Untitled (1051), ink and watercolor on paper, 2006,
15 x 17 inches

A few notes about Richard Tuttle. His retrospective closed this past weekend, where it was on view at the Whitney Museum in New York. I managed to make it to the show just in time.

Richard Tuttle’s work rewards looking and then looking again. The work, which at first blush can appear self conscious in its modesty and seemingly casual execution, goes on to display a finely calibrated, rigorous, and ultimately generous formalism. Sometimes offhand details, such as a shadow cast by a piece of wire nailed to the wall, can shift your sense of perspective violently, and you realize that you’re looking at a sculpture that strongly feels it was born to be a drawing. Looking closer, you realize the shadow the wire casts on the wall is echoed in the form of the thinly drawn pencil line that lies right next to it. The more you look, the more you realize that every formal element in the work is calculated to resonate not only with the other parts of the work, but also the other sculptures next to it, in addition to the space in which the work lives. It’s as if Tuttle made a piece of art whose purpose was to describe itself to you, slowly and patiently. It’s a good conversation.

At the retrospective in New York, I went along on the guided tour. While I can’t describe Tuttle’s work as secretive, I did find out about a lot of things that I wouldn’t have known otherwise. For instance, if a piece falls off a sculpture, Tuttle will often leave it there if he likes where it’s fallen. Also, an arrangement of cut strings on the floor was installed a few weeks after the show was opened. Tuttle likes to come in every few weeks and rearrange things in the exhibition, often creating new works in the process. Many of his pieces (including the wire piece I described above) are recreations of work made decades earlier, drawn entirely from what he calls “muscle memory.”

If you’re in NYC you can still see a grouping of works from the 1970′s and 80′s at Nyehaus. If you want to look at a large group of works online, try his gallery’s website. Art21 (on PBS) has featured Tuttle, and you can see excerpts here.The retrospective is traveling on to Des Moines, Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Try and catch it.

Virginia is a digital artwork by the British artist Julian Opie, who for some time has been making these very pared down portraits of people and landscapes. Sometimes these people are walking, sometimes (like Virginia) they’re simply staring straight ahead, blinking. What I think is really startling about his work is that no matter how reductive these portraits get, they always seem to be engrossing and compelling to watch. I think he’s somehow managed to wrangle elements of both Pop Art (and here someone like Allan D’Arcangelo comes to mind) and contemporary advertising to make these weird vessels that can both contain our projections and fantasies and help us make new ones.

It’s also possible I’m spending too much time with Virginia.

You can download Virginia at the artist’s website, where there’s information about his other works, some of which are also available for download. If you’re in New York you can see some of his newest work installed outdoors as part of a project for the Public Art Fund at City Hall.

Here’s a Paul Thek sculpture, called Blind today Deaf tomorrow (1969/71, 65 x 64 x 25 cm) which I’m guessing is part of one of his larger installations/environments. Paul Thek is probably best known for the Technological Reliquaries series, which were made in response to the Vietnam War. He abruptly stopped making those pieces when he realized he was being referred to as the “Meat Man” and went on to make everything from paintings to installations and more. One of the most amazing ones is The Tomb-Death of a Hippie, which you can read about here. Paul Thek died in 1988, and a lot of his work, including incredibly elaborate installations such as The Tomb, has been destroyed. The Paul Thek Project was started this past summer in order to document and contextualize his work, much of which cannot be recreated.

I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1971) is a three minute and twenty one second video of the artist, Bas Jan Ader, inexplicably crying. The fact that we’re not told why he’s crying puts our own reaction to the work on very shaky ground. Generally, it’s the audience that’s supposed to weep in front of artworks, not the other way around.

Bas Jan Ader practiced a romantic kind of conceptual art which involved ideas of falling, failure, sadness, and the sublime, among other things. His last project, part of a three part work entitled In Search Of The Miraculous, involved a sailboat trip from Cape Cod to England in July of 1975. He lost radio contact three weeks into the trip and wasn’t heard from again. Less than a year later his body was found off the coast of Ireland.

I’m Too Sad To Tell You is part of an exhibition of currently showing at Perry Rubinstein Gallery in New York. It’s up through the 22nd of December.

Ree Morton (1936-1977) made playful, poetic sculptures, drawings, and installations. Her career lasted about a decade before she died in a car crash in 1977. Much of the work was celebratory in tone, and she wasn’t afraid to use emotion or decorative elements. The work can be really open ended in meaning, but it’s always generous. You’re guaranteed to walk away with something. The Mating Habits of Lines: Sketchbooks and Notebooks of Ree Morton collects some of her studio notes and sketches. It’s a great read because she’s just writing to herself — cheering herself on, figuring out ways to push the work farther, and trying to remember why she’s making work in the first place. It’s funny, sometimes neurotic, and occasionally sad. I recommend it.

more Ree Morton images