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

By the early '80s Tuttle began to work seriously with the idea of the frame. This investigation allowed his drawings to assume an increased sculptural presence but also put another structural and referential system into play. In the "India Work" series of 1980, a piece of paper with a small quasi-geometric watercolor image painted on it is floated in an elaborate, multileveled unpainted wooden frame that the artist designed. Rather than simply being something to physically protect a drawing and visually isolate it from its surroundings, the frames in "India Work" end up carrying as much esthetic freight as the drawing elements themselves. Other series in a similar vein followed: "Hong Kong Set" (1980), "Brown Bar" (1981), "Old Men and Their Garden" (1982) and "La Terre de Grenade" (1985).

As the '80s progressed, Tuttle's work took a decided turn away from reduction, and began to incorporate a wider range of materials and techniques. Where once it seemed hard for people to even recognize that a work of art was on display, now complex, colorful, almost baroque sculptural objects left no doubt about what they were. Not that Tuttle abandoned his casual look and creaky facture. That some of these works barely held together was the point--they were about connecting the disparate and discombobulated, cobbling together a coherent visual language out of the odds and ends of life. The work exuded a kind of jittery charm and was becoming humorous, in a low-keyed way.

Monkey's Recovery for a Darkened Room, 6 (1983) is a wail-mounted piece consisting of two tree branches painted bright blue, a deformed rectangle of red wire and string, twists of cloth, curved forms cut out of mat board and hanging, clapperlike lengths of wood attached by loops of wire to each other at opposite corners, so they descend in a diagonal, steplike fashion. The piece is hard to describe, and others are still harder. A list of materials is helpful for getting the feel of a wall sculpture like Two or More XII (1984), if not its exact look: fabric, aluminum Pepsi can, wire, feather, glass, cardboard, enamel, acrylic, spray enamel and dry pigment. The "Sentences" series of 1989 even tossed lightbulbs into the equation, and these pieces--freestanding or nearly so--are probably the funniest and most eccentric in the whole show. Sentences III, a 6-foot-high slab of blue painted wood, its crown curved like a tombstone or surfboard and festooned with three nonfunctioning red bulbs in ceramic sockets on its top, five white working ones along the side, and a busted-up plywood grid on its front, feels like a science-fair robot project gone very wrong. Another favorite of mine is There's No Reason a Good Man Is Hard to Find I (1988). One of the biggest sculptures in the show at roughly 6 by 7 by 7 feet, it is a concoction of wood, PVC pipe, metal bolts and screws, heavy gauge wire, tissue paper, acrylic, imitation leather and industrial-quality thread. It spirals up from the floor with a kind of jaunty, stuttering beat, black bags over its joints, an orange tissue-paper flag on a wire at its top, ready to flutter in the wind.