Just exquisite?: the art of Richard Tuttle

ArtForum, Nov, 1997 by Robert Storr

The '90s have never really declared themselves. Exceptions noted - Matthew Barney, for example - the best art to emerge in the decade has been physically modest and antirhetorical. That's reasonable enough, given the grandstanding of the '80s. In place of massive canvases, reliefs, or bronzes, artists such as Tom Friedman have favored materials like typing paper, masking tape, and bubblegum; instead of crisp layouts, press type, Photostats, and various state-of-the-art advertising techniques, Raymond Pettibon has stuck to hand lettering and drawing on dog-eared or otherwise distressed sheets of paper. And despite the sometimes vast scale of his installations, you may find Ilya Kabakov's dystopian worldview succinctly summarized in a single dangling specimen composed of string, wire, and assorted found objects or in a crumpled ball of tissue paper lying inconspicuously on the floor near the baseboard molding of a SoHo gallery with a brief didactic label explaining the inevitability of the object's lowly status.

The last piece was part of the New York version of a seminal 1990 exhibition organized by Ralph Rugoff for the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles and retooled in 1992 for an East Coast audience at American Fine Arts in New York. The show's title, "Just Pathetic," has since become the only distinctive '90s art moniker to stick. The new sensibility Rugoff defined offered an X-ray-accurate diagnosis of the period's symptomatic discontents. "Whenever failure to successfully conform can be attributed to a lack of mastery and self-control, to a laughable powerlessness, that behavior is in danger of being labeled pathetic. To be pathetic, in other words, is to be a loser, haplessly falling short of the idealized norm. Art which embraces the pathetic voluntarily wallows in this embarrassing territory. While all art risks failing, pathetic art makes failure its medium."

Though theory-ready types immediately jumped on Rugoff's idea to claim it in the name of the "abject," Georges Bataille, and still fancier discourses, what they missed entirely was Rugoff's tone. And when it comes to pegging the zeitgeist, tone is everything. Whether American adolescent fears and obsessions (as in the work of Pettibon or Mike Kelley) or simply a hostility to the grand manner (as is true for Kabakov and David Hammons) was more at issue in the show, the point is that all these artists turned their back on high style and the career strategies that go along with it.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Richard Tuttle, the subject of two shows in New York last year. A miniretrospective at the New York Public Library, a corridor-filling gem coorganized by Robert Rainwater, chief librarian for art, prints, and photographs, and freelance curator Robert Murdoch, featured almost fifty examples of the artist's books, prints, and multiples from 1965 through 1995. Meanwhile, a show at Sperone Westwater presented new paintings on jigsaw-cut wafer board in addition to ten "classic" Tuttles spanning roughly the same period as the library show. Among them were a beautiful glyphlike shaped wood relief from 1965, another letter-form dyed canvas hanging from 1967, an octagonal paper piece almost imperceptibly adhered to the wall with wheat paste from 1970, and a small, ankle-high, wall-hugging plywood slat, painted white along one edge, from 1974.

Having shown quietly in galleries starting in the mid '60s, Tuttle was first introduced to the general public in 1975 in a one-person exhibition at the Whitney Museum organized by Marcia Tucker. The radical unobtrusiveness of the work triggered shock waves that eventually resulted in Tucker's departure from the Whitney and her founding of the New Museum of Contemporary Art. As always, Hilton Kramer was on hand to sound the tocsin for those perennially antagonistic to fresh ideas. "To Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum that less is more, the art of Richard Tuttle offers definitive refutation. For in Mr. Tuttle's work, less is unmistakably less. It is, indeed, remorselessly and irredeemably less. It establishes new standards of lessness, and fairly basks in the void of lessness. One is tempted to say that, so far as art is concerned, less has never been less than this." In the event, Kramer's pan was included in a selection of criticism Tucker included in the show's catalogue (published after the opening). And as is usually the case, Kramer accurately signaled the importance of the occasion by denying it had any.(1)

Prepared by Kramer's onslaught and buttressed by the better-informed and more sympathetic commentaries of John Perrault, Thomas Hess, and Lawrence Alloway, among others, Tucker chose to emphasize the provocative slightness of the artist's output. "The work of Richard Tuttle often shocks viewers with its offhandedness, its modest informality and its rough, impermanent look," she wrote. "Tuttle's pieces are insistent; their often small size, visual frailty and blatant disregard for the kind of technical refinement found in 'major' art stubbornly, even perversely command attention. These pieces are so removed from the attitudes and modes of working found in the art of most of Tuttle's peers that their individuality alone constitutes, for many viewers, an offense in itself."