Collage Drawing

Richard Tuttles Collage Drawing from 1977 is a collage with watercolor on cream wove paper laid down on white wove paper that exemplifies the artists approach to the relationship between the art object and its support, a relationship that he consistently challenges by making the physical constitution of the work, its materials, its scale, and its placement in space, the primary content of the art experience. The title Collage Drawing deliberately collapses the distinction between collage, which involves the pasting of one material onto another, and drawing, which involves the making of marks on a surface, creating a work that exists in the ambiguous space between these two categories. The cream wove paper laid down on the white wove paper creates a physical relationship between two pieces of paper that is simultaneously the content and the form of the work, in which the visible edge of the cream paper against the white ground is both a compositional element and a statement about the relationship between the art object and its support. The watercolor on the cream paper creates a mark that is simultaneously a color event and a physical event, a wash of pigment that both describes and constitutes the surface on which it appears. The year 1977 places this work in the period when Tuttle was producing his most radical investigations of the art object, including the famous cloth pieces that provoked controversy when they were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Tuttles collage drawings are significant contributions to the history of post-Minimalist art, and Collage Drawing demonstrates his approach to the art object as a physical event rather than a representation. His work influenced the development of post-Minimalist art and the broader tradition of art that questions the nature and authority of the art object.

A 1977 collage with watercolor by Tuttle on cream wove paper laid down on white paper, collapsing the distinction between collage and drawing by making the physical relationship between two papers the primary content of the work in a radical post-Minimalist investigation.