Art: The Last Reality? (or, Would Someone Throw Me a Definition, Please!)

Wonderful and ponderous food for thought in the artinfo.com interview with Richard Tuttle by Robert Ayers. Folks may recall that I consider Tuttle one of the most influential living artists, but as Ayers notes:

When Tuttle had his first major retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, Hilton Kramer infamously savaged it in the New York Times: “In Mr. Tuttle’s work, less is unmistakably less. It is, indeed, remorselessly and irredeemably less. It establishes new standards of lessness."

(SIDEBAR: Speaking of lessness: What genius at The New York Times decided that right after they hiked up their price to $1.25 was the appropriate time to decrease the width of the Old Gray Lady by 1.5 inches? If I wanted a "standard" [their rationale for the change in size] newspaper, there are dozens of other, cheaper choices out there. It's not really the smaller page, as much as the one-two punch, I mind. But...the NYT has enough to contend with, with Murdoch hot on their tail, so I'll leave it at that.)

The major theme in the Tuttle interview centers on the notion that art is the only realm in which we can experience reality in our culture. It seems a dubious assertion, IMO, but let's give the great man a listen:

[RT:] Eastern philosophers talk about the illusion of the world. I feel very sympathetic to that, because you know in an instant if a person is involved with appearances or reality. There’s a whole huge structure out there that gives high marks for appearances. Then there are the people who are involved with what’s real. By far the vast majority of people’s lives are involved with appearances—even most art is just appearances. People are literally swept away by appearances.

[RA:] But you believe that you’re working with reality rather than appearance?

[RT:] In our culture there is a job for art, because we can’t experience reality anywhere else. And the experience of reality is absolutely fundamental to human existence. My job is to give the best possible visual experience. I try to raise the bar on the visual experience so that people can enjoy their lives. I get to thinking a lot about motivation—the purest motivation should result in the best visual experience. This is the first show where I think I’ve really connected with this motivation. It takes a lifetime to achieve one’s work. Art is not an overnight career. You can’t face your own desperation until after a long time.

I couldn't agree more with that last idea: "It takes a lifetime to achieve one’s work. Art is not an overnight career." But I'm not quite sure I understand the logic behind "we can’t experience reality anywhere else," (and anyone reading here for a long time will know that the idea that art has a "job," per se, chafes the back of my neck).

I assume Tuttle means that because our culture is dominated by mass media, which is, when all is said and done, just a vehicle for advertising, which has been raised to the science of inducing purchasing behavior via tapping into individuals feelings of inadequacy, mostly about superficial issues (has anyone noticed how those VISA check card commercials are geared toward making you feel like a stone-age loser if you pay with cash or a check?) that "our [mass] culture" is so overwhelmingly concerned with appearances that little reality can eek out of it. But I'm not so sure those pockets of Art that (may) manage to provide a glimpse of "reality" are any less pronounced/effective than those pockets of other realms (including mass culture) that do so as well. Or perhaps I'm working with a different definition of "reality" here.

To my mind, regardless of how raw or true to form an artist's materials are, once they've been rearranged and fixed into that arrangement, they reflect one person's "reality" more than anyone else's.

OK, so that was a bit disingenuous of me (allowing me to slip in that last tidbit to shake things up); Tuttle goes on to explain more fully what he means here:

[RA:] Why do you think that most art deals with appearances rather than reality?

[RT:] I think that it’s necessary to achieve art that is reality-based. In our culture, imitation-based experience dominates reality-based experience. I find this an awful thing. But there are artists who know from the bottom of their souls that art is about the experience of reality. The reason we have art is because you can’t get a real experience from the world. Philosophers can’t tell you, religion can’t tell you. So art has become hugely important.

Again, I full agree with that final notion (i.e., philosophy and religion don't come close to providing me with the kind of real experience that art does). But we're still left wanting a solid definition of "reality" here. Tuttle continues:

But our culture suppresses art. In our culture, the people who need art to survive are given the message that they’re weirdos. Every day and from every corner of the world they’re getting the message that art is imitation-based, which is absolutely the opposite of the truth. You would never base your life on imitation. Even the people who are saying to do it never would. It’s fucked. It’s really fucked.

Now, I can project onto this a definition of "reality" that makes this true for me (my "Reality" definition presupposes the entire universe and everything in it is but part of one big bowl of "molecule soup" and that we only believe/imagine things [like artists and sculptures] are separate, but they're actually all part of the same whole), but I wish to Hell Tuttle had offered his own here. Not that Ayers didn't try to get him to clarify:

[RA:] Can you give me an example of how art is presently conceived as imitation-based?

[RT:] Well, in the New York Times, art is treated as “entertainment.” When you get tired and you want to be distracted, then there’s art. There was a recent review that said, “Don’t expect to find tickets for Richard Tuttle’s show at Ticketron!” This is not that kind of show. This is about art as a necessity. There are shows where people will stand in line for blocks, but those are not about necessity. Fortunately, most of the world is not desperate enough that they need this kind of thing. But people who still have art in their lives, they’d be dead without it, because the suppression of art is so enormous.

That's a rather sobering notion, for me, actually: "people who still have art in their lives" (implying that art in my life could end as well), but can anyone restate those last two or so lines? I'm not at all sure what he's trying to say here. And, more to the point, I don't feel I'm any closer to his definition of "reality."

The closest I feel I got to understanding what he meant was in this passage:

[RA:] What do you think has brought this state of affairs about?

[RT:] This is a very special moment in human history, I think. We have a very clear vision right back to the foundation of our particular culture, and you can see that at the foundation of our culture, the artists worked out the theory and the practice of art. The theory is that art is reality-based, and the practice is to make something that shows that. But it’s tough. It’s hard. Every part of it is hard. The Hellenistic philosophers said things will be a lot easier if we say that art is imitation-based. They didn’t care, because they weren’t artists and they had a lot to gain from art being less than it is. So it stumbles along, year after year, without really satisfying anyone.

Every once in a while, usually in really desperate periods, when life becomes totally confused and almost unlivable, artists come back and create art that is reality-based, and everyone says, “thank you very much.” But then as soon as they can, they turn back to the imitation-based art.

This last notion implies either that artists must constantly struggle (against their tendencies) to create reality-based art or that artists, being products of the same culture the rest of are, would prefer to make imitation-based art because they long for it like anyone else. And, again, all of which would be much easier to decipher if we had solid working definitions of reality-based and imitation-based art, but, alas...feel free to jump in and save me from myself here at any point....

Image above from artinfo.com website: "Richard Tuttle, "Section II, Extension C." (2007) © Richard Tuttle 2007. Photo courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York"