As a proposition about beauty, it is utterly unlikely. But a proposition it is, and it's one of the most stimulating I've come across.
To be bowled over by the beauty of, for instance, oodles of strips of Mylar folded and clustered and arrayed on the floor so they resemble a kind of floor-hugging, hemispherical marine life - at once velvety and glittering, soft and shiny - is not something most of us would anticipate. Nor would many of us expect a transparent wall filled with polyester film - layers of it folding, twisting, and swishing like molten sugar or caramel-colored hair - to be among the most beautiful things you would see all year.
It's this unforeseeable element that accounts for the delight Donovan's work prompts.
But behind the delight, qualms lurk. For Donovan deliberately favors materials that most of us prefer not to think about: plastic cups, straws, buttons, toothpicks, Styrofoam, and Scotch tape.
We don't want to think about them because, when we do, we find them unbeautiful. In fact, when the Greek philosopher Plotinus defined the ugly as that which makes the soul "shrink within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, resentful and alienated from it," I'm betting it was precisely the humble plastic drinking cup he had in mind.
Plastic cups and Styrofoam and most of the other materials employed by Donovan represent cheapness, waste, unbridled consumption, litter. Especially when seen in abundance, and abundance is at the heart of what Donovan does: One work here uses more than 1 million 7-ounce plastic cups.
But Plotinus also remarked upon our failure to "habitually examine or in any way question ordinary things." We would be amazed at these ordinary things, he suggested, "if we were familiar with them and someone explained their powers."
