What a treasure trove is Robert Ayers’ blog, A Sky filled with Shooting Stars. Earlier this week I posted a few extracts from Ayers’ recent interview with Larry Poons. Digging a bit deeper into Ayers’ archives, I have found fascinating interviews with several other significant artists. It is now clear to me that Ayers has a gift at pulling information out of artists that others just don’t know how to access.
Case in point is Ayers’ interview with Richard Tuttle. Conducted concomitant with Tuttle’s show, “Memory Comes from Dark Extension” at Sperone Westwater in 2007, the discussion touches on the exquisitely understated but dauntingly powerful pieces that embodied the sepulchral whiteness of SW. It was a show that knocked me out (and one that I wrote about here.) That exhibit was more intimate and personal than the brilliantly arms flung wide retrospective of Tuttle’s work that traveled the country in 2005/2006, and an extraordinary flowering of giftedness as a follow on to his controversial but now legendary first retrospective at the Whitney in 1975 which garnered this unforgettable condemnation from Hilton Kramer: “In Mr. Tuttle’s work, less is unmistakably less. It is, indeed, remorselessly and irredeemably less. It establishes new standards of lessness.”
Ever since that Whitney show in 1975, Tuttle has been on my *IGLEYD* artist list. So it is even more extraordinary to find how deftly Ayers can pull such rich material out of Tuttle.
Here are a few excerpts from the interview:
Ayers: Richard, this is a beautiful show. But your work is not concerned with beauty, is it?
Tuttle: Eastern philosophers talk about the illusion of the world. I feel very sympathetic to that, because you know in an instant if a person is involved with appearances or reality. There’s a whole huge structure out there that gives high marks for appearances. Then there are the people who are involved with what’s real. By far the vast majority of people’s lives are involved with appearances—even most art is just appearances. People are literally swept away by appearances.
Ayers: But you believe that you’re working with reality rather than appearance?
Tuttle: In our culture there is a job for art, because we can’t experience reality anywhere else. And the experience of reality is absolutely fundamental to human existence. My job is to give the best possible visual experience. I try to raise the bar on the visual experience so that people can enjoy their lives. I get to thinking a lot about motivation—the purest motivation should result in the best visual experience. This is the first show where I think I’ve really connected with this motivation. It takes a lifetime to achieve one’s work. Art is not an overnight career. You can’t face your own desperation until after a long time.
***
Ayers: How did you go about making this show?
Tuttle: A show is so mysterious. You can make a show with two pieces, or you can make a show with a thousand pieces. But this much I know—there has to be unity…In this show I reached a point where I saw very clearly that there’s breadth and there’s depth—those are the polarities that can be expanded in an artwork. For myself as a maker, I have to choose. Do I go broad or do I go deep?
You can read the entire interview here.
Richard Tuttle, artist extraordinaire
*IGLEYD: “I’m gonna love everything you do.” (pretty much)
I’m having trouble concentrating on this whole distinction between beauty and appearance, and reality and beauty having spent the entire day looking at pictures of Tibetan monks creating magnificent sand paintings grain by grain that appear beautiful in both the act of the making in the moment and the appearance in itself and in the both joyful and mournful reality of the ritual of and pouring of them down the rivers of our lives. In the context of that reality, the blather of interviews with western artists, which forgive me, I wrote my entire Harvard Ph.D. blathering about for about a total of 250 hours about 30 years ago, not counting the transcriptions, analyses, and writing themseselves, and was enthralled with at the time, now feel totally disenchanted with at this moment in time. Guess I’d better go better read the actual interviews and stop being such an artist curmudgeon on my favorite artist’s blog (having just started painting again). Feel free to delete this. Really. Those sand paintings just blew me away about how we live our lives and hold onto things and our own self-importance.
QS, Watching Tibetan monks create sand paintings is about as primal as it gets, so let’s put that activity aside altogether.
First of all, I think you know how much I distrust words that are “required” to experience a visual work of art. I would usually choose silence as the most appropriate response to anything worth looking at.
However–and this is a big however–there are certain artists who I believe are truly working at a level that is so outside the norm and so outside what the commercialized art world holds to as its domain that I do pay attention to what they have to say about their process and intentionality.
The number is small. An incomplete list would include Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Richard Tuttle, Mark Rothko and the recent Ayers’ interview with Larry Poons. These are the magicians, the ones who are sourcing their work in a way that might be called transcendent or mystical, both dirty words in the current canon. But they are words I seek and want for my own work.
You have referenced your PhD in previous blog postings. I would love to know more about that project. And I am thrilled to hear that you are applying your stupendous gifts to painting. You need all the fires to be stoked and burning strong since your capacity to process and the fire hose of your expressive drive deserve lots of outlets. Or so it seems to me.
And of course I’m not going to delete this. I love what you said!
Relieved you loved it. Was scared to write it. Will gradually work my way through your magicians as I have stayed away from art for as many years as I have stopped painting which had a lot to do with finishing my dissertation and hiding it away in a drawer, ambivalent as hell about what I wrote, not wanting anyone to read it. (Sound familiar about me?) I look back now and it’s well written, but bland and blah, blah, blah. But the people, they came to life, and that’s still what I do, isn’t it, bring people to life. So that hasn’t changed. Funny about that. Yes, I will make a list of the magic ones and track them down:
Brice Marden,
Agnes Martin,
Larry Poons,
Mark Rothko,
Richard Tuttle
I have a beginners mind. I think of Rothko everytime I paint. but not the others. I am in a place of silence now. I listen to noise all day. I am a therapist. I am a weary blogger and writer. I am ready to see. Steer me to whom you love to see and I will look carefully, without the words. I trust you. I love your art. I will come to see it too. My reading list I have. You always help with poems. I need the essentials of the artists, the souls, the magicians, like Rothko. My art list. My life list. Thanks for your patience.
This posting moved me so deeply. God, woman, what you can do with words.
And I am so honored to think that we could walk that path together. I would love to share what I know–and what I am still learning–with you.
As always, thank you for being in my life. It has been a rich and rewarding connection between us, hasn’t it?
Just passing by.Btw, you website have great content!
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