In the Studio with Tara Donovan

From the March issue of ART + AUCTION

By Rebecca Cascade

In September 2003, Tara Donovan had just finished sitting for a photography shoot with her monumental sculpture Transplanted in the atrium of the IBM building in midtown Manhattan. She noticed a gentleman of a certain age admiring her work. "I said to my friend, 'That old guy likes my sculpture, I can tell,'" Donovan recalls. At the same time, a couple of women approached Donovan to compliment her on the work, which is made from 10,000 pounds of tar paper but resembles an expansive landscape of ridged, black rock. Overhearing their conversation, the man introduced himself as Robert Irwin. "He's kind of my idol," says Donovan of the installation art pioneer. "I literally said, 'Can I hug you?'"

Soon after, Donovan joined PaceWildenstein, where, as it happens, Irwin himself has shown for nearly 40 years. At 36, Donovan is the megagallery's youngest artist—though not by much, since president Marc Glimcher began waging what he calls a "reengagement campaign" to sign up new blood, including Donovan and such artists as James Siena and Keith Tyson. Glimcher says, "Two years ago, Chuck Close pretty much ordered me to see her show at Ace Gallery. He said, 'This is somebody we need. The fit couldn't be better.'"

The exhibition that caught Close's attention was Donovan's breakout show, in the spring of 2003. She filled Ace's huge New York space with six nearly room-size sculptures, each made from a single industrial material arranged to resemble organic or pictorial forms. They included a mini-metropolis constructed from nearly 20,000 various-size yellow pencils; a mound of shifting moiré patterns created by enormous rolls of adding-machine paper; a field of overlapping circles made of poured puddles of Elmers glue. The tour de force, Haze, was a 42-foot-long wall of some two million clear plastic drinking straws packed together like firewood. The piece drew comparisons to encroaching mold and a (slightly dirty) wall of melting ice. Following the Ace show, Glimcher commissioned a version of Transplanted for the IBM buildings indoor sculpture garden, which is managed by Pace. Donovan's first solo show with Pace is currently on view through April 22, to be followed by an installation in the lobby of the Lever House in New York this summer.

With its serial units and prefabricated materials, Donovan's work has been compared with Eva Hesse's and Richard Serra's as well as with the perceptual experiments of artists like Irwin and James Turrell. Tara is putting a fresh spin on several legacies—Minimalism, the earth movement, Process art, says James Elaine, projects curator of the UCLA Hammer Museum, where the artist had a show in the summer of 2004. But she has taken the macho super- seriousness out of those movements. The piece Donovan created especially for the Hammer is made up of bunches of fishing line that suggest delicate white sea anemones. And, Elaine adds, her work is more vulnerable. Literally. Three days after the Ace show opened, Haze came tumbling down because of construction in an adjacent building. Donovan, her mother, and some friends pulled a couple of all-nighters to get the piece back up.

Donovan grew up in Nyack, New York, just north of New York City. "I always knew I wanted to be an artist, but I had no idea what that meant," she says. "I just knew I was good at making stuff. For class projects, I was the one who could make a tepee out of something lying around the house." After graduating from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., she worked as a waitress for six years, then earned an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The following year, in 2000, Donovan landed in the Whitney Biennial, which, she says, changed nothing, except for introducing me to Doug Chrismas [the owner of Ace Gallery].

When I met with Donovan last fall at her Brooklyn studio/apartment, she had just determined which materials she would be using for each of her upcoming shows. She was downright giddy about this accomplishment (she never works with the same material twice).

At Pace, she is simulating a digitized, pixilated landscape by covering the entire floor of the gallery's 6,000-square-foot West 25th Street space with various-size stacks of seven-ounce plastic drinking cups. At Lever House, Donovan is creating a 42-by-8-foot sculpture composed of layered stacks of loosely folded plastic sheets.

At the same time she was working out these logistics, Donovan was creating a series of drawings at Pace Prints. These are neither studies for her three-dimensional works nor drawings in the traditional pencil-and-paper sense, but rather stand-alone works that serve as another vehicle for her investigations of everyday materials—in this case, rubber bands.

The drawings relate very directly to the sculptures in that they use the same process. "With all of my work, I make a rule and then that rule is repeated," says Donovan, as she and an assistant repeatedly put rubber bands inside others to form concentric bunches and then place them in a shallow, two-by-four-foot printing tray. Once the tray is packed, the printing pros take over. Other works in the series have consisted of a single rubber band kept relatively straight; all in all, Donovan expects there will be about 20 variations.

Like most of Donovan's artworks, the rubber band series started with a trip to her favorite surplus store, Hudson Valley Material Exchange, in upstate New York. (She also buys at her local supermarket and dollar store.) She gets whatever's cheap and starts experimenting with it. "Once I isolate a material, I clear away everything else," she says. "It's just me and the thing and trying to figure out what the thing can do." With every artwork comprising so much stuff, its surprising that her loftlike studio shows little evidence of accumulation. Still, on a recent visit, it was a hive of activity. While Donovan dealt with a speeding ticket at the kitchen table—lit by an overhead lamp constructed from clothespins—her studio manager was busy with paperwork and four assistants were spooling adding-machine paper into enormous rolls for private commissions. A bank of windows revealed enviable views of Manhattan, and four guidebooks to France lay stacked on a coffee table, in preparation for a six-month fellowship in Sache at the Atelier Calder. Donovan is also the first recipient of a $50,000 prize awarded by the Calder Foundation.

On those days when Donovan is figuring out what to do with a material, she says, "I'm in the corner banging my head against the wall." She cuts, melts, glues—whatever will help her better understand the properties of what she's working with. "There is no formula. When I figure it out—it usually takes a month—I think Im a genius."

"Tara will be mad at me for saying this," says Glimcher, "but for a young person to have this kind of facility is incredibly unusual." He points out that the quantifiable difference is slight between any old pile of tar paper and Donovan's Transplanted, but her transformative touch is forceful. She goes from one unrelated material to another, reinventing the wheel every time, and ignites its invisible power with just a few moves. At Pace, her sculptures range from $30,000 to $200,000 depending on size; drawings are priced at $15,000. According to Glimcher, two smaller versions of Haze sold for $100,000 at Art Basel last June within the first 20 minutes of the fair.

Perhaps more gratifying than that success is being identified with a group of artists to whom she says her own practice is deeply indebted—namely, Irwin and Turrell, but also Sol LeWitt. Last summer, Donovan had just finished installing Nebulous, a Scotch-tape piece, on the gallery floor for a group show. LeWitt came over to where Donovan was working and mistakenly stepped on her piece. "There is this crunch, and he's mortified," recalls Glimcher. She tells him not to worry, and they have a great conversation. Later, she is clutching that piece of tape, and she says, 'I'm keeping this forever—this is the erased Donovan!'"

For Donovan, the perception of the work is as important as its making. "What lends my work its own identity is the challenge of figuring out how a material can perform its own act of sublimation," she says. "I'm interested in the phenomenological aspect of these materials, like the shadow of yourself on the straws. Those are the things that Im fascinated by."

From the March 2006 issue of Art + Auction.

For more information or to subscribe, click here to visit ART + AUCTION online.




Image: Ellen Labenski, courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York