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Richard Tuttle: New Mexico—New York
Sperone Westwater Gallery (closed March 21, 1998)
Rough cut wood squares pretty thin about traditional home
painting size with another jig-cut landscape suggesting
piece on top with three sides overlapping edges of bottom square one
side cut out about halfway in landscape. They are painted
over with a wash so you can still view grain of wood and
then a symbol or shape over that. The paint gaps are
sometimes left and each piece is held by nailing into wall
with thin black nails apparently haphazardly. Tonally washes
somewhat pastel or dirty.
Interesting to witness the proposed hypothetical sublime of
these landscapes. Gallery program said they were like
"shorthand landscapes." I like that phrase, but feel
puzzles. The easy three-dimensionality, a picture puzzle of
one wood layer placed above another and then the offering of
it as one surface unified by symbol on top. The chordal
effect of all these "canvases," each a different combination
of tones revealing materiality underneath. Abstract, they
create reactions that evoke nothing but their form, the
suggestion of landscapes, but not exact suggestions.
What might a series of poems following this suggestion?
Those that revealed their materiality, the paper, the
pretense of writing, this project, their social/political
value, even the conceit of grammar, dispelled your
intellectual skepticism about the current possibility for
poetry to fulfill aesthetic or emotional needs, then entered
to wander among the remains. Like an open door, a vague
humanness reverberates, as if striking a tuning-fork against
your resistance -- displaces beauty so it can explain the
loss, as these pieces by Tuttle are aesthetic objects
occupying the space abandoned by traditional landscapes
(which serve as aesthetic openings or portals to the
spiritual within your home). So perhaps our hypothetical
poems might encompass a sublime replacing a traditional
confessional or cathartic sublime, or romantic poem, without
reference to loss of any real or ideal world, with a
narrative no one could ever suspect as real events within
time. Yet wholly graspable in its formal disguise -- this
carnival mask of the historical poem. Poems that you are
allowed to see/hear, only because they are nested within the
proper escape sequence of transcendent grammar. A light
breeze of prelinguistic sound as you skid at night in the
car. Or else a hope to digress from the time-worn joke of
entering a room.
Dan Machlin