What to read after Richard Tuttle?

With a quiet but resolute courage, Richard Tuttle (born 1941) has singlehandedly reinvented sculpture after Minimalism. Shrugging off the machismo of most American sculpture being made in the early 1960s, Tuttle created an arena for new possibilities of scale and humor, sometimes adding almost nothing to an object, at other times heaping materials up recklessly or pressing them to the brink of compositional incoherence. Tuttle can thus be said to have introduced a kind of new sensitivity to materials and application of paint to surface--one that brings the artist's proprioceptive body and the materials at hand into an equivalent calibration. Triumphs was published for Tuttle's winter 2010 show at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, which was arranged in two parts: one of recent work selected and installed by the artist, the other of earlier work curated by Barbara Dawson and Michael Dempsey. Because the act of installation (or re-installation) produces creative variables for Tuttle's work--his famous wire drawings of the early 70s, for example, are made anew each time they are installed--and also because of the particular architectural character of The Hugh Lane documentation of installations of older works is included, alongside Tuttle's fascinating prose meditation on the exhibition, in which the gently revolutionary character of his thought is made plain.