C O 2 * [art + sustainability]: Tara Donovan: The Genius of Little Things

Untitled, 2003
Styrofoam Cups, Hot Glue
6'(H) x 20'(W) x 19' 2"(D)

By CAROL KINO

On a recent afternoon at the Pace Prints workshop in Chelsea, the artist Tara Donovan was hard at work with two master printers. They had already completed four pieces that day, and now they were assembling the plate for the fifth, a thickly inked sheet of tempered glass measuring 40 by 48 inches. Once Ms. Donovan had prepared it, the glass would be used to create a single monotype, or unique print — although she prefers to call it a drawing.

After placing a wooden frame around the plate the printers stepped back a few feet while Ms. Donovan donned a pair of safety goggles. Then she picked up a hammer and chisel. “This is the fun part,” she said. Placing the blade precisely near one edge of the glass, she delivered a sharp whack with the hammer. The pane broke neatly, as if on command, sending out jagged rays from the point of impact.

Tara Donovan prints from broken glass

“I’m getting good at this,” she crowed. “First try!” As the team gathered around to look at her handiwork, which remained contained in a neat rectangle by the wooden frame, the broken glass began to crackle and pop, like thousands of Rice Krispies. For Ms. Donovan the visit to Pace offered a welcome break from two long-term projects. Her first monograph was published this month by Monacelli Press and her first major museum show, a traveling retrospective, opens on Oct. 10 at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. “It’s nice to have a surge of new work,” she said of her printmaking at Pace. “So much of the last seven months has been spent thinking about the past.”

Untitled, 2003
Styrofoam Cups, Hot Glue
6'(H) x 20'(W) x 19' 2"(D)
(Detail)

Ms. Donovan, 38, who recently won a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, has drawn attention over the last decade for her ability to transform huge quantities of prosaic manufactured materials — plastic-foam cups, pencils, tar paper — into sculptural installations that suggest the wonders of nature. The retrospective will include many of the works that made her name, like the series “Bluffs” (2006), which she created by gluing hundreds of thousands of clear shirt buttons together into craggy peaks that recall white coral reefs or stalagmites.

Bluffs, 2005
Buttons, Glue
3 1/2'(H) x 5'(W) x 12'(D)

Bluffs, 2005
Buttons, Glue
3 1/2'(H) x 5'(W) x 12'(D)
(Detail)

To construct “Untitled (Plastic Cups)” (2006), which must be freshly built each time it is shown, she stacks millions of transparent plastic cups in a tight, rigorous grid and sculptures the swaying piles into gentle waves that suggest a cross-section of a pixilated landscape. (Like much of her work, it can be expanded or contracted to fit the space.)“Nebulous,” an installation Ms. Donovan first created in 2002, initially brings to mind an expanse of translucent moss or a bank of fog hovering near the floor. It is built with 100 rolls of Scotch Tape, Magic and Invisible. (The Institute recently acquired a variant of the piece for its permanent collection.)

Untitled (Plastic Cups) (detail), 2006; plastic cups, dimensions variable

Though Ms. Donovan’s new prints won’t be on view, her glass-shattering talents will be: she intends to recreate “Untitled (Glass),” a process-oriented sculpture that she first made in 2004. It involves stacking sheets of tempered glass into a perfect cube, then working carefully one by one from bottom to top, striking a single corner of each pane with a hammer. As with the print, Ms. Donovan will contain the glass with a wooden frame while she works. Once the mold is removed, the cube “stays in place,” she said. “You can still see the layers, but everything’s really broken into itty-bitty teeny-weeny shards.”

Untitled, 2001
Shattered Tempered Glass Held by Friction & Gravity Only
35"(H) x 35"(W) x 35"(D)

Unlike some of the installations, which are fabricated by Ms. Donovan and her assistants in her studio and reassembled on site, the glass cube must always be built from scratch — and perhaps more than once during a single showing. “If you bump into this and knock a corner off it, it can’t be repaired or remade with the same materials,” said Ms. Donovan, who tends to speak in short staccato bursts. “It has to be made over again.”

And when the show is over, she added, matter of factly, “it gets taken away with a shovel.”

Untitled, 2001
Shattered Tempered Glass Held by Friction & Gravity Only
35"(H) x 35"(W) x 35"(D)
(Detail)

To some in the art world, the appeal of Ms. Donovan’s work lies in its relationship to Minimalism, as propounded by the likes of Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse. “When most artists of the current generation refer to Minimalism, it’s usually in quotation marks, as appropriation or perhaps critique,” said Nicholas Baume, the Institute of Contemporary Art’s chief curator, who instigated the retrospective. “Tara’s work isn’t ironic. It actually takes up the discourse of Minimalism. It’s about creating a system, using a structure, and repeating incremental units that can go from the finite to the seemingly infinite.”

Yet where many classical Minimalists adhered to a strictly rectilinear grid, Mr. Baume noted, Ms. Donovan’s work expands well beyond it. “The work has the pragmatic rigor of that earlier American period,” he said, “but it brings it into our own period by suggesting digital, cellular, emergent networks. It seems to speak to the systems that are shaping our lives.”

Moiré, 1999
Adding Machine Paper
2' 8"(H) x 29'(W) x 24' 6 1/2"(D)

Another consistent thread is Ms. Donovan’s ability to uncover unexpected qualities in the most commonplace materials and objects. One of the earliest pieces in the show is a version of “Moiré,” which she originally made for her 1999 master of fine arts thesis exhibition at Virginia Commonwealth University. It comprises several giant rolls of adding-machine tape that she molds and layers into an undulating shape whose surface appears to ripple. To make the rolls, she said, she and her assistants tape hundreds of normal-size rolls together, end on end, rerolling them “really loosely so they’re really malleable.”

Yet while Ms. Donovan seems quite willing to explain how she makes a piece, she is considerably less voluble about the genesis of her ideas. Press her on how an installation began, and she’s likely to respond with something vague, like “I don’t remember specifically” or “It was a matter of identifying transparent materials.”

Untitled, 2008, transparent polyester film

She divulged more about an untitled installation in the Boston show that she will be making on a large scale for the first time. A block of translucent, apparently honeycombed, material within a 24-by-4-foot rectangular cutout in a wall, it consists of 2,500 pounds of plastic sheeting loosely folded over and over onto itself until the material’s fugitive color and texture emerge. Viewers will be able to walk around the piece and see through it into the next room. “You can see people moving on either side,” she said. “It actually creates a very kaleidoscopic sort of effect.”

Like many of her pieces, this one began with a visit several years ago to an industrial surplus store where Ms. Donovan bought a roll of plastic sheeting, hundreds of pounds worth, for about $10, she said, because “I thought it might be handy around the studio.”Eventually “I needed a bunch of the plastic for something else I was doing, she recalled. “I was probably using it as a drop cloth. I was spooling it off, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s actually really interesting, the way it folds on itself.’ A lot of times, things are discovered in accidental ways.” *

*[s(f)l: here, at CO2, it been assumed that Ms. Donavan is "reusing" the plastic material as she was previously using it for another purpose at her studio]

Untitled, 2008, transparent polyester film

Ms. Donovan’s career trajectory has been similarly haphazard, though also quite swift. After her work was chosen for the 2000 Whitney Biennial, she moved back to New York, her hometown, and got a job waiting tables at Savoy, a SoHo restaurant where one lunchtime regular was the painter Chuck Close. She didn’t tell him that she was also an artist until she won a residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation studios in SoHo, where Mr. Close is on the board. Soon afterward she left Savoy to work on her first show at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles, but the two stayed in touch.

In 2003 — several waitressing jobs later — Ace offered Ms. Donovan her first major New York show, in the 25,000-square-foot branch it then maintained in SoHo. Ms. Donovan, given only a month to assemble a crew and create seven installations to fill the space, still leapt at the opportunity because she already had a show planned out in her head. “I tend to make things in the studio on a relatively small scale and then imagine them big,” she said. “So I’d sort of compiled all of this work and just needed the real estate to make it properly.” She has not waited tables since.

Mr. Close visited the show and came away an ardent fan. “I thought it was such an incredible alchemy that she had pulled off with these really simple materials that transcend their physical reality,” he said. “I dragged everybody I knew” to see it.That included most of the top brass from his gallery, PaceWildenstein, which was about to start representing younger artists. Ms. Donovan joined the gallery two years later.

Haze, 2003
Stacked Clear Plastic Drinking Straws
12' 7"(H) x 42' 2"(W) 7 3/4"(D)

Since then, she said, her life has changed considerably. “I feel I have a lot more recognition,” she said. Although she said she was thrilled about receiving the MacArthur grant, she added: “I don’t really know that the money is really going to change anything. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing.”

Her method has long remained consistent. She spends hours experimenting with materials until she happens on something that works. She spends more hours devising a system for creating and assembling the individual elements that will make up the overall piece, so that others can help her fabricate it.

Underpinning it all is her capacity for absorption. “So much about the art-making process is about paying attention,” Ms. Donovan said. “It’s about looking and noticing things.”

Haze, 2003
Stacked Clear Plastic Drinking Straws
12' 7"(H) x 42' 2"(W) 7 3/4"(D)
(Detail)