Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object?

March 25–July 10, 2022 Curated by Richard Tuttle and Peter N. Miller

Many objects in Richard Tuttle’s collection will be donated to Bard Graduate Center. They will form the “Richard Tuttle Study Collection” to be used for teaching and exploration by students, faculty, and staff. Support for Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? was generously provided by Agnes Gund with additional support from David Kordansky Gallery, Scully Peretsman Foundation, and Peter Freeman and Lluïsa Sàrries Zgonc, as well as donors to Bard Graduate Center.

Support for the publication was provided by pacegallery.com

Bard Graduate Center Gallery paired Conserving Active Matter with Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object?, an exhibition of seventy-five objects from the contemporary artist’s personal collection along with a series of nine of his new works that were on view for the first time. Tuttle, along with his co-curator and Bard Graduate Center dean Peter N. Miller, invited visitors to a multi-sensory engagement with Tuttle’s objects that provided a rare glimpse into the relationship between an artist’s collection and his work. An index card created by Tuttle accompanied each object and outlined his original encounter with it, how it entered his collection, and his thoughts about it. Tuttle invited visitors to reflect on the question, What is the object?, by looking closely at the items in the exhibition, exploring them through touch, and viewing them from all sides; by imagining their origins, how they were designed and crafted, and how they were intended to be used; and by thinking about what they mean and how that meaning is assigned. Tuttle’s exploration extended to the exhibition furniture he designed, which resembles sculptures he has made throughout his career and provoked the questions, Is this furniture the object? Or are objects limited to those things that rest upon it? The result was an exhibition that Will Heinrich of the New

Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? installation. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Set of five cookie-cutters, 19th century. Metal. Collection of Richard Tuttle. Photograph: © Bruce M. White / Christina Clare Ewald.

York Times called “an expansion of Tuttle’s long-standing practice of juxtaposing incongruous elements in a way that highlights the precariousness of beauty and meaning.”

Belgian book artist Luc Derycke designed the catalogue, a ‘book as object’ that further explores the meaning of objects. The volume was edited by Peter N. Miller and includes his essay about Tuttle’s art as the pursuit of a kind of philosophical exploration, an interview with Tuttle, and an analysis of objects in poetic non-fiction by Renée Gladman, as well as poems and a short surrealist tale by Tuttle about his objects. Bruce M. White’s beautiful photographs of Tuttle’s collection and its accompanying index cards illustrate the catalogue.

The exhibition inspired an online companion site and a wide range of events, including a discussion on the power of puppetry with theater artist and puppeteer Lake Simons, punctuated by short puppet performances that made use of objects in the exhibition; a reading group led by poet Anselm Berrigan with texts chosen to inspire participants to reflect on their relationships to objects; a symposium featuring Claudia Rankine, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Tomashi Jackson, K. Anthony Jones, and Francey Russell; and tours led by the artist and verbal description tours for people with low vision and blindness.