FEATURE TARA DONOVAN
facing page: Colony, 2006, pencils,
20 x 325 x 244 cm

preceding pages: Bluf_f s, 2006, buttons and glue,
109 x 122 x 64 cm. All images © the artist.
Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery,
London, and PaceWildenstein, New York
of most plant and animal life to take such a notion for granted). It was Now, if one thinks back on the recent history of art, by analogy,
not until 1972, however, that the ontological position embodied by aesthetic modernism, in its quest for essences and specificities of one
‘emergence’ was given its first critical articulation for the theory and sort or another, may be seen to function according to reductionist
practice of science as a whole. It was then that Philip W. Anderson, a dictates. Who can forget the limit case with which Clement Greenberg
solid-state physicist and soon-to-be Nobel Prize-winner, published a found himself face-to-face when he acknowledged that even
seminal polemic in Science entitled ‘More Is Different’, which laid out ‘a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture – though
the terms of debate between ‘emergent’ and ‘reductionist’ approaches not necessarily as a successful one’? Encapsulated in that statement
to scientific epistemology. lies the realisation that minimalism is what happens to Modernism
Briefly described, reductionism seeks to explain phenomena once it reaches the looking glass of the latter’s reductionist approach;
according to lower-order entities and events. So, for example, something and it is no coincidence that close on minimalism’s heels followed
like heat may be described via the velocity of the constituting molecules figures who began to exploit the emergent properties of their chosen
of any given volume of air, liquid or solid. Heat can then be described materials. (What else are Serra’s Prop pieces than exercises in unveiling
as ‘nothing but’ fast-moving atoms, a higher-order phenomenon wholly the emergent properties of lead sheets when they are variously leaned,
reducible to (and so ontologically indistinct from) the behaviour of rolled, torn and liquefied?)
lower-order entities. With a firmly reductionist mindset in place, all of More boldly, from this perspective all the ‘posts’ with which we
the objective furniture of the world – you, me, this magazine, that coffee have been plagued since the 1970s – postmodernism, postminimalism,
– can be explained away as simply the appearance – some would say the postmedium condition – appear as so many attempts to make
the illusion or the epiphenomenon – of so much activity happening sense of the asymptotic limit that befalls the reductionist approach.
below the surface of what we experience on a daily basis. And in what other way should one conceive of the type of commentary
And yet we do reach levels of exploration and analysis at which that would read Donovan’s work like a laundry list of so many modernist
such lower-order phenomena somehow lose sight of the behaviour we ‘paradigms’? Seriality? Check. Chance? Check. The readymade? The
have come to expect from our well-observed physical world. Anyone index? Check. Check. This is reductionism at its finest.
familiar with the mysteries of quantum mechanics – how at the To be fair, reductionism and emergence remain a dialectical
smallest scales of observation attributes like the position and velocity pairing, intertwined like the recto and verso of a sheet of paper, as the
of an elementary particle apparently become mutually exclusive – will old structuralist adage goes. Yet it is emergence that offers us a means
immediately recognise just what it means to run up against the limits of to understand Donovan’s contribution to a tradition of contemporary
a reductionist approach to science. But this loss of sight does not just sculpture that likely begins with Serra (though Carl Andre, that
happen at very small scales, as if observation alone could be isolated as sculptural reductionist par excellence, no doubt provides the conditions
the sole source of such conundrums. The sheer diversity of our selves of possibility for the latter’s practice). And though coincidental – much
as a species, not to mention the biosphere itself, offer other signal like our two Donovans – the fact that Serra and Anderson articulated
examples. As the headline reads, ‘Few Genes, Much Complexity’. their positions at roughly the same historical moment should not be
To be a bit more specific, what Anderson was keen to dismissed as insignificant.
illuminate was how the reductionist approach had no way to explain There is a risk to all of this, however, which we might call the
the phenomena known as phase transitions, or moments of ‘broken impulse to mimeticism: a tendency to chase after only the look of
symmetry’, which define the boundary conditions between different complexity without recourse to the structural and organisational
orders or regimes of organisation and behaviour. The transformations conditions by which complexity is given to emerge of its own accord.
of water from a vapour to a liquid to a solid as it cools are common Sarah Sze, easily Donovan’s closest counterpart working today in large-
examples of symmetry breaking phase transitions, as are the transitions scale sculptural installations of consumer materials, has fallen into this
between the advent of conduction, convection and turbulence mimetic trap. Her work wears complexity like a sign, and so serves only
in water as it is heated and comes to a boil. To borrow an example as a testament to the vision of its maker (which, within a different set
from Anderson himself, though one may possess a perfectly accurate of debates, is something akin to the argument from design). Since the
quantum-mechanical description of the molecular makeup of gold, cubes, Donovan’s sculptural work has flirted with this impulse but has
nothing in that description can explain why the aggregate material never bought into it wholesale, and if the concept of emergence does
we call gold has the properties of colour and hardness with which we indeed bear out as integral to her art, we can be sure that it never will.
are familiar. The point is this: as one moves from atoms to aggregate
entities and behaviours, novel properties emerge, and it is the task
of science, according to Anderson, to come up with theories of such Work by Tara Donovan is on show at the Stephen Friedman Gallery,
emergent properties, if not with a theory of emergence itself. London, to 14 July
five.linnine.lin ARTREVIEW
p052-059 Tara Donovan AR Jul07.i59 59 6/6/07 03:25:25
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