Lightweight

Richard Tuttle and Rob Fischer

Go ahead. Call Richard Tuttle a lightweight. Not that he lacks substance, although anyone who calls a three-inch-tall wire twist a portrait has managed to keep his sense of humor. Not that he takes light itself as his medium either, although his Whitney retrospective does devote a room to his Light Works—typically derelict constructions using light bulbs. And his light touch extends to the open space of a gallery and to the shadows cast on the wall.

No, I mean literally light in weight. If Minimalism makes one think of monuments in metal and earth, Tuttle's assemblages largely cling to the walls and floor. If Richard Serra with his Tilted Arc defies gravity, Tuttle's rope trick consists of a finger's length of clothesline, frayed at the ends and nailed in place. His idea of panel painting uses plywood and wafer board. His approach to a painted canvas amounts simply to dyed fabric, cut, shaped, and sewn. He prefers ordinary light bulbs to industrial-strength fixtures.

Minimalism famously reduced art to its elements, with the grid its alphabet and the gallery its storybook. Tuttle seems to pare Minimalism down to the point where it will blow away. At his first Whitney exhibition, in 1975, much of the work in fact changed places from day to day. A few pieces will do so again, I understand, this time.

Do not let that fool you, however. Thirty years later, the controversy over his earlier show has long blown over, but Tuttle's art has not blown away. I may not always find his retrospective earthshaking, but it brings out a defiant continuity between American abstraction and the mixed-media installations so popular today. Meanwhile, a second Whitney exhibition, of Rob Fischer, makes me nostalgic indeed for Minimalism's first incarnation.

From Minimalism to drawing

Tuttle's literal twist on lightweight exemplifies Minimalism quite as much as Richard Serra or Dan Flavin. It also suits his quiet but persistent exploration of what art can do. Critics once derided Minimalism as hollow or theatrical. Tuttle takes each solid object one at a time, and it does not become a prop in anyone's drama, not even the viewer's. When he crafts a frame as part of the work, it neither seals the art object in its own world nor projects art into the space of the gallery. It makes one wonder instead how such distinctions could ever have mattered.

The curator, Madeleine Grynszejn of SF MOMA, prefers to call his work Post-Minimalism—and Tuttle admits to having one foot in that generation. Even there, however, appearances can deceive. Sure, his Constructed Paintings of the 1960s may suggest the shaped canvases of Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, or Ellsworth Kelly. His soft materials will surely recall Eva Hesse or Lee Bontecou—except when they do not.

Stella created icons, and his shapes define the painted grid. Murray's outlines and colors have the giddiness of a comic strip, while Kelley's compete with the very fall of light from above. With Hesse or Bontecou, art competes with organic life. Tuttle does not embellish his surfaces beyond a single muted, unnatural acrylic shade—at times, easy to mistake for a shadow or pencil drawing on the wall. He does point to something larger than life or more mysterious than art, and he probably thinks of Pop Art as a waste of time. Where Hesse's tentacles wriggle outward, toward the viewer and onto the floor, Tuttle's shaped canvas may find its way to a spot high on the wall that I had never even noticed.

Tuttle's contemporaries tend to seek a kind of greater truth in the art object. Hal Foster has even argued that any form of appropriation reiterates the Surrealist association between art and fetish. Tuttle makes one question appeals to deep truth or the unconscious. He calls one series Monkey's Recovery for a Darkened Room, but the monkeys have departed, and the bare twigs do not enclose darkness. A younger lover of fragmented painting, Cordy Ryman, surely would understand.

All this suggests a kind of modesty, but even that can lead one in the wrong direction. His minimal means and effects often infuriate people, and he seems to welcome the outrage. In rotating the installation, he both flaunts and implicitly denies its apparent fragility. He may believe that Pop Art has had its fifteen minutes of fame, but the combination of the ephemeral and provocation makes me think of Robert Rauschenberg in his combines. Both also follow that old edict to take an object, do something with it, and then do something else with it.

I can think of one word that encompasses Tuttle's literalness, quirky experimentation, and old-fashioned dedication to the image at hand—drawing. His early sketchbooks construct odd shapes out of small strokes of watercolor or pencil. Reliance on drawing, an artist's impulse, also links him to Abstract Expressionism. Long ago, he worked for Betty Parsons, who exhibited Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Ad Reinhardt. He still places his other foot in that generation.

Alphabet soup

An emphasis on experiment, recombination, and the artist's mark points to something else as well. On the way in, his retrospective greets one with his 1966 Letters (The Twenty-Six Series). The mainstream of Post-Minimalism often suggests a mathematical model for art, with its own set of algorithms, even when someone like Martin Puryear violates them. Tuttle treats art more as a kind of writing, and its alphabet awaits discovery quite as much as its meaning.

Puns on letters abound. That supposed portrait in wire of Herbert Vogel, the collector, almost forms the letter V. An early panel, House, looks a bit like a double-H. If it also resembles a child's drawing of a house, early alphabets, too, incorporated words. Think of the Hebrew beth, which does indeed sometimes serve for house. One can imagine Tuttle's art, too, as a language still finding its readers.

More often, Tuttle's letters clearly spell out nothing at all. Rather, he toys with language as image or plastic form, much as his wire pieces might begin with a pencil trace on the wall before adding the irregular length of metal—and its shadow, cast on that same wall. His letters do not even have a consistent orientation. At times, one can spot an outright reversal in the role of text and illustration. In a recent artist's book, the tiny sheets of drawings serve as the content, with the words a secondary reflection on how the work came to exist.

Tuttle's resistance to grandeur and obvious meanings can get frustrating. The work shies away from the public space of Minimalism and the unconscious space of appropriation. That can easily prevent it from more fully engaging me in my own space. Perhaps because of its limits, the retrospective has its greatest impact in the first half, when the galleries have their most wide-open spaces and the alphabet is writ large. The Whitney's installation by David Kiehl, with panoramic sightlines, makes these first rooms that much more effective. The later, busier permutations can feel funky or, more often, merely fussy by comparison, but never as revealing.

Still, Tuttle's output keeps changing for good reason: he cares about discovery, as a process. The metaphor of writing no doubt owes nothing whatsoever to Jacques Derrida, but it does show the artist's continued relevance after Postmodernism. Derrida, like Tuttle played around with a work's frame, and he also opposed writerly works, which keep making meaning, to readerly ones, which wait for someone to take them in. Tuttle may lean too much toward readerly, discrete objects, but he has maintained a very writerly career. I may find the work a simple pleasure, but I wish that I could follow him to the show's last four stops in other cities, to watch its self-discovery in every incarnation.

A version of Minimalism with room for assemblage and painterly ambitions makes an interesting genealogy for all those oversized installations in Chelsea today. It also puts most of those to shame—not that they need any further shaming. Consider, for comparison, a near miss, in a second Whitney exhibition by a much younger Post-Minimalist.

Keeping the box

Back in the 1960s, people liked to joke that someone had kept the box and thrown the art away. Of course, these days few could afford such grand, polished, and precise packaging—or indeed the machinery to carry them out of Dia:Beacon. One might have to settle instead for Rob Fischer.

Fischer has, one might say, hollow aspirations. Looking in on the Whitney at Altria, I feared I had come a day early by mistake. It helps that the 42nd Street doors remain shut, and one door on the Park Avenue side stands in need of repair. Right as one enters, a beat-up metal hulk lies on its side, like an Andrea Zittel Living Unit come to grief. A huge, mirrored closet and a still larger pile of ordinary wooden ones face off from opposite ends of the atrium. A more clunky contraption spreads in all directions through the smaller gallery space.

The work's bulk, like its embrace of wear and tear, may suggest the 1960s. However, the materials invoke America's still larger expanses, in a geography and culture beyond New York. The cavity on its side once formed a boat's hull, the closets may suggest prefabricated housing, and a sealed cabinet comes from the cab of a truck. One can imagine them all discarded by the edge of a highway. Perhaps Fischer picked them up on his way east from Minnesota to Brooklyn. He seems to have deposited them wherever they happen to fit.

Fischer takes his allegory of America seriously. The curators compare the installation's shabby heights to the Tower of Babel, the flight of Icarus, and other emblems of ambition and failure. It should put one in the mood for Course of Empire, Ed Ruscha's contribution to the Venice Biennale, also set to open at the Whitney. However, Fischer has more success as a scavenger than as a myth maker. Taken one by one, the items have no particularly strong associations, although I did mistake the truck cab for one of those public toilets perpetually promised New York City. Taken together, the art has not found a substitute for the Minimalist's structuring grid.

Without that impetus, Fischer's art never quite imposes on the viewer's imagination—or vice versa. His echoes of the open road lack the energy of real communities, with all their ambitions and failures. I missed the desolation earlier this year of an abandoned subway station, by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset. I missed the crazed city with transport one can enter, by Barry McGee, the more suggestive allegory of Phoebe Washburn's landscape that recycles its own pieces, or the madness of an installation in progress in "Reconstruction" last year at Exit Art. For that matter, I missed Tuttle's willingness to lighten up and to change his mind.

In a way, the Minimalists really kept the gallery and threw away anything that did not belong to it completely. By comparison, Fischer works as an intruder—or at least a traditional sculptor. Signs remind one often of the work's fragility, and one cannot step up to a small, white platform. Perhaps the chance to orate or to clamber into the boat would turn the art into a kind of Post-Minimalist Romper Room, but everything seems designed to keep one at a distance or to turn one away. Ironically, the installation comes closest to Tuttle's playful and provocative spirit when it veers into the gallery's native disrepair, as with that broken door. I still cannot say for sure which ladders, dumpsters, and warning signs truly belong with the art.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"The Art of Richard Tuttle" ran through February 5, 2006, at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Rob Fischer through January 22 at the Whitney at Altria.