Richard Tuttle Retrospective at the Fabric Workshop and Museum

The name, suggesting threads and dye, wall hangings and looms, is a remnant from FWM’s founding in 1977. Today, the institution cultivates and presents all forms of contemporary art, and is devoted to creating work in new materials and new media in collaboration with artists from diverse artistic backgrounds. Its galleries and open studios enable the public to observe work from conception to completion, and the permanent collection includes finished pieces as well as material research, prototypes, and documentation of artists pursuing and discussing their work.

The current installation, Both/And: Richard Tuttle Print and Cloth, surveys five decades of work by an artist who has collaborated with FWM since 1978 and currently is artist-in-residence. The retrospective, which includes works in paper, plastic, wire, wood, cardboard, cloth, and string, occupies several floors in 1214 Arch and side-by-side galleries in 1222.

Inscrutable installation

Visitors to the galleries are always accompanied by a docent, which seems a strange arrangement initially, but quickly makes sense, given the hopscotch layout and inscrutable installation. It helps to have a guide when you think you’re entering a nice little fabric museum and find yourself on the cutting edge of. . .something entirely different.

I was extra confused because I arrived between groups and saw the exhibit backwards. The staff grafted me onto a knot of visitors in the second part of the extensive exhibit, in 1222 Arch. Later, I latched onto a group at the start, in 1214 Arch. In each case, I managed to miss the docent’s introductory remarks, but was so mystified — more by Tuttle’s work than the unexpectedness of the museum — that an introduction would likely not have helped.

Even the docents were somewhat lost. Few of my fellow visitors said much, which I interpreted as understanding. I had just one persistent question but first had to find a respectful way to rephrase, “What the hell am I looking at?” Finally, I inquired of the first docent whether longer exposure to Tuttle helped understanding. He said it did, that seeing the work daily had increased his appreciation.

Boxes with Popsicle sticks

Having only an hour or two, I decided to just experience Tuttle. A sculpture affixed to the wall caught my eye: a five-inch black cube with the number 21 on its front and a dozen taxicab-yellow Popsicle sticks falling out of the bottom, frozen in midair. Like many of Tuttle’s multipart works, there were several of these throughout the galleries. Number 21 was on the first floor of 1214 Arch, number 3 was on the second floor with number 19, number 23 was on the seventh floor, and so on.

There was no particular order, so it took me a while to catch on. Quite a while.

Really, would you have thought the little black cubes with yellow Popsicle sticks were catalog reference tags and not art? Finally the light dawned, and I felt like I’d found the Rosetta stone.

Space is the answer

In the catalog, each work had a number, title, and a few lines from a poem by Tuttle, which would surely provide some insight. A piece entitled Zwei mit Zwei/Two with Any Two (1977), I learned, consists of six canvases made by lithograph, etching, and screen print. Two of them hung side by side: A rectangular print, positioned lengthwise, was completely white except for the lower right corner, where a small, dark green triangle sat. Its companion, of equal size and emptiness, had a pair of narrow blue lines running the length of its right side. Zwei mit Zwei is accompanied by this verse:

Conscious sitter

North store Have

To remove their

Championship I

didn’t go there

According to the catalog, Zwei mit Zwei comes with installation instructions from the artist. I only wish Tuttle had provided a cryptographer.

In a gallery on the first floor of 1214 Arch, I encountered Wire Piece (1972), a series of individual filaments of florist wire, widely spaced and positioned in various shapes, lit at angles so that each wire and its hairline shadow trace a delicate design on the pristine wall. Wire Piece is paired with these words:

One little thread can hold two enormous

Pieces of cloth together—after all, it is

A line, so mysterious; it does not back to

Front as cloth, but plunges straight ahead.

Who should you follow? A thread marching

So gracefully into the future, or a piece of

Cloth bogged down in mystery? A space for

You, or a space for it? A wire is free to travel,

Light transferring knowledge all around

Making before seem like after, and after

Seem like before, showing the question of

Space is the answer.

Which actually does answer the question in my head. And all those people who weren’t talking? They made a break for it the minute the docent, an artist himself, started chatting with a couple of artists visiting Both/And. Noting the thinned ranks without rancor, he admitted that Tuttle’s work is enigmatic, in addition to the fact that many visitors don’t expect to find themselves in a contemporary art museum. The last FWM installation, he explained, had an even greater desertion rate: It involved whistling.

Staff enthusiasm is contagious

One of the most enjoyable features of FWM are the docents, who are welcoming, eager to entertain opinions and questions, and not afraid to admit their own uncertainty about an installation. Just as the first docent said exposure improved discernment, the second reported talking with visitors to refine his own thinking about Tuttle’s work. Then he guided the three of us remaining to the second floor of 1214, where we saw, among other works, Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself, 1973, a piece created on site. It consists of strings laid in patterns on the floor, like small, fibrous crop circles.

And then there were two.

I will return to FWM, perhaps even to revisit the Tuttle exhibit to see what’s on the seventh floor of 1214 Arch. Now that I know what to expect, I look forward to the quirky layout and the enthusiastic staff. And if I catch anyone staring at the boxes and Popsicle sticks, I will clue them in without hesitation.