Art review: Tara Donovan at San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art

Tara Donovan's best sculptures employ thousands of ordinary household objects in installations whose structural integrity seems miraculous. Adjusted to respond to the architecture of the space in which they are installed, they establish a perceptual bridge between object and environment. The intuited recognition is felt in a viewer's bones as much as it might be seen with his eyes. "Uncanny" is the word that keeps coming to mind.

Sometimes, though — and too often in the traveling survey of 15 installations at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art — the sculptures seem to be little more than clever, arbitrary accumulations of material. Once grasped, they just sort of sit there.

Thousands of white-plastic drinking cups are abutted in stacks of varying heights to make rolling, wintry “landscapes” emanating translucent light. Mylar mounds suggest synthetic moss, while balls of crinkled paper plates are like gigantic virus molecules.

Untold hundreds of lavender buttons, glued in organic stacks that rise from the floor, yield the appearance of man-made stalagmites or a coral reef. Loops of Scotch-tape unfurl across the floor in irregular, apparently random designs, like a patch of ice that turns out to be sticky rather than slippery.

In each case, you admire more than engage these works, impressed by the cleverness of their materials and fabrication. But an aura of inertia plays against them. It's as if, once parsed, there's no expectation of further insight.

Other Donovan sculptures could not be more different — notably, a trio of 3-foot cubes made from toothpicks, straight pins and sheets of cracked glass, all made in 2004, and the 2003 “Haze Neblina,” a vast wall lined with literally hundreds of thousands of plastic drinking straws. Fragility has never seemed more powerful, an inherent contradiction that turns out to be surprisingly moving.

The cube sculptures came about by happy accident, when Donovan knocked a box of toothpicks to the floor. Most spilled out and made the expected mess, but one cluster of toothpicks that had been tightly packed into a corner of the box held its shape. Intrigued, the artist tried to reproduce the effect. The scale grew. At the size of 3 feet per side, the finished cube seems like a bundle of potential energy that has been corralled into unlikely service.

What holds the thousands of toothpicks together? Adhesion — a combination of density, friction and gravity, from which a few stray toothpicks on the floor around the base seem determined to escape.

Those errant shards are important to the sculpture, however, because they hold the visual key to what could conceivably happen, especially in a seismically unstable setting. In a world that is alive and constantly changing, the static sculpture seems to expand beyond its physical limitations, encompassing the floor beneath your feet, the room in which you stand and the inherent instability of all perceptual experience.

The same happens with the cube of straight pins, although here the silvery, nickel-plated bits of steel add prickly, glinting light to the mix. The tempered glass cube, made from stacked sheets whose blue-green color is like ice, has been whacked hard on all four corners from bottom to top, creating a labyrinth of cracks and bits of glass that may (or may not) portend a block ready to fall to pieces.

Like the toothpick sculpture, these two cubes include bits and pieces scattered around the base that foretell the form's inevitable dissolution and decay. Entropy interrupted is a powerful theme. Donovan's sculptures struggle against inescapable degeneration and decline, if only for the moment-by-moment experience during which you perceive the works.

A cube is a horizontal and vertical grid pushed into three dimensions, a kind of abstract map of the modern built environment. “Haze Neblina” pulls actual architecture into the mix.

The work consists of what might be millions of plastic drinking straws, cut to varying lengths and stacked in irregular rows, perpendicular to a very long wall. At each end, side walls act to contain the sculpture.

The irregularity of the straws' lengths results in a surface that is not flat; instead it bubbles and undulates, like a pillowy bank of cumulus clouds or a spreading vertical expanse of soapsuds. The sculpture's temporary reality moves to the perceptual foreground. An intellectual awareness of being bounded in time is transformed into perceptual experience.

One of the best features of “Haze Neblina” is wholly unexpected, however. As you walk along the length of the wall, either up close to the straws or across the room, the constantly shifting angle of your sight-line creates an optical disruption. Along the way it matches up with the protruding length of some drinking straws, either inside the tube or in the space around it between abutted straws. Visually, the solid gallery wall seems to crackle and shatter, not unlike the way lighting bolts appear to buckle inside clouds. "Neblina," the word for "fog" in Spanish and Portuguese, seems an apt description.

The traveling exhibition, concluding an 18-month tour, is surprisingly small. (If you happened to see the 2005 Donovan survey at L.A.'s sprawling Ace Gallery, its 13 works provided roughly as full an introduction as this museum show.) The selection is also odd. The show spans 2001 to '08, with just one work from each of the first three years and one from '07.

Helpfully, the museum has installed a selection of Minimal and Post-minimal works from its permanent collection in the space across the street from the former downtown train depot where the Donovan show is installed. (Don't miss the wonderful two-channel video — a sleek projection showing abstract images of luminous simplicity, paired with a clunky monitor with documentary footage of the extensive drudge-labor involved in producing the projection's set-ups — by Mexico City artist Melanie Smith.) It provides good context for the repetition of simple materials installed in space-gobbling accumulations that Donovan is trying to bring into the 21st century.

Donovan's is an uneven accomplishment, to be sure. But at moments it takes your breath away.

-- Christopher Knight

“Tara Donovan,” San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, 1100 Kettner Blvd., (858) 454-3541, through Feb. 28. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Tuesdays. Closed Wednesdays. $10

Photos: Tara Donovan, "Untitled," mylar, 2007, and "Untitled (Pins)," "Untitled (Toothpicks)," "Untitled (Glass)," all 2004; Credit: San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

"smart, clever, uncanny"
Waste. Excess. Bulk.
Bureaucracy. Academia. Self-styled Intelligentsia
"It provides good context for the repetition of simple materials installed in space-gobbling accumulations that Donovan is trying to bring into the 21st century"

Isnt this exactly what we must end to survive the 21st century?
Less is more.
More is, well, desperate?
What does this have to do with ANYTHING?
Sure is "smart" though.
God help us.

It is time to put aside childish things. And toothpicks and straws and paper cups. You know, Trash. Learn to recycle, and get a life.

art collegia delenda est

[William Wray]

Yet ANOTHER show of household objects glued together to make clever shapes that pensively become sculptural abbreviation of a fantasy landscape. This must be a kind of instinct of creativity subliminally deformed by growing up watching the Rose Parade where gluing flowers together makes magical floats of kitschy themes of city brotherhood.
All though my years as a commercial artist and animator I found the most popular theme that “creative” businessmen types wanted to do was some from of metamorphous where someone or something changed into something else. In self-mesmerizing tones they would describe their unique idea of rock stars turning into angelic werewolves and ultimately into the products they were pitching. We see a new metaphoric TV commercial once a week.
Surprise art world, it’s to easy--- Anyone can do it by lying down on a hilltop and staring at the clouds until you see a big dogs head or a ducky float by and meld into another shape. This is graphic design with found textiles. Plumb deeper, learn to draw and paint. it’s the hardest, but most rewarding thing you will ever do.

[jblue]

The piece is titled "Haze"- not "Haze Neblina". The MCASD lists all titles in Spanish after the title in English on all wall cards- hence the "Neblina"- meaning haze or fog in Spanish- next to "Haze".

[Bruntastic]

In response to William and Donald's comments on Donovan's show, I'm with you, I can see where being a modernist or commercial artist can turn you off from this work. The art world is in a delta of Modernism, "anything goes" these days. I get pretty sick and tired of going to galleries and seeing the "flavor of the week" or work that is meant to be sold, no real "soul" to the work.

It's pretty easy to read an article and criticize the writer's words. Many viewers aren't into "conceptual" art, or art that they don't understand. I've seen Donovan's work in New York. The installation consisted of over 3,000,000 (that's right 3 million) plastic cups displayed on the Pace Wildenstein gallery's floor. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of art I have ever seen. Instead of getting caught up in the language of Knight's words in regards to this show (of course language is the driving force behind conceptualism), see the work in person. Her artwork does take one's breath away.

[Donald Frazell]

Why is more, more? When a small Klee or Schwitters has more soul and intensity of life than all of the mammoth Mausoleums and Wildesnsteins i teh world cant match up. This is Modrnism, its Cotnempt art. Modernism started with the post impressionists and those northerners like Munch and the much better Nolde. And easterners like Klimt and even Vrubel.

With the incorporation of first Japan, then Africa and Oceanic art it became truly Modern, world inclusive, about us, aobut our common heritage and defining what it is to be human. To explore nature, to reach for God. sorry, but tons of plastic trash just doesnt get it done.

Instead of masses of consumables, how about learning ones craft, and makeing something scream passion the size of a magazine cover? It can, aned has, been done. This aint it. Sorry. We have regressed into selfishness and Meism. Its time to be about Us once more. Art has a Purpsoe a roll in life, it is time it did its job again. Art is the highest common denominator, Entertainment, and this, is its lowest.

art collegia delenda est

[hairycarrion]

All the art speak and academic masturbation aside, I see the work as a response or reflection to the banality of our capitalist-consumptive society.