“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.
Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
“Art’s importance comes when it’s a tool for life, when it makes life more available for us.”
— Richard Tuttle
Today’s ART21 Exclusive features Richard Tuttle reflecting on a decades-long career, and the conceptual, thematic, and stylistic threads that can be consistently traced through his 26 New York gallery exhibitions. Tuttle was interviewed at Pace Gallery, where fittingly his installation 26 provided an archival record of these solo shows, collectively exposing a profound intimacy in postminimalism.
“I’m very committed to the idea of making an art that stays contemporary,” says Tuttle. The artist goes on to describe his interest in creating works that fuse together “the kinds of things that only happen once and the kinds of things that happen always.” Tuttle also shares advice for young artists and reflects on the value of art: “Art’s importance comes when it’s a tool for life, when it makes life more available for us.”
ART21 Exclusive is supported, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; 21c Museum Hotel, and by individual contributors.
CREDITS: Producer: Ian Forster. Consulting Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Ian Forster. Editor: Jarred Alterman. Camera: Jarred Alterman. Sound: Ian Forster. Artwork Courtesy: Richard Tuttle & Pace Gallery. Archival Photography Courtesy: Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York & Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Contributor
Ian Forster is a producer at ART21. He joined the staff in October 2009, first working on ART21
William Kentridge: Anything Is Possible
and subsequently ART21
Art in the Twenty-First Century
Season 6 and Season 7. In addition to his work on ART21′s broadcast programming for PBS, Forster oversees the Web video series ART21
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel back in time and look over the shoulder of one of the early 20th century’s greatest artists to watch him work? Here you go, watch Wassily Kandinsky create an abstract composition.
Barbara Cortland broke the world record – in 1983, she wrote 23 novels. She was 82 years old. Two novels a month that year. Altogether she wrote 723 published novels. Her last at age 97. When she died a year later there were 160 unpublished novels still waiting to be published. Did people like her […]
By Brian Hieggelke I once asked Michael Weinstein—who passed away suddenly after an aortic aneurysm at home last week at the age of seventy-three—why he recommended every photography show he reviewed for us, in nearly every single issue of Newcity beginning in 1990 and up to and including the edition you’re reading right now. He […]
