Cathy's Art Diary

Ragged exhibition at Pace London of new textile work by Richard Tuttle. I’ll admit I didn’t get these works! On first glance they looked like poorly finished applique patchwork. I had a desperate need to take them down and finish off the edging properly! I guess part of the artistic point is in the finish but I found no explanation of it and for me it distracted from any image or idea they were trying to put across. Reading the commentary it says they are looking at “materiality, space, and three-dimensionality” and are geometric abstract works. I guess they did challenge the idea of works hung an walls having to be paintings but I feel that art needs to have either meaning or beauty or craft and I’m afraid for me these had none of those. I did however like the prose poem by Tuttle which was handed out with the list of works entitled “What beauty means to me”. It might be a nice idea for an installation to have this read out in the space with the textile in. A pointer...

Retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery of work by Richard Tuttle, a companion show to his current installation at Tate Modern. I had liked the Tate installation but this left me a bit cold. The commentary to the pictures was by him, often in poetry form, and I found it didn’t explain the work to me so I was a bit confused. I liked the wires which had been stretch along a line drawn on the wall and then released giving an image of three lines, the original, the wire and the shadow of the wire. However I did find the three inches of rope nailed to the wall a bit silly and would personally have hovered up the bits of string on the floor.

Interesting installation in the turbine hall at Tate Modern by Richard Tuttle. In the commentary it says Tuttle is interested in everyday materials as well as being a collector and historian of textiles. I thought the cleverest thing about his installation was that it was shaped like a wave turbine, get it?! It looked like a beached whale in the air. I wasn’t too sure about the swathes of material on it and what they meant but they looked good in the photos I took! I guess the long red piece was something to do with blood but I’m not sure. I was interested to see that he had had them woven in India. I wanted the whole thing to move, even if it just bobbed up and down to give it some extra dimension. There are more pieces in this show at the Whitechapel Gallery and I hope to get along if I have time.