Viva Texturas!

Men just want their MOMA

Two Tuttle Doves

RE: Re-enchantment

Good Gossip

Two Tuttle doves and a partridge in a pear tree

No frills.
There are particular artists who one associates with paper, but one in particular is an American named Richard Tuttle. Recently he had a retrospective show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (a sort of coronation if you’re an American artist.) To see his work was to brush in very new ways against the hardnesses, scantnesses and thinnesses of paper. No frills. Certainly he uses other media, and would not qualify as a ‘paper artist’ per se, but he uses paper a lot and with ingenious feeling for the commonness, fragility, texture, and “layered-ness” of the material.

Cut and paste.
And flexibility. One early piece in the show was just a small ‘donut’ of paper that had been cut across at one point on the radius (like a bite); the paper was then slyly twisted and glued right to the wall. So simple, yet as gracefully geometric as a highway interchange. Another piece was a large 6 or 7 sided polygon cut from thin white paper and glued like wallpaper right to the white wall. A first you didn’t even see it, then when you did it induced a curiously illusionistic quandary of which was the art and which was the wall. Then at close range, you discovered exquisite little wrinkles that had formed as the glue dried, tiny ridges on a topographical map or the Tetons observed from outer space.

The Tao of layering.
Tuttle, as much as Carl André (for those of you in the trade) is an artist of wall and floor. Much of his stuff would work equally well on either one. Their planes and textures are essential seas floating Tuttle’s slender scraps. He’s also a master of layering. A simple idea, but few artists understand the crossings and weavings and peek-a-boo of layers as inventively and intuitively as Tuttle—maybe a really fine composer or a chef like Joel Robuchon. Folding paper at skewed, surprising angles and then printing a slab of ink across the whole is just one way that Tuttle creates, with the most spartan economy, his spatial crossword puzzles out of a single sheet of paper.

Ask Marion (the Librarian)
His show is over, but ask around and you should have no problem finding a book about him. If you’re lucky and have a really cool acquisitions librarian at your library, ask them for help.