Exhibition note.(Art)

"The Art of Richard Tuttle" San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. July 2-October 16, 2005

Back in the 1970s, Richard Tuttle's installations were apt to shock. Not many people were used to considering cloth octagons laid on the gallery floor, not to mention a three-inch piece of rope nailed to the wall, as works of art. During a 1979 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, one fuming viewer even punched out the curator.

It's hard to imagine that this new exhibition, which leaves San Francisco this month and opens at the Whitney Museum on November 10, will have a similar effect. For decades, artists and curators have asked their public to consider just what art can be. The concept rings a little hollow by now. The tone of Tuttle's work tends toward a pleasing whimsicality. His desired effect seems to be one of small surprises popping up within the vast wash of emptiness. You walk across what seems at first an empty gallery to find small watercolored squiggles on notebook paper, or a single wood slat against the wall.

The problem is that the force of this work rarely exceeds that effect. "10th Wire Piece" for example, consists of a series of single lines penciled along the gallery wall, on top of which Tuttle has run thin strips of curling wire. These protruding curlicues might seem like ripples of significance within the void, invitations to curiosity and attentiveness from out of the blankness. But given the huge volume of surrounding empty space, what wouldn't appear this way? Once you actually begin to examine these wires, they don't reward your attention at all. They're just wires. Even larger pieces, like Turtle's series of waferboard sculptures from the Nineties, suffer from such visual anemia. With their predominant pastels and their flighty diagonals, these jagged, painted shapes give off a sense of "here today, gone tomorrow." They hover on the line between evanescence and just plain forgettable.

The catalogue to the show ...