The subjective object: while showing an enduring preference for the casual touch, deliberately creaky facture and modest materials, Richard Tuttle has over the last 40 years created an exceptionally varied body of work, as a current traveling retrospective makes clear

Art in America, Dec, 2005 by Richard Kalina

In September 1966 two important shows opened on the same day in the same building on 57th Street in New York--"Eccentric Abstraction," curated by Lucy Lippard at the Fishbach Gallery, which introduced Post-Minimalism, and "Ten," a key show from the early years of Minimalism, curated by Robert Smithson at the Dwan Gallery. Minimalism and Post-Minimalism's histories (and personnel) are intertwined, and ongoing critical examination coupled with significant exhibitions has brought them even closer. The large-scale retrospective of Richard Tuttle's sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints and artist's books organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and currently at the Whitney Museum, New York) gives us a chance to examine in depth the work of one of the most original and indispensable members of the Post-Minimal group.

If there was something that Minimalism and Post-Minimalism undoubtedly shared, it was their ability to upset people. For many, there seemed to be, maddeningly, nothing there to see. Tuttle, in particular, managed to get under people's skins. His 1975 survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum, which featured pieces of rope on the floor and short lengths of string and bits of wire attached to the wall, was lambasted in the press and led eventually to the firing of Marcia Tucker, the show's curator. Hilton Kramer's vituperative New York Times review remains a benchmark in the history of postwar art-critical nastiness, so much so that Robert Storr felt it necessary to discuss it at length in his contribution to the current exhibition's catalogue.

Though there may have been doubters, Tuttle has always had many people strongly in his corner, and at the beginning of his career he had the good fortune to land at the legendary Betty Parsons Gallery, first working there, starting as a gallery assistant, then showing with Parsons from 1965 until her death in 1982. The gallery's place in the history of postwar art and its low-key, idealistic ethos made a strong impression on the young artist. One of the most influential galleries of the '50s, it had been home at various times to Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Tony Smith, Ellsworth Kelly and other abstract artists with a poetic, reductive bent. Martin, whom Tuttle met when he was in his 20s and she was in her 50s, became a lifelong friend and inspiration.

The first works that Tuttle showed at Parsons were called the "Constructed Paintings." They were built from two congruent plywood shapes that were held an inch or two apart by a thin wooden strip attached to the plywood by hundreds of small, carefully hammered nails. Hovering somewhere between painted sculpture and sculptured painting, they had edges drawn with an elegantly wavering line--a harbinger of virtually all of Tuttle's subsequent work--and an even matte acrylic surface. The colors Tuttle chose were often odd, slightly grating "decorator" hues--for example, a light violet-gray panel placed flush to a white one that is in turn abutted to a flesh-colored one in Chelsea, a minty sea-foam green in House and an insistent mid-tone peacock blue in Torso (all 1965). The overall shapes, whether in single- or multipanel works, read initially as straightforward, undemanding forms--rectangles, inverted "U" shapes or simple curves, with each panel painted a single, uninflected hue. Even though the forms are seemingly straightforward, the paintings do not want to stay put perceptually. They quiver, go off plumb, slide away from you. The twin rectangular panels of Two (1965), for example, have completely different color weights, with the buoyant, pastel orange on the left barely tethered to the dense cedar green on the right. The panels are physically abutted but not flush, since the edges are not ruler-straight, and the whole ensemble cants over to the right, though not far enough to create anything so conventional as a "dynamic" diagonal. These works (with the possible exception of a slightly earlier group of ten small cardstock cubes, each with different forms cut out from it (1)) come about as close as Tuttle gets to orthodox Minimalism. And it is clear that for him, Minimalism's geometry and orthogonal orientation are things to play off of, not go deeper into.

The "Constructed Paintings," their indeterminate color and slightly irregular edges notwithstanding, were still very much objects, and Tuttle, along with other Post-Minimal and Conceptual artists, became interested in dematerializing his artwork. In his unstretched canvas works from 1967, Tuttle took the same sorts of quasi-geometric shapes that he used in the "Constructed Paintings," cut them out of canvas with the help of a paper template, hemmed the edges, and then balled them up and put them in a pot of fabric dye. The canvas was hung out to dry, and the result was a wrinkled, unevenly pigmented surface. The colors of the pieces--rust, gold, orange, blue, green--were rather wan and unassertive to start with, and over the years, depending on the permanence of the dye and the piece's exposure to light, they have faded to even paler shades. This fading, though, has resulted in surprisingly little esthetic loss. Such chromatic flexibility, combined with the way the pieces were meant to be displayed and stored, underscores their lack of preciousness, their consciously diminished aura. Tuttle wanted them to be pinned to the wall, or even spread out on the floor, with the orientation left up to the owner or curator. There was no prescribed back or front, up or down, and the pieces were meant to be kept wadded up in a cloth bag when they were not on display (although, as an SFMOMA curator assured me, no institution would ever do that).