"A kind of strange part of my work is that one instant
is the same as all time, all eternity: microcosm, macrocosm."
"Both in the making and the critiquing there is all of
life, and there has to be because if you don’t have
all of life, then how can you make anything that really
has some importance?"
"How can someone have sculptural ideas? I can have an idea
how to play a Mozart sonata; I can have an idea how to
make baked potatoes. But a sculptural idea is different."
Measurement seems
to play a big part in your work.
TUTTLE:
A kind of strange part of my
work is that one instant is the same as all time, all eternity:
microcosm, macrocosm. One of my favorite artists is Jan van
Eyck who gives you a picture that satisfies all attentiveness
to the smallest of the small and all attentiveness to the
largest of the large. That’s one of the things that
a picture is supposed to do for us. Ultimately, you have
to come to that flash instant which is almost un-measurably
short and then un-measurably large. I’ve always been
confused why we have this system where we try to balance
out originary time with non-originary time. You know, sequential
time by the watch and then the concept of time. Even our
sentences, the ways we express ourselves, play service to
each one of those notions of time.
ART:21:
Talk about what happens when
installing your work.
TUTTLE:
Something magical happens when
a group of my work comes together. The Kleins in Tesuque
are wonderful people, they built a new house, and have some
works of mine that they wanted my input on hanging. What
came to mind was introducing six yellow pieces that were
from about 1970-74 in the three consecutive rooms that were
then woven in with works that they had already owned, some
from the ’90s and earlier periods. I know that about
my work—one and one equals three and one and two equals
six—there’s this kind of exponential leaping. It could
be just an awareness of some weird sense of logic that comes
out the more material you have. Knowing that, I can also
play with that and make it even richer.
In the Klein situation, you have these six yellows that weave
in with another order. On some level, the installation—to
use a horrible word—would be this weaving between my persona
and their persona to create a kind of world. It’s not
just visual, how to see the rooms as what they were intended
for and then to build on that and show artwork off to its
best advantage. I mean, in some sense I would think that
an artist is really like what Plato might call a true philosopher—you
can go to the limit of any and all disciplines.
ART:21:
Are there limits to art-making,
rules?
TUTTLE:
You know that first little piece...you
can have the yellow without the black in it, or the yellow
with the black in it. And at the moment it has the yellow
with the black in it. And I thought that would push it forward,
in the sense of things emerge or are born—they’re
pushed forward. Because yellow is the color of natural ambiguity,
it can recede or come forward. That’s why it was used
in Italian primitive paintings with gold—it was gold
in that case, but yellow and gold work the same way.
These
simple things that any child could do, these sort of “rules
of art.” Like the famous rule of negative capability,
or whether it’s “to be or not to be.” That
has so much energy. It doesn’t say anything, but it
has so much energy in it that generations and generations
of human beings have pondered it. In some sense the best
art or the aim of the best art is to just let it. You know
we should just let things happen that want to happen. You
know it’s not about making something happen but about
allowing something to take place.
ART:21:
And the border between drawing
and sculpture?
TUTTLE:
How can someone have sculptural
ideas? I can have an idea how to play a Mozart sonata; I
can have an idea how to make baked potatoes. But a sculptural
idea is different. It’s like a different mind, where
I suppose we dig up some three-dimensional sense.
I also find in the world at large that there’s a battle
about the existence of the third dimension. Many of the cultures
that primarily use the two-dimensional look much more dominant
than the ones who connected early on to the three-dimensional.
And I myself find that the two-dimensional in a way is more “real.” In
a culture like Japan, everything is on a two-dimensional
plane and it’s inexhaustible—this two-dimensional
plane.
But we all have an ability to step back from our own language
for example and treat it like it’s something outside
of us and we can teach it to other people. And we use that
third dimension to take a distance. And a lot of the synthesis
in our culture comes from the use of that third dimension.
One of the questions of the
moment is should we sustain that third dimension, what does
it cost us? It’s very weighty because we don’t
really account for it and there’s an intuitive element
to it. A lot of the real innovations in mathematics comes
from intuiting in the third dimension. And in other cultures
where three-dimensions isn’t the focus, once that’s
been discovered, then they’re able to use it on the
two-dimensional plane with greater efficiency than the ones
who were already using it. Artists have always been involved
in this kind of universal stuff. We wouldn’t have
Giotto if artists didn’t think about, like, “Does
the third dimension exist or doesn’t it?”, or, “How
can it be expressed if it does?”
ART:21:
What is the connection you see
between art and life?
TUTTLE:
My beginnings were with the
Betty Parsons group. One of the important elements in that
vision was that art is life—all of life. Both in the making
and the critiquing there is all of life, and there has to
be because if you don’t have all of life, then how
can you make anything that really has some importance? I
abhor anything that I personally feel reduces the scope of
art. There’s a division left over from the twentieth
century where certain people might think that art is something
that is made outside of any personal expression. Joseph Albers
or the Bauhaus—it’s really coolly detached. And then
there’s the other kind where it is full of personal
expression. The personal expression side is great but you
can finally get an art which is just an expression of some
twisted personal idiosyncrasy.
ART:21:
When did you know you wanted
to be an artist?
TUTTLE:
Before I went to kindergarten
I really wanted to be an artist. Not that I knew what being
an artist was, but on the first day of kindergarten the teacher
handed out the paper and the colored crayons. And I just
connected in my brain that this was the first day of my life,
and that going to school was the start of everything that
was important to me. I remember the drawing to this moment.
I took a pencil and I just made this horizon line, and then
I took the colored pencils and I made a rainbow there. And
that was my drawing. I looked over and I saw that the other
kindergarteners were doing their sun with the rays of the
sun and drawing their flowers from the bottom of the page
and all of that. And I knew that my drawing was more, say,
advanced or sophisticated, but I also knew that I had lost
a kind of innocence—irretrievably—that they still retained.
And so I was a little bit pushed back in a state of confusion.
Then, when the teacher collected the drawings, mine was not
put up as one that was highly valued. I had to adjust to
that, and of course I did, but my respect for the teacher
was forever erased.
But the story goes on...when I had my
first show at the Betty Parsons Gallery when I was 23 or
so, I looked over on the wall and saw a piece called "Hill."
And it was kind of the same rainbow which the graphite line
had changed into. It was a big, startling moment to me because
that really was the first day of my life in a way and quite
a way from kindergarten, which I had mistakenly thought was
the first day, to my show in a New York gallery.
