In her recent career survey organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston, Tara Donovan creates ethereal, environmental sculptures out of such banal, everyday objects as toothpicks, Scotch tape, Mylar, and plastic cups. Working with one material at a time, and testing the range of its physical properties, Donovan subverts the utilitarian function of an object through a process of accumulation. In the seventeen works on view from the past decade, she stacks, piles, or otherwise masses her material to explore its latent sculptural capabilities, all the while turning mundane matter into the stuff of high art. When I visited the exhibition, I was immediately struck by the transformative nature of Donovan’s constructions and her ability to change commonplace objects into wondrously evocative aesthetic forms. Under the artist’s guidance, enormous rolls of adding-machine paper piled on the floor, countless plastic drinking straws stacked against a wall, and thousands of feet of silver tape scrolled across the walls become new physical and perceptual landscapes.

The timing of the ICA’s retrospective could not have been better for Donovan. Right after the opening, she received a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Further, the show’s lavishly illustrated catalogue, the first major publication of her work, with its smart, if short, essay, begins a critical process of historically evaluating the artist, important not only for Donovan’s reception, but also for thinking about current preoccupations in contemporary sculpture. Her strength is found in an ability to wow her audience with ingenuity, process, and beauty. She creates awe-inspiring experiences intended to influence the viewer, both in a sensorial and conceptual manner. The only question that remains is to what end.

The show is primarily devoted to what Donovan terms her “site responsive” installations—work dynamically integrated with the surrounding architectural space and intended to evoke a more nuanced relationship with its environment than site-specific sculpture. For example, in Untitled (2003) Donovan utilizes light to transform thousands of Styrofoam cups, grouped together and suspended from the ceiling, into what appears as a living, breathing organism drooping down into the exhibition space. The overarching cellular structure and translucent, light-filled surfaces of the work mirror the replication and organizational form of natural phenomena, a comparison frequently cited in critical reviews of the artist’s work. But the obsessive use of a single material and its modification from the simple to the complex also alludes to self-generating codes and digital networks, a connection drawn by the exhibition’s co-curators, Nicholas Baume and Jen Mergel, in their accompanying catalogue essay. At stake in such comparisons is how to make sense of the dramatic alteration that takes place in Donovan’s production through processes of repetition and formal investigation. At their most literal level, these environmental sculptures sublimate the everyday identity of base materials in favor of an investigation of beauty, a concept only recently returned to favor in contemporary art. But at its most abstract, this work is inherently cynical, aligned with the overwhelming consumption and commodification of contemporary culture. It is this latter association that weds Donovan’s installations to a broader context, replete with pressing ecological and social concerns.

Donovan’s compulsive use of manufactured materials, her emphasis on process, and her reliance on compositional rules and analytical systems connects to well-established modernist paradigms. More specifically, her use of readymade forms references Dada and the historical avant-garde; her interest in process-based production calls up the sensual sculptures of Eva Hesse; and her reliance on seriality and the monochrome connects her work to that of Minimalist artists Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd. This latter comparison, which is evident throughout the exhibition, is reinforced in the very last gallery. Three cubes, approximately thirty-six inches squared, are linearly displayed and at first glance mimic the systemic logic of Minimalism. But as the viewer moves closer, the objects become even more compelling. The smooth finish of a minimalist cube is replaced by jagged, bristling surfaces composed of common pins, toothpicks, and tempered glass respectively. Each cube, held together by friction and gravity, coerces its audience into a process of discovery, questioning exactly what is the work made of and how does it hold together. At the same time, Donovan’s installations are replete with phenomenological allusions, dependent on an active, embodied viewer mindfully moving through the exhibition space.

In addition, Donovan utilizes key postmodern strategies that question the very nature of the art object and its meaning in contemporary society, and as such borrows from conceptual practices. The ephemeral quality of her materials—disposable cups held together by hot glue, plastic buttons stacked together, loosely assembled loops of Scotch tape—and the provisional installation of each sculpture, assembled in situ only for the duration of a show, reveals Donovan’s work as ultimately contingent on the terms of its exhibition. There is no stable, coherent object. Rather, each piece, assembled and installed by a host of assistants, changes in relation to new sites of display, a condition undermining at least to some degree the work’s commodity function. When the ICA’s show was over, Donovan’s environments were de-installed, packed in crates, and relegated to a storage facility, awaiting an alternative configuration in a different space. This transformation back into the commonplace is a condition largely masked in an initial viewing of the work.

Comprised of such “throwaway” items as Styrofoam and plastic, materials that arguably never decompose but simply break down and contaminate, Donovan’s installations invariably engage with issues of sustainability and the environmental effect of synthetic materials. Her art raises questions about working with potentially harmful resources—not a new concern in the history of art, but one with particular implications for current debates on the ecology, the scale of the human footprint, and global warming. Take her Untitled (Plastic Cups) from 2006, which I initially saw installed at Pace Wildenstein’s New York gallery. There the concentration of thousands of plastic cups arranged as a 50’ x 55’ topographical landscape significantly off-gassed. When I first entered the space, the smell was overwhelming. With eyes burning, I was caught between a desire to meander through the exhibition exploring gradations of color and scale, and a more visceral reaction to flee posthaste from the noxious fumes. This dichotomy between the inherent beauty of the work and its fraught materiality is ultimately quite terrifying, a reality the artist carefully avoids in interviews and statements.

In The World Without Us (New York: Picador, 2008), Alan Weisman hypothesizes about the built environment once humankind vanishes. Taking New York City as a case study, the author details the slow, inevitable destruction of the architecture and supporting infrastructure, and the gradual return of nature. Ironically, he concludes that in a world devoid of human existence plastics and other hazardous materials would likely remain. Moreover, it has been argued that the consumption of plastics threatens the very structure of the biosphere and has in fact generated what is known as the Eastern or Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a continent-size island of plastic debris floating in the Pacific Ocean. Trapped by major wind and ocean currents, this mass of toxic material is absorbed by marine life and ultimately enters the food chain, the implications of which have yet to be measured. Within this context, Donovan’s reliance on disposable, synthetic objects takes on new meaning as either an incredible act of hubris or a direct engagement with current debates about the consequences of human activity. Here in this juxtaposition, the Burkean sublime is resuscitated. Both the magnificence of such objects and the inherent horror of their material potential are intrinsically linked and fundamental to the work’s transcendent reality. In fact, the emotional intensity of Donovan’s exhibition, and the questions it raises regarding the meaning and responsibility of contemporary art, hinges on this disjuncture.