All There in the Weave: Duality and Unity in the Art of Richard Tuttle

Abstract

This investigation into the art of the seminal American Postminimalist Richard Tuttle (1941- ) responds to a 2014-15 survey show at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall and Whitechapel Gallery, London, which spotlighted the prevalence of textiles and related materials and techniques in his oeuvre and mode of exhibition. It focuses on questions about what duality and weaving mean within his field of reference, having identified that Tuttle?s work and speech display a pronounced tendency to engage with the dynamics of either/or. This is related in this thesis to his sense that he and his generation were ?born into a broken world?. The task undertaken is to contextualise this statement while establishing a framework of analysis equipped to probe it. Homing in on structural relations, it draws on Tuttle?s autodidactic programme of study, through which ? for longer than his fifty-five-year career ? he has traversed time and space in pursuit of insight and understanding. In acknowledging his self-declared mysticism, it explores his spiritual beliefs through a synoptic engagement with Eastern traditions, specifically Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism. It theorises his work as a personally and socially motivated dialectic and weave-constructing response to the rupture he perceives in a polarised world. An historical and theoretical analysis of the at-once ancient, ubiquitous and cutting-edge domain of weaving and textiles uncovers mechanisms at play in Tuttle?s unity-seeking exercise, founded, as it is, on a deeply held belief in the efficacy of art.