A review of Tara Donovan's work and a little insight into how her work are made, by Christine Muhlke:
In the art world, Tara Donovan has become the belle of the banal. She employs everyday objects such as drinking straws, buttons or No. 2 pencils to create large-scale sculptures and prints that take on a life (and light) of their own. She allows the shape of the chosen material to determine the form of the piece until it becomes magically other (think vast moonscape in Styrofoam cups), managing to transcend both materiality and gimmickry in a culture that celebrates both.
In her latest series, ‘‘Drawings (Pins),’’ on view this month at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea, shimmering metallic ‘‘canvases’’ are composed of dressmaker pins — tens of thousands of them. The cumulative effect is almost painterly. While these works are two-dimensional, they deal with the same issues as her ‘‘site-responsive’’ sculptures, as she calls them: ‘‘It’s all about perceiving this material from a distance and close up and how the light interacts with it,’’ Donovan recently explained, citing how Scotch tape, stuck to itself in biomorphic swirls, takes on a ‘‘fugitive color’’ when hit by the sun. ‘‘I’m constantly looking for this kind of phenomenological experience.’’
Her work could be classified as the ultimate manifestation of O.C.D. — take a million plastic cups and lock yourself in a museum for two weeks — but Donovan, an upbeat, charismatic New Yorker who earned a MacArthur Foundation ‘‘genius’’ grant when she was 38, sees to it that each installation is a highly social event. ‘‘It’s a really nice way to visit,’’ she says.
When I arrived at the ground-floor studio in her home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, six weeks before the show was to open, 10 assistants sat before Gatorboard panels, inserting pins gathered from several 32-gallon trash cans. They talked intimately or worked quietly to music, as they’d been doing for the last year.
‘‘I just ordered 800 Band-Aids,’’ Donovan says with one of her frequent, highly contagious laughs. Dressed in a vibrant Zero + Maria Cornejo tunic over leggings and a punk-looking necklace of chain wrapped around wood by her friend Victoria Simes, she is just the kind of person you’d actually like to sit next to while you coaxed a million toothpicks into a cube.
‘‘I think a lot of people get caught up when they ask me about the labor,’’ she says, ‘‘and I always think the labor is sort of the reward: I’ve already figured this thing out. All I have to do now is do this thing. It’s very freeing. I can think about what I want to cook for dinner!’’
These days, Donovan can have all the toothpicks she wants — the better to fill her other 7,000-square-foot studio, a few blocks from the house. At the moment, it’s filled with a dazzling sculpture made of tight, silvery curls, part of her next Pace show, ‘‘Untitled (Mylar),’’ which runs from March 4 to April 23. When she was waitressing to support herself, she ordered toothpicks through the restaurant’s supplier one case at a time. Even when her work was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, she was still waiting on Cindy Sherman and Laurie Anderson at Savoy in SoHo. But it’s a day job she doesn’t regret: ‘‘I’m the most amazing multitasker in the world,’’ she says. ‘‘And I swear it’s all from waiting tables. It’s like the best skill ever.’’
As the mother of twin 1-year-old boys, she needs that skill. Donovan says she manages to go upstairs at 5 p.m. each day and tries to keep her work and home life separate, even though she designed them to coexist. Her three-story house, like her art, is a deliberate and meticulous manifestation of her aesthetic, from the towering honeycomb front gate she designed to the way the light indirectly infuses the space; some of the floors are made from the stacked ends of two-by-fours. The project also introduced her to her husband, Robbie Crawford, who worked for the firm Standard Architects.
‘‘We managed to meet, date and get married, and the house still wasn’t done,’’ she says while Crawford makes butternut squash soup in their open kitchen.
Upon entering the front door, visitors are staggered by the sight of the 40-foot enclosed staircase — especially if Donovan is welcoming them from the invisible walkway high above. Her ‘‘clean studio’’ on the second floor has since been divided to make the kids’ room, which is filled with mini Modernist furniture designed by Crawford. The third-floor living area and kitchen are the heart of the house, anchored by an enormous stone fireplace. Donovan and Crawford like to cook and entertain (her favorite cookbook is ‘‘Olives and Oranges,’’ by Sara Jenkins and Mindy Fox), especially since the artist would rather stay home than hit the art-party circuit.
I ask her if she had attended Art Basel Miami, and Donovan just laughs. ‘‘I don’t want to hang around with a bunch of 20-year-olds talking about getting to shake Jeffrey Deitch’s hand,’’ she says. ‘‘I mean, I’m assuming this is the kind of shenanigans that go on?’’
At lunchtime, she and Andrea Glimcher, Pace’s director of communications, drop me off at Saltie, her local locavore cafe, in Glimcher’s chauffered S.U.V., Donovan offering sandwich suggestions. After I order, the woman behind the counter asks me, ‘‘Is that Tara Donovan? I used to wait on her at Marlow & Sons all the time. Wow,’’ she says with a sigh. ‘‘Talk about having it all.’’ 1
And now here is a review from the Barbara Krakow Gallery:
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A review from the New York Times written by Carol Kino:
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.
''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.''
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.
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.)
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.''
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.''
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.''
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 ''Moir?' 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.''
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.''
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.
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.'' 3
From the Rice Gallery : A Review on Tara Donovan's piece Haze
Tara Donovan’s work always begins with the properties of a single material. Typically, Donovan selects an everyday, mass-produced item that is so familiar to us that it has escaped our notice. Scotch tape, toothpicks, pencils, and clear drinking straws are among these items she has chosen as artistic media. She studies the medium’s properties and by varying the light, quantity and arrangement, she develops a set of rules that serves to contain and guide the final form. Dictated by the material’s unique properties, the installation “grows” through repetitive labor. Along with Tara, Rice students and others realized Haze through a time-consuming marathon that the artist humorously referred to as “a mechanized process without the luxury of a machine.”
Donovan calls her installations site-responsive, in that she expands, compresses, or changes their shapes in relation to the space in which she installs them. Haze occupied the entire width of Rice Gallery’s 44-foot back wall, and rose up to more than two-thirds of its 16-foot height. The work’s gently curving top edge was echoed in swellings across the surface, making it seem vaguely organic. Its form seemed familiar, yet ambiguous. At a distance, one felt that he or she was looking at a formation of encrusted minerals, a cross section of a coral reef, or wisps of a strange, opaque fog. Up close, the image sharpened and the viewer’s preconceptions changed instantly, swept away in the recognition of surprisingly familiar objects from which Haze was made. Viewed from any perspective, Haze was a beautiful and poetic presence, real yet indefinable. 4
Sources:
1 Muhlke, Christine. "The Right Stuff | Tara Donovan Is the Ultimate Material Girl." Rev. of Untitled, Tara Donovan. New York Times Style Magazine 11 Feb. 2011: n. pag. Tmagazine.blog.mytimes.com. New York Times Company, 11 Feb. 2011. Web. 16 Nov. 2012.
2 McQuaid, Cate. "Minimalist Touch Makes the Most of Everyday Materials." Rev. ofTara Donovan Drawings & Sculptures. 2 Nov. 2006: n. pag.Barbarakrakowgallery.com. Barbara Krakow Gallery. Web. 12 Nov. 2012.
3 Kino, Carol. "ART; The Genius of Little Things." Rev. of Tara Donovan Drawings & Sculptures. New York Times 28 Sept. 2008: n. pag. Nytimes.com. New York Times Company, 28 Sept. 2008. Web. 16 Nov. 2012.
4 "Tara Donovan, Haze." Ricegallery.org. Rice University, 2003. Web. 18 Nov. 2012.
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