You can never predict what a Richard Tuttle work will look like or what it will be made of.  Ever since he began exhibiting in 1965, he has followed no discernible path or relied on any particular material.  His work defies any attempt to corral or classify it.  Is it a painting, sculpture, or drawing? Or is it all three and more?  It is astounding that he has been able to maintain this openness for more than four decades without showing any sign of repetition, of copying his earlier work, of becoming a known quantity.

In a piece titled Ten A (2005), he used “wood, cardboard, museum board, foam board, tissue paper, paper, sandpaper, sheet metal, Styrofoam, fabric, tape, nails, rope, leather, thread, acrylic, gouache, and graphite”—humble and easily obtained materials that anyone may even have some of in their apartment.  It is one reason why art students love his work; he makes it seem possible for them.  Made of ten pieces of wood that are joined together in places, the piece measures 40 x 40 x 4 1/2 inches, which is hardly monumental.

I could hardly begin to describe this piece accurately, which, as a poet and art critic, I find comforting.  It doesn’t give itself over to language, doesn’t become something that you can colonize with words.  And this is one of the great things about Tuttle’s works—it doesn’t need words to exist, but it invites languages to address its existence, to make a place for it in words, to say something about it, because we live inside language and want it to say something useful about everything.  It helps us be in touch with reality even as it quietly reminds us how remote we might be from it.

I first saw Richard’s work in 1975 at his show at the Whitney Museum.  I had just moved here from Boston, where the only modern art you saw was color field painting.  I remember going to the Tuttle show and being confounded and delighted, and returning to it at least four or five times.  I had no idea what I was looking at—delicate wire hanging on the wall, casting shadows, and lengths of string on the floor—but I never questioned whether it was art or not because that question seemed beyond the point.  I remember feeling incredibly happy after leaving the museum, and this feeling of joy happened the second and third time I went.  I thought maybe there was something wrong with me—I was a poor poet living in New york, I had no prospects for the future, and little money.  Was there some drug wafting through the air at the museum?  Had I finally gone over the edge?

But seeing Tuttle’s show made me think that anything is possible, that the person alone in a room with just a few things on hand could make something mysterious and beautiful, and that to me was the first great comfort that I got from his work beyond the delight of its existence.

In New York you can actually meet people and in some cases they aren’t personalities surrounded by others protecting them from you, whoever you are.  As it so happens, I got to meet Richard Tuttle some years later.  He was sitting behind the desk at Betty Parsons, and we had a conversation.  I can’t remember if this was before or after I had written a review of a show of watercolors he had at Betty Parson, but I remember feeling like he didn’t act superior, wasn’t cool or aloof, and that we had what I would call a human exchange.

Some years after that initial encounter, I got to know him and his wife, the wonderful poet Mei-Mei, who I had met earlier, in other circumstances.  No matter what happened in his career, he didn’t seem to change, didn’t become someone I didn’t recognize, didn’t lose that basic human quality.  At the same time, looking at his work, a show I saw in a museum in Paris in the early 1980s, while wandering that city alone, and feeling depressed, and leaving the show happy.  I can’t explain it in any simple way, and perhaps I don’t want to try and explain it.

I know that in making works out of humble materials that Richard Tuttle speaks to something basic about being human—that he embodies the ideal of freedom more fully than most of us ever achieve, which is that the isolated human being can make something new out a things that are little and inexpensive, common.  And this freedom is really the deepest dream of art—it is why Titian late in his life does The Flaying of Marsyas, which, after all, is about betraying painting, and owning up to it.  Titian, with his prodigious gifts, had done all that his patrons had asked him to do, had made beautiful, near pornographic nudes and stunning portraits, but in The Flaying of Marysyas, with the blood dripping down, and the dog licking it, he makes the equation between art, the body, and the soul; they are invisible.  Being an artist and keeping the dream of freedom alive—that’s something only great artists do.  And that is something that Richard has done for more that forty years.