8, OR HACHI: INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD TUTTLE
By MAKI NISHIDA
Portrait of RICHARD TUTTLE. Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo.
Born in New Jersey in 1941, Richard Tuttle is widely recognized for his post-minimalist and process-based works. He has been at the forefront of contemporary art since his debut solo show in 1965 at New York’s legendary Betty Parsons Gallery, and his controversial 1975 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which comprised subtle pieces of wire, canvas and cord tacked to walls, and barely perceptible sticks of wood on the floor that critics such as Hilton Kramer lambasted, asking, rhetorically: “What is the point of burdening a major museum facility with such a minuscule accomplishment?” Since then, he has produced a substantial body of work investigating color, line, volume and form through a wide range of materials, many of which are often overlooked as ephemeral and unimportant. His works reside in a space between painting, sculpture, drawing and poetry, and pose questions to existing systems of classification, as well as preconceptions of what art is.
