Notes from reading some essays on Richard Tuttle yesterday

1.    Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, 1966: “Bochner’s ‘conceptualism’ thus emerges as a dynamic model, a thought activity occurring in the gaps between language and things.”
2.    “The gap between language and things is precisely where Tuttle’s exploration of drawing unfolds as well.  What Bochner characterizes as the bracketing of an already devalued medium and practice is the zone of qualification from which Tuttle begins.  Institutionally aligned with sculptural “anti-form,” this notion of the indeterminate, the impermanent, the contingent, and the interrogative is the horizontal plane from which Tuttle challenges the vertical, the permanent, and the non-transitive.” Excerpt from Kinesthetic Drawing by Cornelia H. Butler (in the Richard Tuttle retrospective catalog)
3.    “It was not until drawing had transformed itself through its autographic function and was actually absorbed into a new aesthetic of ‘incompleted’ painting, that drawing could cease to function primarily as a step toward painting and become an independent action, and that drawings could be made consistently as finished works—could function as an alternative major mode of expression…The story of drawing from the mid-fifties onwards is the story of…an emotive cooling of the basic mark, the basic line itself.” Excerpt from Bernice Rose’s Drawing Now catalog essay, 1976
4.    p. 176 and 177 of Tuttle retrospective book, reread description of Tuttle installing Wire Pieces, think about the relationship of the body to any given material
5.    Look up the word kinesthetic, define so as to better grasp
6.    “Action is the objectification of subjectivity and the subjectification of objectivity.  It must be a kind of practice.  Practice always is the union of subject and object.  Therefore, human activities always construct culture.  Human activity sees the world of trans-temporal ideas.  The concept of acting as a variety of seeing arises from this.  It means that the self sees itself through negating itself.  The creative activity of the artist is a paradigm of this.” Excerpt from the Japanese philosopher and poet Kitaro Nishida