I traveled to Boston this weekend for the Barbarian company meeting and holiday festivities. On Saturday, I went to the ICA to check out the Tara Donovan exhibition. The exhibition was fantastic, displaying a number of large installations by the artist. Each piece is constructed from multiples of a simple base object, with the overall forms being determined by the connection between pieces. Donovan’s work is instructive on many levels, some of which I’ll explore below.
When observed over time, in motion, or from different perspectives, each of Donovan’s work shifts and presents new sides of itself. Parallax and moiré effects are common in many of her pieces. Haze, a wall composed of drinking straws, has a few particularly interesting qualities. The regularly varying material opacity and hollow transparency combined with our limited field of view generates zones of darkness and light on Haze’s surface. The subtle compression of the straws as they push against one another causes subtle, crazed polygonal shapes to emerge within the darker areas.
The lack of obvious connectors between each object is curious. Many digital works share this absence of connection between components. What’s interesting about Donovan’s work is that it holds together despite the lack of connectors. In some cases, cups are stacked inside of other cups, or slabs of cracked glass are laid on atop the next. In others, the base material is the connector – many of the pieces are constructed from mylar tape. A lot of work is held in place by compression acting on the items from the walls of the room in which it is installed.
Each installation works on multiple levels of scale. Indeed, each installation exists on a large scale while being composed of relatively small items. Hundreds, if not thousands, of each building block are composed into the final piece. While some might claim that architecture inherently works in the same way, standard building materials lack the independent character of the things Donovan works with. This suggests the use of recognizable base forms in generative work, where the parts can be as meaningful as, and convey a separate meaning from, the whole.
The combined effect of these various attributes is that they often presented something of a puzzle for the viewers as they engage with Donovan’s work. People in the museum were delighted, and occasionally incredulous (especially with the paper plates), as they discovered what objects each installation was composed of, and to figured out how they were assembled. Perhaps part of the mystery of the pieces is how they can be so immediately powerful while being composed of such seemingly modest objects.
I can imagine a number of potential generative software pieces that would mimic Donovan’s assemblies. Existing purely in the software space, however, multiples of objects lack the impressive scale present in Donovan’s pieces. It would be possible to generatively develop systems of interlocking pieces and use rapid-prototyping or cnc milling technologies to produce thousands of the unique components. There would be an element of luxury involved. Despite that, proper material selection could render the objects more environmentally friendly than the commonly mass-produced items Donovan utilizes. Perhaps she would be interested in creating the objects from which her final pieces are constructed.
A number of other interesting pieces are on show, although they are eclipsed by Donovan’s work. One notable room is an ‘exploration of possibilities and problems’ concerning the Loch Ness monster. I hope to see similar presentations of less known, perhaps fictional, landscapes and phenomena in the future. As it stands, Loch Ness is a little too well known, and the presentation a little too sparse for my tastes.
More information about the exhibition and the museum can be found on the ICA website.