Just exquisite?: the art of Richard Tuttle

ArtForum, Nov, 1997 by Robert Storr

Nowhere is the word "pathetic" used in the critical debate surrounding the Whitney show, but the connection Tucker and others perceived between "ambitious" art and ambitiously "unambitious" art links Tuttle of 1975 to contemporary antiheroic tendencies. And it positions him as an aesthetic "elder" in many ways comparable to Bruce Nauman, whose polymorphous assaults on mandarin style and sentiment have had so profound an effect on recent practice. Nauman's analytic anger resonates with that of Pettibon, Kelley, and their soul mates, while Tuttle's idiosyncratic finesse is echoed by that of Friedman, with whom he also shares a temperamental serenity, and, at times, by that of Hammons and Kabakov.

Whether its materials consist of bottle caps nailed in the thousands to telephone poles, fried chicken wings ornamentally attached to cast-off carpeting, or cigarette butts impaled on bent coat hangers like candles set into a sconce, Hammons' work is as ingeniously decorative as it is socially rooted. In much the same way, messiness was never so artful as it is in Kabakov's ghostly still-lifes of communal kitchens and squalid Soviet SROs. Karen Kilimnik's hodgepodge tableaux and scatter pieces mix deftness and dilapidation in ways not unrelated to Kabakov's - the cultural wasteland she commemorates occupied the opposite side of the iron curtain from the one he now re-creates. And, with their dynamic shape-shifting and sometimes Al Held-like grandiosity, Jessica Stockholder's jazzy interiors, facades, and junk-shop amalgams represent the upbeat contingent of the loose, and much larger, aesthetic community currently encamped in Tuttle's vicinity.

A generational chasm separates Tuttle from his '90s counterparts, however, not to mention a profound philosophical difference. A voluble as well as reflective man, Tuttle is devoted to ideas but seemingly untempted by systems building. A basically intuitive intellectual, he has not been disappointed by Modernism, as so many younger artists have, because art's compromising entanglements with the world have never been as interesting to him as its mutating genetic codes, according to which the simple chromosomes of his early work have mutated into wondrous organisms of recent years.

At heart, Tuttle is the lyric poet of the ephemeral. Books consume a large part of his energy, both as a reader and as a maker. (Pettibon is literate in similar measure.) A considerable number of those on display at the public library were catalogues for exhibitions; like the late Martin Kippenberger and Joseph Beuys before him, Tuttle has frequently acted as his own curator while assuming the prerogatives of the professional designer of posters and documentation for his art. Meanwhile, among the living, Tuttle's literary collaborators have included Larry Fagin, Barbara Guest, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (a poet he met in connection with a project sponsored by the Whitney Museum and later married); among the dead they count Auden, Yeats, Descartes, Spinoza, and Beuys.