I confess that when I first encountered the work of Richard Tuttle I was aghast. And even the second time I encountered it in New York at the Whitney sometime in the 90's I was even more aghast. It went against everything I thought I understood about Art up until then.
A few years later however, after a subtle immersion into the ideas surrounding Art and Nature in Japanese thinking, I awakened to the beauty of expressed minimalism, if I can call it that. Then I came across Richard Tuttle's work again, and I kind of fell in love for the first time.
Looking backward barely 40 years it is hard to imagine that his works could have provoked such an outrage, but then his influence was a tsunami of sorts for young art students everywhere. In fact, I cannot think of an artist who has been such a driving force of influence in art schools, and in academic thinking generally than Tuttle. He has merged the Personal with the Academic, and not always for the better I think.
It is a minimalism which made meaty and materialistic America uncomfortable.
