Tara Donovan
Elwyn Palmerton
The idea of site-specific installation was originally seen as a way to circumvent the sterility of the white-cube, evade the materialism of the market, and give control of the exhibition context back to artists. Even so, it’s ironic but not surprising that Tara Donovan’s current installation at Pace-Wildenstein looks like nothing so much as a commercial for the austerity of the white-cube, for Pace-Wildenstein, and for the commodifiable products of her practice. It’s not her fault, necessarily. These spaces are tough to fill and the best art sometimes gets dwarfed.
Still, none of this would matter if her sculpture packed more of a punch or its problematic aspects didn’t seem conveniently polite. By conforming neatly to the shape of the gallery and blending elegantly with the white walls and high sky-lights, it seems to advertise the expense of both her material profligacy and the slick gallery. The combination of the ostensibly humble material in excessive quantities and high-status context comes across as weirdly, if perhaps inadvertently, disingenuous.
Made from a gazillion plastic cups arranged on the floor in stacks ranging from one cup to about three feet high it resembles a topological map or arctic, snow-blown tundra. The gallery’s sky-lights bathe it in soft luminosity. The lower stacks of translucent cups reveal hints of the gallery’s floor and suggest ice melting and flowing into the valleys. The peaks and areas of near collapse suggest mountain ranges and precipitous cliffs in ways offer dramatic shifts of scale but fall short of maintaining the illusion. It’s logistically impressive but short circuits: by equating consumer waste with melting polar ice caps, Donovan’s sculpture reduces itself to the level of public service announcement.
It doesn’t help that this genre of sculpture, mass quantities of one type of cheap object arranged according to a few rules mode, has been conventional, if not cliché, for quite a while. Donovan’s examples do distinguish themselves by virtue of their scale, laboriousness and attention to light, but she’s hardly its best practitioner. Phoebe Washburn’s similar installations, for example, are better, smaller, more fun and tend to invasively colonize the gallery and question it, rather than merely occupy it. What makes the genre so arbitrary, and what Washburn mostly circumvents, is that the type of rigor involved is purely academic and arbitrary; why not, for example, use two or three different sizes of plastic cup? Unlike Washburn’s insouciant take on it, Donovan’s is smart in ways that are safe, and safe in ways that are tastefully elegant.
Like a lot of repetitive, process-oriented work, Donovan’s sculptures leave me thinking about their relationship and resemblance to computer animation. The rigid parameters of her topography recall wire-frame digital images. The arctic landscape theme especially calls to mind cheesy fractal landscape calendars. After all, rote process is, by definition, what machines do best. Just as blockbuster movies’ computer animations leave me palpably aware that they are, in more than one sense, a bunch of Excel spreadsheets, Donovan’s work and its reduction to simple formulas, facts and dimensions, can only put me in a mind of time, labor and money.
In John Cage’s "Lecture on Nothing"–a "lecture" written as musical composition–a female voice intones, "If one is making/something/which is to be nothing/, / the one making must/love and be/patient/with the material/he chooses. Otherwise/he calls attention to the/material." Donovan’s sculpture draws attention to something that she might not even think of as a material: the gallery space. The problem is that Donovan’s process doesn’t seem to account for entropy, an essential quality of all materials. The stacks are all glued to the floor and the taller stacks lean, supported by the mutual reinforcement of adjacent stacks. Far from being a trivial aspect, these modest "cheats" highlight the arbitrariness of her parameters; why stacking, for instance, or why cups, even? The unity of the piece shifts from its poetry to its formal presence to its material, before landing on laboriousness as its central preoccupation. Her method gives the impression of a denial or evasion, one that draws attention to the literal presence of her materials and, consequently, the market-value, of her final product.
