demand page-turning, Chen’s book sculptures arrive with “some assembly required,” and Kelm’s piece lives in its box and must be extracted by each reader. Sze’s work, by contrast, works when it is looked at, not touched. As such, it shares more with Clarissa Sligh’s What’s Happening with Momma? (Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1988), an accordion book that can be read completely when the book is propped up and unfolded on a pedestal. Here, the unfolding is not just a result of the concertina binding; each page (which is shaped like a house with a pitched roof) also has an accordion of paper steps unfolding from the front door, to form a stoop on which the story is being told. The story is being told in words on these folded steps, as well as metaphorically among the people who sit on the stoop, and Sligh’s book thereby evokes an urban context of brownstone apartment buildings similar to Sze’s Notepad.

Though the collectors who have bought Notepad are, by Sze’s dealer’s estimation, people interested in books and bookish art, this work generally does not circulate in the artists’ book community. It was recently shown in the Cutters exhibition at Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery (2009), and has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Clearly, this work belongs to the art world more than the book world or the artists’ book world, which has long debated the inclusion of sculptural works within the category of the artists’ book. It is meant to be seen on a wall, not pored through like a book or played with like many artists’ books. Still, a viewer can engage physically with this work by moving around to view it from different angles, and by deciding where and how to install it. The Plexiglas box may put owners at ease by reducing the risk of damage, but it is precisely this exposure that lends intensity to Notepad. What is a collector to do?

The best location I have seen for this piece was provided by the artist herself. A photograph of Sze in the New York Times Style Magazine reveals that she hangs her own Notepad on the wall next to a window in her studio. In this location, the ladder at the bottom of the piece inches down the wall and gestures toward the window, where a real ladder could provide a real fire escape. The eye travels not just to the vast space of the room, but to the space of the street, the city, and the rest of the world.