"The Art of Richard Tuttle," July 2-Oct. 16, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, Ca. 94103
"Elmer Bischoff: The Late Abstractions," Jun. 8-July 30, 2005 at John Berggruen Gallery, 228 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, Ca. 94108
Ah pity the po’ fool that has to write about Richard Tuttle’s current retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, because that fool has to come to terms with a project whose very essence is a graceful refusal of all terms, especially those that default to preexisting taxonomies of power and credibility. Perhaps our fool will get stuck doing a piece of writing about how hard it is to write about Tuttle’s work, maybe even going to the extensive library of failed Tuttle-writing efforts to take stock of the long list of previous attempts at same, attempts that always seem to run aground on the fallacy of cataloging those many things that Tuttle’s art is not while conceding that they are all in some small way factors in what it is.
