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The Disposable Met: Review on Tara Donovan

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John Haber

John is an arts writer and textbook editor living in New York City. A native New Yorker, he studied physics at Princeton and started writing about art in 1994. His own website now has articles on more than 700 artists and critics, from the early Renaissance to contemporary art. His interests include art and science, art and politics, old and new media, and the future of art. haberarts.com

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Tara Donovan knows how to work the room. In her case, it involves real work and a real appreciation of the room. Ordinary materials play off against an extraordinary installation, solid objects against a whole always about to come apart, and substance against light.

Donovan’s last solo show made waves. Disposable cups stacked on the floor turned the gallery into a lunar landscape. One year later she appeared in “Burgeoning Geometries,” and one could better see the geometry beneath the burgeoning. Simple straight pins became a shining, forty-inch cube. Again she cultivated a sense of beauty and the element of surprise, but one could also better see her modest sense of humor. This was not just carnival entertainment. One had to remain aware of two very distinct scales, neither quite that of sculpture, and to tread carefully.

She could easily have fit into “Undone” more recently at Altria or “Unmonumental” inaugurating the New Museum’s architecture, and she must seem a natural, too, for the Met’s contemporary wing, through April 27. There the cramped mezzanine roughly mimics a private gallery while threatening to spill out onto the usual suspects on the floor above. Already Kara Walker and Neo Rauch have taken turns struggling with the space. Both did so by also struggling with artistic tradition, a nation’s shameful history, and the Met’s permanent collection. With Donovan, it is not so easy, for in her work history either starts with Minimalism or stretches to eternity. Would she have to close the space off entirely or open it to the skies?

She has done neither, and it never quite comes off. She again starts small, with closed loops of Mylar tape of variable length and about the width of a thumbnail. Each loop sticks to the wall. A purely intuitive patterning runs across the entire gallery. It resembles a micrograph of microbial life, with Mylar as its cells. Tara Donovan’s Untitled (Mylar) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007)The gallery’s constraints have obliged her to think more in terms of an image, where her strength lies in her materials and their new form as art object.

At its best, the convergence of object and image suggests that her work to sprung to life. Other artists, too, have used walls to explore the relationship between modular addition and self-driven chaos of living things. Digital art and real-time data all but demand it, while Julie Mehretu and the other artists in “Remote Viewing” at the Whitney back in 2005 thrive on it, but Sol LeWitt was there long before. Without the floor, however, Donovan seems to have lost touch with both the art object and the gallery as landscape to contain it. As formalists used to complain when faced with representational art, it looks like illustration, and you probably hated your biology textbook.

The work most repays attention close up. One could not go too near her plastic cups. One could pick up a pin from the floor of the Whitney at Altria, as gravity partly dissolved the cube, but with equal fear of museum propriety and the sharp point. One cannot touch the tape either, but one can enjoy how variable the loops seem up close and how solid. One never really has to worry about disturbing this work, and it comes closest to her characteristic shimmer when one can focus on the small object. The Met also deserves credit for backing an artist this time who has not had as many museum solo shows. Maybe it will give her a new lease on art history.