The Brooklyn Rail

Seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes were fraught with allegorical messages: cut flowers signaled the transitory nature of human life, rotting vegetables the inevitability of death. Richard Tuttle inverts these allegories. Like an alchemist, he takes objects that time has consumed and destroyed, and redeems them.

The aphorism ars longa vita brevis—the idea that life is short, but art transcends life—is, in Tuttle’s terms, a painful reminder of universal impermanence. Not only is life short, but, given our capacity for and delight in destruction, art too is precarious. So, these wall pieces, all made in 2024, symbolize our world—a world in which disposable items threaten to engulf us when we can no longer dispose of them, one teetering on the edge of a trash heap abyss. But the Latin adage also means something else. “Ars” refers not only to the work of art but to the craft of artmaking, techniques learned over a long period of time in a nominally short life. This, too, is relevant to the octogenarian Tuttle. He knows what he’s doing because he’s spent so many years doing it, though his early shows, especially his 1975 Whitney solo exhibition, occasioned bilious controversy. Hilton Kramer, in the New York Times, mercilessly hammered Tuttle at the time:

To Mies van der Rohe's famous dictum that less is more, the art of Richard Tuttle offers definitive refutation. For in Mr. Tuttle's work, less is unmistakably less. It is, indeed, remorselessly and irredeemably less. It establishes new standards of lessness, and fairly basks in the void of lessness. One is tempted to say that, so far as art is concerned, less has never been as less this.

A Distance From This is a belated rejoinder to Kramer’s excoriation of Tuttle, the exhibition’s curator Marcia Tucker (who apparently lost her job because of Kramer’s condemnation), and the entire aesthetic underlying the artist’s work. Kramer’s silly indictment of this truly great artist originates in Minimalism, whose hallmarks are hard-edge geometric abstraction, industrial materials, and machine-like objectivity. Minimalist works—a Carl Andre floor piece, a Richard Serra wall of steel—are self-contained artistic statements whose rigorous adherence to doctrine recalls the Counter-Reformation ideology infused into so much Baroque art. Tuttle’s art has nothing to do with that. In fact, if the Minimalists are Baroque, then he is Rococo, related to Minimalism but different, his esthetic not doctrinaire but whimsical.

Not that he is decorative. To the contrary, each of these sixteen pieces is an experiment in the phenomenology of perception. What you see close up is vastly different from what you see at a distance. This fact perhaps explains the show’s title, A Distance From This. You think you’re seeing one thing in a Tuttle collage, but the nature of that thing changes with your perspective. Take Prong, 22 (2024). Seen from twenty feet, it is a complex wall sculpture: a yellow right angle delineating squares and rectangles, rigorous geometry juxtaposed to vague, wiry curves and twists. Order in conflict with disorder. Seen from twelve inches, the piece breaks down into its discrete parts: random wires, a rubber hose, a fragment of a picture frame—detritus seemingly arranged by chance. The thing-in-itself is simply not there because it only exists in terms of what the viewer perceives it to be.

This concept of the work of art as mirage reveals why all sixteen pieces carry the title “prong.” A peculiar word, a prong is not only the tine or sharp point on a fork, but also a vector pushing the viewer closer or further from each object. Prong, 1 (2024) is a 13 by 42 by 2-inch painted wood work that looks like a harpoon when seen from nearby. Step back and it becomes an aperture, a split in perception opening the way to another place. Every object in the show is a prong, jabbing visitors into taking part in a process, demanding we analyze what we are doing when we face art. Tuttle tosses out the idea that looking at art is a spectator sport: we’re all players.

One of the truly astonishing pieces here is Prong, 28 (2024). An approximately rectangular sheet of wood hung landscape style, with rectangular areas in portrait mode marked out on it. A streak of paint running from the upper left almost to the lower right, truncated, the part broken off to its right, looking like an escape path. Then, dramatically, two black marks, one toward lower left, the other, vaguely pointed, aimed toward upper right. As if some giant shoe had come down hard on a Minimalist work in progress, suggesting there is another road to take. The rigid order of Minimalism demonstrably breaking down before our eyes. Kramer’s blindness to Tuttle’s complexity provides us with an important insight: what you see is not what you get because what you see is a mirage in the distance that disappears when you approach it.