Observer Arts Interviews Artist Richard Tuttle | Observer

Since the ’60s and for the entirety of his decades-long career, Richard Tuttle has been challenging and subverting the idea of a canvas as a surface of representation, confronting and deconstructing it as a “painting object” or “constructed painting.” Approaching the canvas just as another element to combine with others, Tuttle creates seemingly chaotic assemblages where paradoxical combinations of elements eventually find their harmony in the space. Embracing a distinctive handmade quality, the artist orchestrates into hybrid and apparently paradoxical forms—a vocabulary of humble and mundane materials, from strips of wood to carved cardboard, scrap metal, rubber tubes or even very ephemeral and fragile sheets of paper. The emphasis is on minimal acts of craftsmanship that turn simple or discarded materials into new aesthetical constellations that are a deep investigation of the interplay between materiality, objects and experiences to find meaning.

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Observer met the artist to discuss how his continuous attempt to challenge the canvas and his resistance to all medium-specific designations for his work have manifested in a new solo exhibition at Arne Glimcher’s 125 Newbury space in Tribeca.

Their ‘ooster’s you-staby. Thei’roosters you-stabee. When you stretch language over grammar, you can say much more. The more you know grammar, the freer you are with language. The’roosters you-sta-be. The freer you are with language, the freer your brain is. Th’rooster you-sta-bee. What is an artist trying to picture? Is a singing bird music in nature? Is the artist trying to find a picture in nature like the composer? Was Dr. Seuss born to be funny?

Today’s picture has to picture today, doesn’t it? What genius will come along and picture what it’s like to live hidden from covert operations of your CIA in other countries your representatives in Congress don’t even know about? What is a picture supposed to look like that represents only monotheism’s struggles with one another in a world that doesn’t even acknowledge polytheism, much less offer it as peace? Today’s picture cannot be called “abstract” if it represents these and other aspects that each of us is supposed to fold together. The Secret Team of L. Fletcher Prouty shows the clandestine world governs. The only thing more powerful is what a picture should be and can be today.

Is dirt a material? Certainly. People build houses from it. People make pottery from it. In a way, it defines “material.” Yet we don’t know what it is. One way is that there are infinite kinds of dirt. Another way is that people think it’s dirty. Yet another way is that we approach it after we use it for something. There are many ways that explain why we cannot know what dirt is. Are the materials I use in my work akin? Maybe, maybe not, but they are certainly going toward dirt, aren’t they? As William Bryant Logan says in Dirt, “There you have fecundity.” Wasn’t that a wonderful passage?

I read in Suzanne Marrs’ biography of Eudora Welty how she suffered from writer’s block during World War II when events were powerful and loved ones were soldiers at war. Welty’s inspiration often came from incidents bound into Southern caste systems she exploited and destroyed. The biographer merely speculates how the agrarian South pared off with the industrial North—the North waging the war with other industrialized nations—and how this subsumed folklore, for better or for worse. A biographer would be better to know the context of art.

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I do not want my work to turn out like this, idolized but standing in a vice where events are more important than content or awareness. How can it be open and disparaging without being ordinary? How can it take advantage of A.I. the same way art was freed by photography?

Workmanlike, the writer Kenneth M. Sheldon recounts a murder that happened during World War I in East Jaffrey, New Hampshire and was never solved. He uses an almost Euclidian approach, delivering facts in short puffs that suspend history in the air. I would like to do that. Isn’t style and glamor an asset?

Over and over again, we have reference to a kind of axis between New Mexico, where I live, and Guatemala. Not the Guatemala of the Hispanics but of the Mayans, whose culture, largely destroyed, provides rich time mythologies that my heroes Dennis and Barbara Tedlock pointed to and saved enough of to give contemporary Mayan people vast resources. Some of these resources may still be enjoyed, I hope, in the Prongs and their ancillary, pro-formative, other workings, yet to come.

Richard Tuttle’s “A Distance From This” is on view at 125 Newbury in New York through October 26.