Tuttle His Way to Art

2010_2_16 Tuttle His Way to Art
I first became aware of the artist Richard Tuttle in the series called ART: 21 Then I saw the documentary “Herb and Dorothy,” about the New York couple , Herb and Dorothy Vogel who over a 40 year period managed to put together a fine collection of contemporary art on a low income budget. Tuttle was featured in the film as an artist the Vogels often collected before he made a name for himself. They were also very good friends. It was in that film that I discovered there was a short film about Tuttle available through NETFLIX. It was called “Never Not an Artist.” What follows is my response to Tuttle and the work I saw in the film.
As a young man Richard Tuttle was an easel painter who worked at Betty Parson’s Gallery in New York City, the gallery that became best known for being the first to show the work of all the major Abstract Expressionists. Parson used to tell young Richard that AE was a sign of an expanding universe. He reacted to that idea, figuring that there must be an equal force going in the opposite direction; so while the AE painters worked large, often on a monumental scale, he would shrink his art and work on a small scale, and that is what he did for about 40 years. The work that epitomized that small scale in the extreme was his notorious 4 inch piece of rope that he nailed laterally to a gallery wall. (It was on a par with Duchamp’s “Urinal” and caused almost as much fuss.) That work was a step away from an Art of Nothingness; indeed, Tuttle has been dancing on a razor’s edge between something barely-there and something almost-not there. Sometimes the work can approach being invisible. I am thinking of the octagonal piece on the gallery wall that was a mere shade different than the color of the wall. He can resemble a magician practicing sleight of hand: now you see it, now you don’t. That is Tuttle’s world, his comfort zone.
He is unconventional in his use of materials. He likes off-beat materials, like crepe paper, plywood, bubble wrap, thin wire, tree branches, tape, nails, and once in a while, paint. He has sometimes worked with simple shapes that resembled letter forms; other times he used string laid out in simple patterns on the floor. One shape made by a piece of string was a semi-circle called “Hill.” Combining wood and paint was about as close as he ever got to wobbly rectangles on the wall. Close in controversy to the piece of rope were the three dimensional pieces of wire. He would affix a very thin wire into an arrangement on the wall, attach it with small nails, draw a feint line with pencil and figure in the shadows cast by the wire in the design. It made for a very subtle and delicate work of art. The Vogels owned one of those pieces and were very fond of it.
One is constantly struck by the bare-bones simplicity of Tuttle’s ideas. They are like a naked haiku, so to speak, or the ultimate understatement-- a whisper in the dark. He is usually classed as a minimalist, but I think he is an idea man and wittier than most minimalists—and his DNA contains a shot of Dada as well. In the film he said that only one in tem people understands what his art is all about. Much of his work provokes and puzzles a lot of people, as his stuff is a radical challenge to many gallery visitors. To see his things in a gallery can be disorienting and off-putting. You don’t find a series of regular rectangles aligned on the walls.
I was happy to see the Vogels again in the film and Tuttle with them in their New York apartment. And Tuttle is now a westerner, living in a nice studio in New Mexico, near the same small town that Georgia O’Keefe lived for many years. He seems to feeding of f the deep space of the high desert and the lovely light and dark patterns of the area.