May 14, 1999
AT THE MET WITH RICHARD TUTTLE
Influence Cast in Stone
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By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
EW YORK -- Richard Tuttle, who grew up during the 1940s in
Roselle, N.J., remembers first going to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art when he was around 6 and seeing the ancient Assyrian gates that
used to flank the entrance to the south galleries. The gates are
big stone sculptures of winged lions with human heads and five
legs.
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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times |
Tuttle at the Metropolitan in front of Louis Comfort Tiffany's "Autumn Landscape" window.
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"You can forget how much of an impression works like those make
on you as a child," he says. "I felt fear, I felt power, dread --
actually, a lot of bad feelings. But later when I came back to the
museum I realized I was hungry for those feelings. And since then
I've come to understand how fearfulness is a art of art, a form of
art."
Maybe so, though in person few artists are less fearsome than
Tuttle. He tends to speak so softly that he is inaudible. Like his
work, he is a concoction of selflessness and deadpan wit. For a
recent catalog to a show called "Community," he included bits of
rubberized gold string and strips of green self-adhesive paper,
which could be tied through 32 die-cut holes he had had made in the
cover, making the design do-it-yourself. It was a typical (for him)
nod toward what he calls the "horizontalization of our
democracy."
Except during the high-flying 1980s, when his work was out of
sync with the times, he has been a steady presence on the American
art scene since his first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in
1965. Many younger artists today revere him almost as a shaman.
Much of the work you see in galleries now -- installations of humble
materials, low-key abstractions, spare Zen-like interventions of
one sort or another -- owes a debt to him. "Art is a very tender
thing that can easily be hurt," he has said, which describes what
he makes, and, to an extent, him.
Visiting the Met not long ago, he picked out the Assyrian
sculptures by way of mentioning "Yellow Backdrop," a small relief
he made in 1986. It consists partly of an anchor-shaped piece of
black plastic, like a lump of coal, wedged between two brightly
painted plastic wafers, giving the work depth.
Tuttle links the wedge to the fifth leg on the Assyrian lions.
The leg was added so that a person passing through the gate would
see two legs in front and all four legs from the side; it
negotiated, perspectively, the viewer's passage from front to side.
Similarly, the black wedge in "Yellow Backdrop," Tuttle says,
negotiates the passage from front and back, front and side.
Not everyone even notices that the winged lions have five legs,
but by now Tuttle's knowledge of what is in the museum is nearly
encyclopedic. He and his family split their time between New York
and New Mexico, but when they are here, which is much of the year,
they go to the Met every Friday night. It has become a ritual.
Tuttle has his favorite spots. In the American wing he makes a
point of noting John Frederick Kensett, the Luminist, who happens
to be an ancestor on his father's side.
Kensett painted the Eastern shoreline. In the 1840s he was one
of the artists on a committee that helped to create the Met. Tuttle
is proud of this fact, but his interest in Kensett above all
involves qualities of his late seascapes: quietude, stability, a
kind of internal light. Light seems to emanate from inside these
pictures, as if they were generating their own energy. The notion
of self-generated energy is a trait Tuttle describes as
specifically American. He sees it in Pollock's paintings and
Tiffany's windows.
"In fact I don't think it's wrong to speak of Pollock in terms
of Luminism because his pictures have the kind of energy you find
in Kensett," he says. "The marvel of it is that as time has gone
on, you still feel the energy in these Pollocks as happening in the
present: it establishes itself in contemporary time, which is why I
think Pollock continues to look so radical."
"Passing Off of the Storm" is one of the Met's late Kensetts,
nearly abstract in its spare design: a rectangular band of sea
beneath two bands of sky. A few tiny sailboats interrupt the
horizon line. "You know Dan Flavin used to collect Kensett's
drawings," Tuttle mentions, speaking about the Minimalist who died
a few years ago, an acquaintance of his. "Dan did a group of his
own drawings of sailboats in the late 70s that have this same
broken line character. I'm sure they look back to Kensett."
About Pollock, he adds: "It's like the horizon line I see in
Pollock, which you can choose to see or not. I believe it's there
because it's connected to the nature of his art. When the canvas
was on the floor, Pollock had to paint it from one side, then go
around and paint from the other, and that created a line, visible
or not, across the center of the painting. I think you see this
unconscious line disappear in his later works, which are a decline.
"I remember once doing a bunch of scribbled drawings with a
ballpoint pen," he continued, "just doodling around and around,
to clear my mind while I was traveling. And I realized I'd made a
horizon line, which emerged for no conscious reason. It's an
unconscious thing, a trait of the hand." Art in the Here and Now
Tuttle was among the Post-Minimalists who came onto the scene
during the late 60s and 70s, making sculptures of rubber, wire and
cloth piled in a corner, hanging on a wall or lying around the
floor. Gravity mattered. The idea was to make art that was just
what it appeared to be, that existed in the here and now, and,
additionally, that activated the exhibition space and turned into a
kind of performance zone.
Tuttle began by making palm-size paper cubes with cut-out
designs and shaped wood reliefs that seemed like a twist on
geometric abstraction. The cubes, among other things, were about
being able to hold a little bit of space in your hand. They had a
purity and formal rigor that came out of Minimalism but eschewed
Minimalism's aggression and imperiousness. Their effect was to
insinuate, rather than insist on, their own virtues, and, in their
delicate, antiauthoritarian, transitory way they helped to signal a
quiet revolution in American art.
From the beginning, much of the public seemed not to get the
point. Simplicity is never really simple to achieve and is easily
mistaken for simplemindedness. Not counting his books and prints,
the bulk of the art for which Tuttle has become best known consists
of cardboard, wire, bits of wood, light bulbs, dyed cloth.
Sometimes he has arranged these things into reliefs, accompanied by
a few faint pencil marks on the wall. The value of the materials is
meant to be in inverse proportion to the value of the expression
they serve. His art depends, in a sense, on one's will to see it.
The other day in his studio, a modest rented room he shares with
another artist above a furniture warehouse in TriBeCa, he fished
through a big cardboard box containing a few dozen smaller, painted
cardboard constructions. They are his latest relief sculptures,
which he says he is not satisfied with yet. Each is the size of a
small shoebox, taped together so that you can still see bits of the
tape through the paint. A few extra pieces of cardboard are stuck
onto several of the constructions, all of them with different,
brightly colored abstract designs.
He hung six of the works on pushpins along a wall, taking pains
to measure precisely the spaces between the constructions. He has
called his art a cross between calligraphy and architecture,
meaning that his main concerns are line and space: specifically,
the works he has made out of wires and ropes are meditations on
line and drawing, partly derived from a longtime fascination with
Chinese calligraphy. He's always alert to how his sculptures and
paintings, if only discreetly, alter the spaces they occupy. "I
think our response to any image is a response to the space it
inhabits," he says.
For his part, Tuttle explains at length, the constructions
function as a group without actually being either a series or a
sequence, meaning that they exist equally, in no particular order
and toward no specific end, in opposition to our tendency to
rationalize and prioritize things -- or that seems to be what they
mean to him, anyway.
He has a penchant for long, Delphic monologues. Ask him a yes or
no question and the response will take several minutes, at the end
of which you still don't know the answer. His wife, the poet
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, jokes that only 5 percent of what he says is
useful, but it's more to the point to say that he speaks as he
thinks, bouncing among ideas, and being shy, he's wary about
sounding pushy so he tends to be elliptical.
Some of the things he says later sink in. In the museum he
remarked how, before giving a speech not long ago, he worried that
he would forget what he meant to say. To calm himself, he rubbed
his palms together. "And I thought about those early Flemish
painters' portraits of people with their hands like this," he
said. "When we make this gesture, we're brought to a certain
physical consciousness. Art is always about trying to look for
consciousness, to bring about an awareness of consciousness."
This seemed like a convoluted way of saying what is obvious:
that the people in the pictures are praying. But then the image of
Tuttle rubbing his hands together, calming himself down, stuck and
grew. There is, in fact, something about what happens to a person
who makes this gesture: it effects a kind of balance, both physical
and psychological; the gesture of praying no doubt evolved because
it was a means of enhancing consciousness and easing the soul.
After that it became nearly impossible to look at those Flemish
portraits without at least thinking about the gesture, which is the
thing about Tuttle and about his art: if you get past resistance to
his materials or language, you're frequently rewarded with some
funny, unforeseen, sometimes even quasi-spiritual nugget.
In the Egyptian galleries, for example, he is fond of the
fragmentary head of a queen, made of yellow jasper, from the reign
of Amenhotep III in the 14th century B.C. The top of the head, down
to the lips, is missing, broken off, a sign of violence that Tuttle
says "opens her head so that it's as if she can speak, in the
sense that when we speak we reveal what's inside us."
He contrasts the fluid sweep of the chin with the ragged line
that is made by the break: "I have a particular passion for long,
long lines (I married a poet who writes the longest lines in
American poetry), and I love to follow the line of those lips and
also the line of her chin."
He mentions the sculpture apropos of his own "White Rocker," a
small work he made out of quarter-inch plywood during the '70s.
It's an oval split diagonally and folded, the two parts bridged by
a quarter-inch strip (the minutiae of the geometry, like everything
about his art, having for Tuttle a metaphysical value). The oval
curve, he says, echoes the curve of the Egyptian queen's face.
"The point of 'White Rocker' was to create an extended line, to
show a balance between volume and line. It's kind of hokey. But it
turned out that adding the bridge had the unexpected effect of
lengthening the line even further, making it seem longer."
A few years ago, Tuttle made some shaped reliefs out of
waferboard, a patterned wood composite, which he painted partly
with lines and forms that also tapered and turned, the results
being jaunty and sweet. One of them, from 1996, he explains, "is
built around a small flamelike line, and the question is whether
the line is thick or thin."
"The line is important, kind of subconsciously, but actually
you take in the work all at once, the same way you do a Chinese
character, which is made up of a sequence of strokes or gestures,
ordered in a particular way," he said. "Those characters are some
of the most profoundly built structures in human history.
"In our writing system, the messier you get the less you
communicate. But if you know Chinese characters" -- Tuttle has
studied a little Chinese -- "you know that the writer is
communicating feelings and ideas through the speed of the lines.
Art is about the power to communicate at differing speeds,
otherwise it's all fast and then it just becomes advertising."
Tuttle is especially interested in works that function on
different planes of consciousness, the term he used in talking
about the Flemish portraits. For example, the vermilion seals added
to Chinese scrolls to mark ownership are, he says, a second layer
of consciousness: "You can get a lot of information from the seals
and not even see the characters of the scroll, or vice versa. So
these two levels of consciousness exist simultaneously.
"Consciousness can be represented in different ways. Take the
Greek kouros." Now he is referring to the Met's sixth century B.C.
sculpture of a striding boy, the stride designating a shift in
Western art toward a naturalization of the figure. "The boy is
stepping into consciousness, designating a new awareness by his
stride."
He goes on: vermilion has a quality of seeming invisible. You
can see it if you look for it, he says, but it tends to disappear
when you don't, and among Western artists, Courbet exploited this
fact, using vermilion to sign his paintings.
"Courbet found a way to locate his signature between the
visible and invisible. It was an astonishing breakthrough, really,
to identify the position of the artist and by extension of all of
us in this way. He's saying, 'I'm an individual not because of how
I dress or who I associate with but because I can locate myself in
this metaphysical sense, in terms of art, between the visible and
invisible.'
"I think the revolution of Courbet involved this notion of
self, because if you think back you see that the self of the artist
didn't exist in the same way it did after him," Tuttle says.
"Goya, for example, grudgingly gives himself up, making portraits
in which his own identity slips between himself and the sitter. But
with Courbet, the slipping is between the viewer and the artist.
He's in a different relationship to us. And the slipping between
viewer and artist is something that continues all the way to
Pollock, whom you can feel making the drips when you look at his
pictures."
