Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know, or the Weave of Textile Language
Richard Tuttle: I Don’t Know, or the Weave of Textile Language, edited by Richard Tuttle, Magnus af Petersens and Achim Borchardt-Hume, October 2014.
I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language is a unique project by the renowned US artist Richard Tuttle (b.1941), who came to prominence in the 1960s and has become revered for his delicate and playful approach to sculpture, painting, poetry and drawing.
The largest survey of his work ever held in the UK, it comprises a newly commissioned large-scale sculpture for Tate Modern’s iconic Turbine Hall, a survey of his work from the mid-1960s until today at the Whitechapel Gallery, and this publication, conceived and designed in close collaboration with the artist. Known for using such humble and everyday materials as cloth, paper, rope and plywood, Tuttle has here taken as his starting point one of the unsung heroes of everyday life: textile.
This book follows the three-part structure of I Don’t Know. The Weave of Textile Language, rooting the project in an anthology of texts selected by the artist alongside a series of lavish colour photographs of textiles from Tuttle’s personal collection. This is followed by essays by the exhibition curators, Magnus af Petersens and Achim Borchardt-Hume, closely looking at how Tuttle’s work engages with both the idea and material of textiles, and how this relates to his long-standing interest in questions of scale, the idea of art and its connection to the world we live in.
A co-publication between Tate Publishing and Whitechapel Gallery.
Paperback, 204 pages. ISBN 978-1-84976-319-6