Summary

In “The Tattered Ruins of the Map: On Sarah Sze’s Centrifuge,” Smith uses an art installation to meditate on the meaning of images themselves. She focuses specifically on a yet unnamed room in Sze’s studio in which a cluttered collection of images hangs from strings. Smith notes that she and Sze were born into a time when the “image-map of the world” was not yet complete and just “before the time we ceased thinking of images as the representation of any particular external reality and started to live within images themselves” (204). She reflects that perhaps the only way to expose and make visible the simulation that our lives have become is through “total rupture” (206).

Smith notes that none of Sze’s images...