Tara Donovan
Untitled (Plastic Cups)
2006
PaceWildenstein
an amazingly cool installation; here are some comments:
Jerry Saltz, via artnet, 4/3/06, HEAPS AND CONSEQUENCES:
Occasionally, however, accumulation and multiplication -- both of which may be hard-wired into us -- overcome convention and carry you away. Multiplication connects us to infinity which connects us to our desire for it; repetition is reassuring, terrifying and mysterious all at once -- it is a field of dreams and a comfortable prison, part of the cosmic continuum, something that's been there since the beginning. Repetition is difference repeated within such narrow strictures that it opens new possibilities. At its best repetition conjures what Baudelaire called the "sacred machinery." That's why sometimes when rooms are filled with arrangements of objects, when configurations are fashioned from hundreds, thousands or even millions of similar things, repetition turns metaphysical, obsession and process become transcendental, and magic happens. [...]
an excerpt from an interview, MATERIAL SEDUCTION, Tara Donavan in conversation with Oriane Stender, also on artnet:
OS: You have said that you are inspired by Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Sol LeWitt. How about Eva Hesse?
TD: Eva Hesse is someone I have always studied and respected. The idiosyncratic nature of her processes has certainly informed aspects of my own practice. LeWitt’s articulation of rules for constructing work is a methodology I have incorporated into my practice. I do, however, feel indebted to artists such as Robert Irwin or James Turrell, who attempt to construct an evolving phenomenological experience in time and space with their work.
OS: Do you also feel an affinity with other younger artists who use accumulation as a major part of their practice, people such as Tom Friedman, Sarah Sze and Tim Hawkinson?
TD: Many artists working today are part of a conversation that clearly extends back to the 1960s, artists with whom I feel a certain affinity. The breadth and diversity of the consumer landscape has expanded to such a degree that the materials which can be adapted to the artistic context are in seemingly limitless supply. The idea that art can be manufactured or that art can radically complicate notions of value attached to mass-produced objects is no longer a point of serious contention in contemporary debates. I think the new fertile territory encompasses a range of practices that capitalize on the iconic identities of commercial and industrial materials by pressing them further into the realm of seduction.
This is something I try to accomplish with my own work, but I also see this tendency in other artists such as the three you mention. The focus on craft that I believe we all share separates us from the strictly conceptual or minimal concerns that preoccupied previous generations of artists. Certainly my work has relationships to any number of contingent practices, but I believe it is the challenge of figuring out how a particular material can perform its own act of sublimation that lends my work its distinct identity.
[read on...]
Tara Donovan, "New Work," Mar. 11-Apr. 22, 2006, at PaceWildenstein, 545 W. 22nd Street, New York, N.Y. 10011
