Richard Tuttle
16 Sep - 22 Nov 2008
© Richard Tuttle
Craft #10, 2008
51.5 x 36 x 20 cm
cardboard, paper-mâché, glue, wiremesh, cotton, wire and acrylic paint mounted on painted cardboard circle on wood on black cardboard circle
Craft #10, 2008
51.5 x 36 x 20 cm
cardboard, paper-mâché, glue, wiremesh, cotton, wire and acrylic paint mounted on painted cardboard circle on wood on black cardboard circle
RICHARD TUTTLE
"Craft"
September 16 to November 22, 2008
‘Say it! No ideas but in things.’ (William Carlos Williams ‘Paterson’ 1946) No ideas that can be separated, detached from things. No objects, no articles, just things, self-evident and incomprehensible, imbued with an important measure of undecidability. They are because they are art. Material and symbol, found and formed into the work, small and equipped with an internal structure, complex and highly differentiated.
‘Craft’ – Richard Tuttle gave this designation to the fifteen works of this exhibition.
The attempt to describe something that exists as a description of itself is a questionable endeavor. Nevertheless, a few attributes of these strange beings can be brought out and very near generalized. A role is played by color, also employed as material, blotches of color, spots of color, sometimes set on fine transparent networks. In this way, relicts of form, found objects are integrated and combined. Lines, connections, correspondences can be made out here and there. Each work constitutes a small dense center and is affixed on the wall at an exactly designated height with a bracket on a circular painted surface. Depth becomes tangible, volume is able to extract permeability from the solid wall. Space, spatiality is not demarcated or enclosed but originates through expansion – it is quasi turned inside out.
Venturing an association with insects in certain works is risky. It involves the concentrated potential of these works that occupy a vital point in a force field and that claim and activate their context, their environment. The mobility here is a matter relating to the viewer. He will frequently shift his point of view before an individual work and in the exhibition in order to reach the margins with this situation.
Entrusting the fragile thing with worth and validity without charging it with finality and insularity is something achieved by the art of Richard Tuttle. The seam, the zones that come into contact, the points of transition that are butted up against and incorporated – these open up and alter the scale of the work. The contradictoriness and presumptuousness of a one-to-one art and the pathos of art that supposes to convey borrowed contents and insights are not to be found here. Yet insights are readily available, here and now.
A high-level aspiration is a precondition of this artistic exercise. Access via patterns of thought and vision is denied and recognizability by means of repetition is essentially precluded. Each group of works wants to be a place for the new, for something never before seen. Even just the strange and remarkable form of the new that must not yield to arbitrariness forces the artist to seek discipline and precision. In each individual case, it is the success that is capable of relieving the intensive effort of its weight, yet without fully dispelling this seeming contradiction.
"Craft"
September 16 to November 22, 2008
‘Say it! No ideas but in things.’ (William Carlos Williams ‘Paterson’ 1946) No ideas that can be separated, detached from things. No objects, no articles, just things, self-evident and incomprehensible, imbued with an important measure of undecidability. They are because they are art. Material and symbol, found and formed into the work, small and equipped with an internal structure, complex and highly differentiated.
‘Craft’ – Richard Tuttle gave this designation to the fifteen works of this exhibition.
The attempt to describe something that exists as a description of itself is a questionable endeavor. Nevertheless, a few attributes of these strange beings can be brought out and very near generalized. A role is played by color, also employed as material, blotches of color, spots of color, sometimes set on fine transparent networks. In this way, relicts of form, found objects are integrated and combined. Lines, connections, correspondences can be made out here and there. Each work constitutes a small dense center and is affixed on the wall at an exactly designated height with a bracket on a circular painted surface. Depth becomes tangible, volume is able to extract permeability from the solid wall. Space, spatiality is not demarcated or enclosed but originates through expansion – it is quasi turned inside out.
Venturing an association with insects in certain works is risky. It involves the concentrated potential of these works that occupy a vital point in a force field and that claim and activate their context, their environment. The mobility here is a matter relating to the viewer. He will frequently shift his point of view before an individual work and in the exhibition in order to reach the margins with this situation.
Entrusting the fragile thing with worth and validity without charging it with finality and insularity is something achieved by the art of Richard Tuttle. The seam, the zones that come into contact, the points of transition that are butted up against and incorporated – these open up and alter the scale of the work. The contradictoriness and presumptuousness of a one-to-one art and the pathos of art that supposes to convey borrowed contents and insights are not to be found here. Yet insights are readily available, here and now.
A high-level aspiration is a precondition of this artistic exercise. Access via patterns of thought and vision is denied and recognizability by means of repetition is essentially precluded. Each group of works wants to be a place for the new, for something never before seen. Even just the strange and remarkable form of the new that must not yield to arbitrariness forces the artist to seek discipline and precision. In each individual case, it is the success that is capable of relieving the intensive effort of its weight, yet without fully dispelling this seeming contradiction.