FEATURE TARA DONOVAN
ON 20 FEBRUARY 2001 A WOMAN WROTE in to The New York Times By loose analogy, we can see how Donovan manages to do very
to comment on an article entitled ‘Genome’s Riddle: Few Genes, much with very little. Given a single item, she unlocks a potential that
Much Complexity’, and to commend the scientists and researchers lies not only within that individual unit but also in the way that a multiple
mentioned in the article, whom she acknowledged as ‘amazing in their of such units relate to each other. ‘Few Genes, Much Complexity’,
determination and dedication’ for their ‘commitment to a public forum reads the headline. The riddle asks how we get from one to the other,
for genome analysis’. The letter was signed ‘Tara Donovan, New York’. and Donovan’s art may hint at the answer.
Just what is the ‘genome’s riddle’ that so stimulated the hand The work Donovan was making during the run-up to the
of our letter-writing Donovan? Perhaps some will remember that two mapping of the human genome bore something of a postminimalist
groups, one a consortium of American academic scientists and another, flavour. Her three cubes, one composed of toothpicks, one of steel pins
the Celera Genomics company, announced in late June of 2000 that and one of shattered tempered glass (each Untitled from 2001), updated
they had each, independently, completed a map of the human genome. Richard Serra’s One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) with more of a
The Times covered this event and the science behind it with a series of consumer aesthetic. These two works harnessed the inherent properties
articles that ran under the headline ‘Reading the Book of Life’, most of of their discrete units as a means to maintain their cubic forms. In Serra’s
which appeared in June, but a few follow-up pieces in February of the case, One Ton Prop had served as a rejoinder to so much minimalist
following year. activity which had yet to break free of its fundamentally pictorial – ie,
One of those February articles reported on how the human conventional and compositional – concerns, for which there appeared
genome is composed not of somewhere in the neighbourhood of to be no overriding logic save the artist’s own decision-making process
100,000 genes, as was originally hypothesised, but something closer and a certain fetish for all things industrial. By activating the mass of
to between 30,000 and 40,000 (as of 2007, we now know that this Prop’s steel plates as a means to achieve equilibrium for each of the
number is in fact smaller still: somewhere in the range of 20,000 to sculpture’s four sides, Serra forged a path beyond minimalism’s formal
25,000). What was so shocking about this discovery was its implicit preoccupations and allowed the physics of gravity to have a say in the
affront to our species’ pride. By 2001 the only other genomes that had matter of his art.
been mapped were those of the common roundworm and the fruit fly, Thirty years later, Donovan’s cubes of toothpicks and steel pins
the former bearing close to 20,000 genes and the latter roughly 13,600. take this physics one step further by foregrounding how the final term
General sentiment held that surely we humans would own a genetic of One Ton Prop – to ‘prop’ – requires an altogether different force from
toolkit of far greater wealth and diversity than such lowly specimens, that of gravity; which is to say that it requires friction, a function of the
but such was not the case. The key, its seems, lay in the path to that electromagnetic forces that hold between atoms and their aggregates.
term ‘complexity’, the sciences of which were barely 40 years old. Together, friction and gravity form a partnership that underwrites the
A confession: as it turns out, the Tara Donovan who wrote in to toothpicks’ and steel pins’ efforts to maintain a coherent form.
the Times is not the same Tara Donovan who has come to be known But this is not yet the whole story. Friction and gravity may be
for a body of often large-scale sculptural work that takes ordinary doing all of the physical ‘work’, but they are nevertheless subject to
objects and materials, such as toothpicks, Scotch tape and plastic cups certain organisational constraints. If, for example, one tried to execute
– materials that are abundant and objects that are easily available in the same cubic form using a 5-inch (rather than a 35-inch) dimension,
the hundreds or thousands in any unreformed industrialised consumer the result would turn out looking as if someone had simply overturned
culture – and then configures them (some would probably say a box of toothpicks or pins – ie, something far less distinctly ‘cubic’ in
transfigures them) into an art of undeniable aesthetic impact. character. What this means is that there are limits to such configurations,
And it is certainly a mere coincidence that Donovan’s sculptural limits that are determined by the size, shape and physical properties of
work began to gain public recognition at roughly the same time that the individual unit and in the way that the unit behaves with its like kinds
the map of the human genome was nearing completion. But perhaps when multiplied within certain dimensions. In short, Donovan’s cubes
it is worth taking this coincidence as a fortuitous cue, and to note how teach us a lesson about the emergent properties of objects.
Donovan’s subsequent work has tended to appear more and more ‘Emergence’ as a philosophical concept was given its first
‘biological’ in character. Take Donovan’s current sculptural installation at rigorous articulation in the late nineteenth century by George Henry
London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, a multitude of silver Mylar sheets Lewes in his Problems of Life and Mind (1875). For Lewes, as for the
enfolded into semi-spheres of differing sizes, which when bundled philosophers and scientists who followed, the issue of emergent
together begin to appear like an infestation of alien sponges. And note properties was largely confined to the biological sciences. It was there,
how this piece echoes a series of Donovan’s earlier works, such as Lure after all, that the notion of novel properties or substances ‘emerging’
(2004), Nebulous (2002) and Colony (2002), which made fishing line, out of more fundamental organisations (of often lower order) and
Scotch tape and pencils appear like so much moss and lichen growing more simple entities found its most sympathetic audience (even
on the gallery floor. before the advent of DNA, one need only look at the cellular makeup >
facing page: Untitled (Mylar), 2007,
Mylar and glue, dimensions variable
ARTREVIEW five.linfour.lin
p052-059 Tara Donovan AR Jul07.i54 54 6/6/07 03:22:06
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 88 Page 89 Page 90 Page 91 Page 92 Page 93 Page 94 Page 95 Page 96 Page 97 Page 98 Page 99 Page 100 Page 101 Page 102 Page 103 Page 104 Page 105 Page 106 Page 107 Page 108 Page 109 Page 110 Page 111 Page 112 Page 113 Page 114 Page 115 Page 116 Page 117 Page 118 Page 119 Page 120 Page 121 Page 122 Page 123 Page 124 Page 125 Page 126 Page 127 Page 128 Page 129 Page 130 Page 131 Page 132 Page 133 Page 134 Page 135 Page 136 Page 137 Page 138 Page 139 Page 140 Page 141 Page 142 Page 143 Page 144 Page 145 Page 146 Page 147 Page 148