ART REVIEW : Richard Tuttle, a Minimalist Who Likes Going to Extremes

Richard Tuttle takes slightness to such extremes that he makes more well-known Minimalists look like bombastic showoffs driven to overstatement. Tuttle’s unusually delicate yet tough-to-categorize works are initially almost invisible. Only slowly do they open onto curious formal conundrums, before further unfolding to encompass and enliven the entire space in which they’re shown.

At Burnett Miller Gallery, five understated suites of drawings from the late 1970s form a quirky, abstract alphabet that invites viewers to play an impressive array of surprisingly fresh logical puzzles.

Each of Tuttle’s pieces consists of a page torn from a spiral sketchbook onto which he has glued a smaller piece or two of carefully cut paper, often folded back over part of itself. These little strips and shapes form straight and curved lines, arcs, angles, scallops and rectangles. Delicate layers of watercolors have been applied to parts of these odd, unreadable symbols and to adjoining portions of the pages on which they’re glued, efficiently confusing the differences between figure and ground, collage and illusion.

The tiny shadows cast by the double and triple thicknesses of creased and wrinkled paper turn out to be as consequential as any of the cut or painted shapes in Tuttle’s drawings. Two nearly identical images--which resemble an off-center and tilted letter T --have decidedly different characters simply because one consists of a single strip of folded paper and the other is made up of two overlapping pieces.

These subtleties are more vivid in Tuttle’s largest drawings. Unframed and taped to the wall, this set of 16 pages supports cutout elements that 15 years ago were glued directly to the walls of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Their current incarnation resembles a child’s pop-up book. With more dramatic shadows, the real space of architecture is evocatively reconfigured in a few inches of abstraction.

Tuttle’s wonderfully unaggressive art makes a lot out of almost nothing, transforming a few formal elements into tiny spaces that fold back on themselves, yet leave plenty of room for ambiguity.

* Burnett Miller Gallery, Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., B2, Santa Monica, (310) 315-9961, through Jan. 28. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Glass as Class: Dale Chihuly’s ravishing glass sculptures at Dorothy Goldeen Gallery are made like bowls but function like paintings.

Part of their delight derives from the way they exquisitely confuse the craft of blown glass with the art of abstraction, but most of their fun is due to less intellectual pleasures. Shamelessly decorative excesses, such as vibrant, light-drenched colors and sexy, undulating shapes, endow Chihuly’s fragile sculptures with so much verve and vitality that they’re anything but peripheral.

Nine large circular pieces attached to the gallery wall recall the demure wallflowers of high school dances, except that the Seattle-based artist’s radiant works draw every eye in the room to their sinuous contours and semitranslucent surfaces. Light pours through their petal-shaped exteriors, inviting admiration from every angle.

Scale shifts radically in front of these captivating orbs. It’s as easy to imagine that each one is a mysterious planet enshrouded in a thick, gaseous atmosphere as it is to fantasize that they’re tiny sea creatures seen under a microscope.

Shells and jellyfish are even more explicitly evoked by Chihuly’s pedestal-mounted sculptures, whose hot, tropical colors combine the high-voltage glow of Las Vegas at night with the natural fluorescence of exotic fish. By short-circuiting the normal usefulness of glass vessels, Chihuly loads meaning and metaphor into his gorgeous sculptures.

* Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, 2224 Main St., Santa Monica, (310) 399-4489, through Jan. 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Photos From a Distance: In William Klein’s black-and-white street photographs, worlds don’t collide as much as they shuffle by one another. The anonymous people in his abrupt, grainy pictures rub shoulders, cross paths and physically jostle each other, but still seem separated by unbridgeable distances.

One of Klein’s earliest and one of his most recent photos in a sweeping, 70-work survey at Fahey/Klein Gallery give vivid pictorial form to the invisible buffer zones that contemporary city-dwellers habitually carry around town.

“Four Heads, New York” (1954) is a tightly cropped close-up of two men’s and two women’s faces in remarkable proximity. Compositionally, the image is held together by its equal, gridded quadrants. Conceptually, however, nothing links its four subjects. Their wide range of expressions and gazes aimed in different directions suggests that each inhabits a disparate world.

Likewise, “Marathon, Florence” (1986) portrays urban space as a stage on which diverse dramas play out alongside one another, without overlap or intersection. A runner, concentrating on his race, is framed by several spectators who look on with various degrees of interest.

Klein’s fashion photographs similarly emphasize the incongruities of urban life, contrasting the otherworldly beauty of graceful models with pimply-faced service men awkwardly doing their duty, as in “Pont Alexandre III and Marine, Paris” (1960). These influential shots bring a jolt of grittiness to a placid genre, but because of their obvious staging, lack the impact of Klein’s more spontaneous, uncommissioned pictures.

In the 65-year-old artist’s best photographs, made between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s (when he turned to film), modern alienation takes palpable, positive shape. Emotional distance, rather than appearing as a sinister force that isolates and dehumanizes people, provides protection and a small slice of space in which privacy and mystery flourish.

* Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 934-2250, through Jan. 14. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

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Inside, Outside: “Collaborations: Inside the Armory, Out on the Street” is a dispiriting display of five art-related public projects undertaken by four pairs and one trio of L.A.-based artists. Organized by curator Karen Moss for the Armory Center for the Arts, and funded by the Pasadena Art Alliance, it meant to emphasize the links between what transpires inside galleries and what happens outside their doors.

Unfortunately, nothing very interesting takes place in the gallery. Most of the installations mimic the methods of amateur sociology: Facts are gathered, tallied and presented, always ending with a solicitation of the viewer’s opinion. As these works exclusively refer to external endeavors, art becomes an empty signifier that points to (presumably) more important activities taking place elsewhere.

The fundamental problem is that the exhibition is based on a belief that art is not only much less important than social work, but that ultimately, art-making is a hopelessly self-indulgent exercise.

This deeply cynical type of thinking, prevalent today among bureaucrats and professional fund-raisers, forgets that museums and art centers are themselves public places, not significantly different from the collectivist fantasy of “the street” propounded by the show.

Despite the practical value of some of the works, particularly Renee Edgington’s and Matthew Francis’s clean-syringe exchange program, “Inside the Armory, Out on the Street,” plays into the hands of conservatives by willfully emptying art of its content.

* Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (818) 792-5101, through Dec. 23. Closed Mondays.