The Brooklyn Rail

Stepping off the elevator onto the seventh floor of Pace’s West 25th Street headquarters, viewers stand at the edge of a field of sculptures that are a mix of formal/classical and exotic/non-Western forms and surfaces that gently pulsate, oscillate and, from certain perspectives, dematerialize. This is Tara Donovan: Stratagems, the artist’s current show of eleven discrete sculptures (all 2024) ranging in height from 8–10 feet made entirely from CD-ROMs. The passage of light through floor-to-ceiling window-walls wondrously activates the sculptures and nurtures a dialogue between the reflective surfaces of the sculptures and the towering forms of neighboring architecture. Moving into the gallery, viewers are both catalyst and audience for mutable, sensory experiences that delight in a magical intersection of matter, energy, light, and Donovan’s creativity.

Attached to concrete bases of varying heights and laid out in a grid across the multi-level space, the “Stratagems” are, at once, static and dynamic like multiple chords of a musical composition transposed into tangible form and intangible light. These opposing energies were reinforced by choreographer Kim Brandt’s performance in and around Donovan’s sculptures. Hugging the floor, six dancers silently and continuously slid towards and away from each other—and the sculptures—in alternately coiling, unfurling, fetal, pinwheel, and intertwining movements over the course of three hours. The performance complemented and set in relief the spiraling, effervescent energy of Donovan’s sculptures.

The “Stratagems” channel Constantin Brâncuși’s Endless Column (1938), one of the great sculptural works of the twentieth century that laid the foundations for modern abstract sculpture. With the repetition of a single abstract shape to suggest an indefinite ascension toward the heavens, it became a symbol of freedom and transcendence. Stanley Kubrick’s monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which triggered an evolutionary shift and a higher level of consciousness also comes to mind. That the common, once pervasive CD is the source of Donovan’s captivating, phenomenological, silhouette-dissolving viewing experience is in keeping with her more than twenty-five-year interest in working with the ordinary stuff of our everyday lives. Straws, plastic cups, Styrofoam cups, pins, notecards, paper plates, plastic tubes—these are the unremarkable, inexpensive and ubiquitous materials that Donovan has chosen to work with and succeeded, through laborious exploration and repetitive processes, in unlocking and transcending the mysteries of their materiality. A round, plastic “compact disk” with a reflective surface, the CD was introduced in the early nineteen eighties as the future of technology for storing and transmitting information. Now that information has passed to the amorphous Cloud, rendering the CD a relic of the very recent past. One is reminded of Futurism’s glorification of the speed and dynamism of the new technological age as represented in Umberto Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) and Giacomo Balla’s Speeding Automobile (1912) that ended swiftly along with the war and fascism. Aspects of Donovan’s sculptures also bring to mind Constructivist Naum Gabo’s transparent glass and plastic creations whose materials, abstract geometries, and spatial openness embodied a radically innovative language to express the promise of a new technological and social order. Suddenly useless and abundant yet with light-catching surfaces, CDs are the perfect raw material for Donovan to explore and metamorphose into structurally sound, transcendent art.

The “Stratagems” exhibit a dizzying range of complex schemes and patterns born of experimentation, contemplative focus—and hot glue. Sorted by color and glued face to face to cover the labels, none of the CDs expose their specific content, but the amount of recorded information contained on the approximately 250,000 disks in the show is unfathomable and contributes an indescribable energy to the exhibition. As a title, Stratagems highlights the untold layers involved in realizing the sculptures as well as their jewel-like nature. Some are graceful, light and transparent; others are spiky, compact and dense. Stratagem XIV has continuous, wide, and circular rows of tightly layered green disks that look like draping branches of a Christmas tree. Stratagem XIII and Stratagem XI have intricate, geometric surface patterns suggestive of Islamic designs that, from a distance, seem to block the light but, up close, reveal their interior light. The helix-like forms of Stratagem II and Stratagem IV glimmer as the light catches the edges along the surface of the stacked and interwoven, green-hued disks while, up close, one marvels at the light within that moves in concert with the motion of our bodies. In both works, the curved contour of the outer CDs conjures the mannered gesture of Brâncuși’s Mademoiselle Pogany (1912) with its achingly coy lean into the base. Brâncuși’s innovative conception of the base as integral to sculpture certainly informs the integrated relationship of the Stratagems to their bases.

While no longer the indispensable object it once was, the CD will always be a circle and a symbol of unity without beginning or end. Building the “Stratagems” by hand in a labor-intensive process that became a meditative practice of concentric layering and a literal weaving of these reflective, manufactured, circular disks, Tara Donovan has accessed an otherworldly level of wonder having simply, in her words, “conjured beauty from relics of a recent past.”