RICHARD TUTTLE: My favorite artist is Jan van Eyck,
who gives you a picture which satisfies
all attentiveness to the smallest of the small
and then all attentiveness to the largest of the large.
I mean, that's one of the things
that a picture is supposed to do for us.
Art is... is life, you know, and that is... you know it...
it in fact has to be, you know, all of life.
You know, the awareness, the beauty,
the, uh...
the ability to give to a viewer something which
makes their life more what it is, more what it could be.
Uh, and it's... it's the essential....
it's like, uh, the clue to... to everything.
It's a very kind of remarkable thing to connect
the kind of mind freedom that's available to us
in this particular landscape.
It's about harmonizing, it's about living in the beauty,
not so much just looking at the beauty.
It's about how it gets into us
and finally, uh, feeds the spirit.
You look out and you literally feel
you're the first person who was ever here, you know?
A lot has happened here in time, but then it's erased so quickly.
Part of that is the wind and the rain,
you know, cleanses the soil.
I mean, footsteps left yesterday are... vanish over the night.
Happily, my earliest beginnings
were with, uh, you know, Betty Parsons and the circle
around the New York school of abstract expressionists, and
Western space was definitely one of the elements
in how that art was composed.
I was doing white paper octagonals on the wall,
and we were at a show in, uh... a museum in Dallas,
and a critic came along and made mock introductions
of "Oh, this is Richard Tuttle--
he's interested in impermanence in the arts," you know.
And... and she didn't... she did that to Betty,
and... and Betty just immediately snapped back
and said, "What's more permanent than the invisible?"
[ chuckling ]
In any art form,
there has to be an accounting of its opposite condition.
You're going to be a visual artist,
then there has to be something in it
that accounts for the possibility of the invisible,
the opposite of the visual experience.
A painting or a sculpture really exists
uh, somewhere, you know, between itself, what it is
and what it is not.
Recently I refined my sense about where my limitations are.
In some sense, I was happy to think that each piece
would be a kind of conjoining of architecture and calligraphy.
Those then exist as definable poles,
but then look in between, and that is this rich, rich vein
that we don't really know very much about.
As this house was being built
we talked about installing works of mine in the Klein collection.
Yellow is a color of happiness,
but I think it's also a very important color in general.
I was tremendously enthusiastic about this yellow
and these pieces that were yellow.
What's really interesting to me
is that you're weaving two separate groups
in three separate rooms,
and so you get a division and a fluidity
that connects with a place.
In some level, the installation, to use a horrible word,
you know, would be this sort of a weaving
between, uh, my persona and their persona
um, and... and to create a... a kind of world
in which you can invite your guests.
[ playing classical piece ]
An exhibition might be likened to a city.
You don't even need to go to all the places if you don't care to.
It would be enough for a visitor just to visit one village,
but you have a choice, and I... I think
that's the kind of exhibition I'm... I'm really thinking of.
I think this village idea is a way to invite the visitor in.
Each village takes on a personality.
You enter a room and you can scan that in a second,
and wherever you're attracted, you can go in that direction.
The sculptures sort of function as a way
to help you get into that drawing space,
which is really intimate.
Each village has two groups of drawings.
Each set of drawings seems to concern themselves
with, say, how the piece meets the floor
or how the piece meets the wall--
either concern of the floor,
which is like concrete issues, you know,
or how it meets the wall, which is more like abstract issues.
It's an old division between, you know, realism and idealism.
You know, the ideal says
that the experience happens inside of you, you know,
which then would mean that everything
from the conception of drawing to the color itself
is inside of you,
and the real is that everything is outside of you.
But finally, you know, it's art and art alone
which can actually say what is the truth, you know?
You could say that the wire represents form
and then this overlying is... is... is chaos.
Where in the world do you ever find an absence fill a solid
and a solid fill an absence?
This piece as an artwork can simply be giving us
those two, uh, really disparate, uh, solutions
to, uh, the definition of matter,
uh, in one, uh, created form.
I mean, the wood chips are in some sense a decorative element
that's an elaboration of the underlying wire structure.
You can see the actual grains of this piece of wood here.
You can experience that as really a pure drawing.
Everything in life is drawing, if you want,
and drawing is... is absolutely, uh, quintessential
to... to knowing the self, you know,
and I would even say that the art that survives,
you know, from one generation to the next
is the art that actually carries something...
that tells us, tells society what, uh... about self.
One would say in order to draw, you have to be able to see.
Well, what about making drawings
about an area where you can't see?
And, you know, as obsessed as I am
about, you know, the experience of seeing
and the details and so on,
what I find most interesting is the part which I can't see.
And so that... that's what I want to do
in this Drawing Center show--
I just want to look at these kinds of places.
For example, ask somebody to draw blue,
you know, make a drawing of blue.
You know, you can't do that.
The pieces are self-portraits, uh, I mean, as all artwork is.
Maybe it takes me ten tries to make a drawing.
Sometimes the art is actually in the tenth one,
you know, the final one,
and other times it's in the whole ten.
A couple times in my life
where I... I really can look at something
and... and say that, you know, "I did not make that,"
but in your heart you know, you know, you know, you know
that you... you did, uh, go beyond yourself
or you enjoyed this, uh... uh, kind of a... a leap.
You get beyond this barrier that normally we live within.
Art, unlike life, needs this heightening of reality.
I realize that culturally
we walk on a different ground than is in fact there,
and that the psychological ground
is a little bit higher than the actual ground.
The emotion, you know, of an art response,
the energy of a... of a... does to me feel like motion.
We use that word, "moved"-- "I am moved," you know--
and yet we know we're standing right there
and we have this experience
of being stationary and moved at the same time.
And I guess what I'm trying to figure out
is how to sustain the polarity
where you can be the paintbrush of society,
but also you can make the society your paintbrush.