Richard Tuttle
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I lived in New York then. Curiosity piqued and expecting to be amused, I trudged off to the debacle. But Tuttle’s “lessness” was surprisingly, thoughtfully elegant. Admittedly it was strange to see small strands of wire displayed in the Whitney’s high-ceilinged rooms, and I recall standing in front of an inch-long piece of rope attached to the wall, wondering how this could be art. Yet somehow this form neatly bound in the middle succeeded: it was interesting to look at, and it established a dialogue with the space around it. Set in the middle of a huge, empty wall, the rope had an odd, almost numinous presence, a presence that Kramer missed because of his own biases: Tuttle’s “bits and pieces,” he sniped, “lie strewn around the ample second-floor galleries in a pathetic attempt to master its vast empty spaces.” But unlike countless earlier generations of artists, Tuttle doesn’t seek to dominate the space around his work. During the anti-authoritarian 60s a number of artists, like Tuttle, sought to establish a new, more modest role for art, as objects that exist in a dialogue with their spectators and surroundings.
Several dozen of Tuttle’s works on display at Rhona Hoffman–collages from the 70s and drawings and constructions from the 90s–reveal how subtle, and even how affecting, his art can be. The artist has done just enough to make his forms strong and coherent; one mark fewer, one fold of paper less, and a piece that now seems alive would be flat and uninteresting. Tuttle tests limits: how much must one do to raw materials to produce art? By doing the minimum he leaves the viewer’s imagination a huge amount of room, deepening one’s ability to find visual excitement in everyday objects.
With its creases, its disparate forms, its play on flatness and depth, Tuttle’s work eludes traditional categories. A former New Yorker who lives in Santa Fe, Tuttle is also a collector–of Islamic carpets, among other things–and has traveled extensively in Europe and Japan. He once told an interviewer, “My work is an effort to overcome identity,” and to another remarked that he wished to make art that looked “ecstatic, as though the artist had never been there.” Many of his pieces suggest not a finished traditional artwork but the thought process that might inspire one– the perceptual incongruities in a fleeting image, or ideas about repetition and variation. This tendency is most explicit in the newest works, all from 1995, a series of nine numbered constructions called “Source of Imagery.”
Perhaps the Tuttle show at the Whitney caused such outrage because we’ve come to expect predigested, predictable art from our museums–such as 159 of the best Monets, all in chronological order–and Tuttle’s art precludes fixed conceptions. I shudder to think of how a museum might display one of the “Source of Imagery” pieces, which the viewer should be able to walk around, to view from all angles. But then even Michelangelo’s David is behind glass nowadays. I don’t know if Tuttle is as great an artist as Monet, but Monet’s style is already an accepted part of our culture. Certainly I learned more about art and about seeing from Tuttle’s show than I did by joining the troops of “must-see” viewers at the Art Institute.
