RCA Society

Tate Turbine Hall and Whitechapel • Richard Tuttle ‘I don’t know...’!

Art works placed in an art gallery invite us to understand their place within an art historical  context. What are it’s references? What is the artist adding or subtracting from the conversation? What does the art work do to open or close our eyes or minds? - our mindseye?

Richard Tuttle’s  structure of the Tate Turbine installation is a massive plunging half body with arms outstretched draped in punctured unemotional cloth of red and yellow. The small lozenge shaped cuts puncturing the blandness of the evenly woven brightly coloured dyed cloth draped over the plane structure in the Turbine are reminiscent of the pierced skin in a Grunewald crucifixion. The red and yellow dyed cloth was no longer decorative but a combination of speed and terror - a static crash through village washing lines scattering people and their belongings as they try to escape the burning nepalm aimed at them with incomprehensible force. Conversely, the works in the Whitechapel Gallery are secretive and inaudible. Here Tuttle’s work shrank into endless small wall pieces of bits and bobs of woven textile, paint and thread constructed into secrets. The unravelled strands imperceptibly scattered here and there are minimal inaudible conversations in the ‘weave of textile language’. There were larger humorous constructions which broke the tedium and some odd interruptions such as a wooden tripod structure dressed in hooded white coverings .... What was that? Such things are not spoken of.

Tuttle is known also as a highly regarded collector of textiles... He distinguishes between cloth, material and textile and talks of the weave, the movement of the yarn. Yet in most of the works shown at the Tate and Whitechapel there is little multi dimensional depth and an avoidance of woven texture within each single fragment - the texture is constructed through an overlaying or intertwining of various materials. The works are minimal - the textile often flat and colourless, almost cut out of the conversation or tenuously trying to hold things together. What is being said here? I don’t know...