Just exquisite?: the art of Richard Tuttle

ArtForum, Nov, 1997 by Robert Storr

By means of his ever-expanding list of raw or semiraw materials, Tuttle has gone about elaborating the absolute "lessness" of his early work to the point of quirky excess. Tuttle of the '60s and '70s evolved into Tuttle of the '80s and '90s in a manner parallel to the epochal shift from minimal to maximal art, but he never broke character. To the Baroque histrionics of neo-Expressionism, Tuttle answered with sometimes extravagant Rococo refinement. The work may be diminutive and emblematic, as in the tiny wall pieces he showed in Baden-Baden, flat-out-pictorial, as in the often lush acrylic and wafer-board paintings featured in his gallery show last fall and at the Venice Biennale this past summer, or nearly - but never quite - space devouring, as in his Floor Drawings of 1987-89, rambling mixed-media assemblages that look like pup tents, miniature-golf traps, or carnival concessions on a sunny morning after a windy night. (The decorative light bulbs found in some of these pieces correspond closely to Hammons' use of them in Highfalutin, 1985-90, and related pieces.) Tuttle's paradigms are roadside USA; his touch is epicurean. Rare is the American who can take his pleasure so guiltlessly or offer it with so few strings attached; in his art, those strings may dangle from the actual work.

To call Tuttle's work "precious" - a habitual cocktail-party and art-academy epithet - is to beg all the interesting questions. To make things simultaneously ephemeral and jewellike is to pit impermanence against permanence, everyday temporality against aesthetic timelessness. Japanese art of the high courtly tradition repeatedly did so; artists of the Rococo period celebrated the fleeting delights of their doomed aristocratic world in a related spirit. Tuttle's work is more improvisatory than its Japanese analogues and less melancholic or overtly frivolous than its seventeenth-century European ones. But he too is engaged in the serious business of making the most of things with the least exalted claim on our attention and the unlikeliest chances of long-term survival. In which case the prime emotion stirred in the viewer by Tuttle's elegant confections - beyond instinctive covetousness and despite puritanical suspicion - is vulnerability.

Doubling back to the beginning, then, one can recognize in the damage-prone things that Richard Tuttle reveals to be "just exquisite" the favored twins of already-damaged things Ralph Rugoff finds "just pathetic." But where Rugoff's critical stance concerns the aesthetics of heightened lowliness and the liberating experience of zero expectations, Tuttle's low-grade materials are rendered highly sensuous, his disregard for summary statements bordering on the ecstatic. Coming from different places - and heading in different directions - Tuttle the undeterred romantic and his disabused '90s brethren meet at a juncture where the only truly hopeless propositions seem to be those straining for heroic impact. Their shared renunciation of this option lends the resulting work varying degrees of bittersweetness. While the conceptually astringent flavor of much "pathetic" art is individually seasoned with sentiment - Kabakov's nostalgia, Pettibon's "film-noir" homages, Hammons' visual blues riffs - Tuttle's work is sweet with a cleansingly sharp aftertaste, as is that of Friedman, Stockholder, and others of their more purely formal approach.