Artist's floor installation is made of pencils

Artist's floor installation is made of pencils -- lots and lots of pencils -- but that's not the point
- Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle Art Critic
Saturday, January 13, 2007

Photos:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2007/01/13/DDGFRNHBBU1.DTL&o=0

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2007/01/13/DDGFRNHBBU1.DTL&o=1

A New York art dealer tipped me to Tara Donovan's debut solo show during my visit there in spring 2003. He had not seen it himself, he said, but it had ignited quite a buzz. And justly so, for Donovan had confidently, almost blithely, mastered one of the most difficult exhibition spaces in Manhattan.

We get just a whiff of that confidence in the UC Berkeley Art Museum's presentation of Donovan's "Colony" (2002), a version of the least expansive piece in her breakout New York show.

The Ace Gallery's now defunct New York operation -- Ace still maintains two Los Angeles venues -- occupied a refurbished single-story warehouse with a vast interior on Hudson Street, west of Soho, the old gallery neighborhood, and well south of Chelsea, the current one.

Consisting of hundreds -- maybe thousands? -- of sawed-off, eraserless pencils, bunched and stood on end on the floor, "Colony" can shift aspects startlingly, depending on where it sits.

A prototype of the piece occupied the smallest of the dramatically various spaces within Ace New York. The narrow confines of that room pretty much dictated vertical views of the sculpture.

At the BAM, "Colony" sits by itself, roped off, on a wide-open floor in the lowest of the museum's tiered galleries.

Here a visitor almost has to depend on wall text to see that the sculpture consists of pencil stubs. In the long, low-angle views the situation encourages, "Colony" can look now like a thick scattering of sawdust, now like an encrustation of lichens or even an animal-skin rug.

From an elevated viewpoint, or even from standing nearby, the piece suggests a contour map of an island, perhaps a whole country. It can look like a dense miniature cityscape or a great swath of clear-cut forest.

"The phenomenon that my work changes or reveals new traits in different spaces is the reason I use the term 'site-responsive' to describe the relationship between a project and the space it inhabits," Donovan said in an e-mail. "The idiosyncratic nature of my work, along with my intention to construct a 'field' of visual activity, allow each sightline to offer something new or unexpected to the viewer."

A native New Yorker, Donovan, 35, was able to witness the procession of recent American art firsthand throughout her years of formal education. She attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in the late '80s, completed a bachelor of fine arts degree at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, and earned a master's degree in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Like several other American artists close to her in age, such as Tony Feher and Tom Friedman, Donovan revisits the strategies of minimalism and process art with an attitude toward materials more broad-minded than the earlier generation's.

She has used, en masse, materials such as plastic cups, drinking straws, tar paper, rubber bands, toothpicks and paper tape.

"My ideas develop over time through experimentation with specific materials," she writes. "I may find that a material has a particular quality in which I see some potential, but the possibility of it becoming a 'piece' can occur quickly or literally take years, depending on the success or failure of my process. Specific spaces do influence the installation of my work in terms of scale and the way the work responds to environmental factors such as lighting, but I work out most of the issues with the way projects will be constructed and presented in my studio prior to installation."

The first-time viewer of "Colony" naturally wonders whether its components stand on their own, fastened by gravity alone, on minimalist principles, or adhere to some armature.

" 'Colony' is in fact glued together in sections," Donovan acknowledges, "but is not structurally reliant on that fact."

I naturally wondered as I studied "Colony," which is on loan to BAM from a private collection, whether Donovan delegates the assembly of her work when it travels, or insists upon setting it up herself.

"Reinstallation doesn't necessarily require my presence or direct oversight," she told me. "There are very specific instructions that travel with each work, and often I have someone who works with me at my studio participate in the installation. The works are fairly simple to fabricate by following the rules I draft for their construction."

Still, the number of components in a Donovan sculpture stuns visitors who do not know what to expect. Her New York show at Ace featured a long room with what looked like a fog bank at its far end. Even after inspecting it closely, many people had to consult the wall label at the gallery entrance to believe what they had seen: a colossal accumulation of white plastic drinking straws, stacked tightly like firewood, perpendicular to the wall behind them, spanning the width of the room, more than head high.

"The 'how did you do it?' or 'how long did it take?' questions of disbelief (are) very common when people first encounter my work," Donovan said. "It isn't necessarily my intention to bring attention to the labor involved in each work. For me, the labor is no different than taking a brush to canvas or carving a piece of wood -- it is a means to an end."

Visitors who give enough time to "Colony" may begin to intuit metaphoric or social references in it. They might think of chewed-down pencils as symbols of anxiety, perhaps connected with cut-down trees. Or see some ominous intimation of the waning of writing by hand in a new age of keyboarding and voice-recognition software.

Most frequently, people wonder about an implicit critique of excess or waste.

"But I myself don't really make these connections when making my work," Donovan said. "It is the material itself -- the fact that it participates and is somehow symbolic in reference to human waste and decadent consumption -- that leads people to fixate on these types of associations. ... I see my practice as a subversion of the normal cycles of distribution, consumption and waste. ... The fact that a poetic statement can result from these associations is another layer of complexity that takes on significance for me when a given project is completed."
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Tara Donovan: Colony: Sculpture. Through April 15. UC Berkeley Art Museum, 2626 Bancroft Way, Berkeley.