Tara Donovan at the ICA: Worth her genius grant?

Tara Donovan's sculptures at the ICA are interesting in a couple of ways. They make fascinating use of the most mundane, mass-produced materials - scotch tape, styrofoam cups - discovering new physical properties in them, mostly involving light. And these mass-produced materials seem to come alive as the sculptural forms replicate natural systems, forming colonies and sedimentations that seem biological or geological. Sculpture made out of tape and styrofoam cups sounds like the worst stereotype of modern art, and despite the curatorial acumen brought to bear, catalog text can't quite convey the essence of Donovan's (mostly untitled, mostly monochrome) works. They need to be encountered in person to work their peculiar magic.

Donovan, you may recall, got one of them thar genius grants from the MacArthur Foundation a few days ago, which comes with $500,000 over five years to spend as she pleases, presumably in furtherance of her art. She may spend hers at the dollar store. That, at least, is one of the places where she accumulates a million plastic drinking cups or enough toothpicks to make a chest-high cube. There are 16 works in the career survey opening Friday at the ICA, and every one of them seems to have big-box or discount origins. But visit the room-sized landscape of stacked drinking cups and walk around it under the gentle light filtering through the translucent ceiling and ICA skylights. Then you'll see the changes of color and light flickering over the gentle slopes of that plastic, miniature moonscape - and the effect is more than some art-schoolish meditation on the nature of mass-produced objects. It's a weird little alchemy of its own.

The most striking piece  is not available as a photo, but it's "site-responsive" and maybe the single best artistic use of the ICA's extraordinary building so far. A rectangle has been cut out of the wall separating the main gallery from the long narrow space known as the Founders Gallery, where floor-to-ceiling windows overlook Boston Harbor, the airport and East Boston. Donovan has stuffed this hole - perhaps 15 feet long and two feet high - with many feet of polyester sheeting rolled back over itself like ribbon candy, over and over. The supposedly clear plastic takes on a butterscotch hue as it passes light through from outside, and then it becomes a sort of kaleidoscope as you walk by, offering pinhole views of Eastie, fragmented and shifting.

See, I told you it was hard to explain. But it's striking enough at 10 a.m., and at this morning's preview we were told we really ought to see it at sunset. I bet.

As is my habit, I walked back through the galleries by myself while the rest of the party was still quizzing Donovan about her methods. (She smiled slightly when asked if she has Ooompa Loompas to help her build the things; her assistants are quite smart, she said, and "not orange.") These little solo walks are a great way to end any museum preview, a rare and perhaps not entirely intended rich man's privilege. I found myself standing under the bulbous, rather tumorlike yet somehow cheerful mass of syrofoam cups that hung down from the ceiling (above). Curator Nicholas Baume had said earlier that the sculpture makes you feel like "you might be swallowed up, in a quite delightful way." And that was exactly right as I slipped past under it, feeling like I was narrowly escaping a comic fate, nearing the last act of "Little Shop of Horrors."

More information: 617-478-3100 or www.icaboston.org.

Comments

[Charles G. Baldwin]

By chance I saw the work while attending a film festical at the ICA and I was awed. Your descriptives of the work are spot on... however difficult it may be to elucidate the natural rhythms created by repeated plastic cup stacking.

Would have neen a treat to be alone with them...