Whispered, not shouted

WHEN “The Art of Richard Tuttle” opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art two summers ago, I remember being surprised at the lengthy tour that was planned -- a tour coming to a close now at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The handsome show opened there this week and will remain through July. The tour’s uncommon scope stood out for several reasons.

Between its two California venues, major museums in New York, Des Moines, Dallas and Chicago booked the Tuttle show. As unusual as it is for an artist’s retrospective to travel to six institutions -- three or four is more common -- it is rarer still for a show to be seen in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Nobody would bat an eyelash if an exhibition went from Philadelphia to Boston, even though they’re closer to each other than California’s two major cities; yet maybe because no state line is involved, it almost never happens here. But it did this time.

A desire to attract a broad public does not explain the enthusiasm. This is Richard Tuttle, not King Tut. Tour groups from community centers will not be dialing up Ticketmaster and renting buses.

The show is made up almost entirely of the kind of art that causes most people -- including conservative art critics -- to scrunch their brows. It includes a sculpture that consists of nothing but a 3-inch piece of white clothesline nailed horizontally to a white wall. Lots of drawings are composed from just a few pale marks of watercolor and perhaps a little strip of folded paper.

Many other works tremble on the brink of sheer invisibility. Octagonal shapes of nearly transparent tissue paper are pasted flat against the gallery wall -- a kind of Minimalist wallpaper. Other walls feature the forms and shadows of lengths of wire traced with pencil.

But clearly, the survey does represent something unusually appealing to American museums that focus on the art of our time. The explanation is finally rather simple -- as simple as the elegant gestures and modest materials with which this plain-spoken art is made. The New York artist’s work since 1964 is emblematic of art’s thoroughly institutional nature today. It italicizes the museums that show it.

A line tied to the apparatus

A 3-inch piece of white clothesline, nailed to a white gallery wall like Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed on the door of the castle church, would not have been generally perceived as art had it been pounded to a barroom door on the Bowery. Tuttle’s 1974 piece is site specific, and the site it specifies is the art world -- a phenomenon then still wet behind the ears. The rope is tied up in the complex, burgeoning apparatus of artists, art lovers, galleries, schools, magazines, museums, auctioneers, collectors, critics and general hangers-on that, for the first time in American life, had grown up around art in the quarter-century after World War II.

The wire pieces, which the artist made in 1971 and 1972, collectively rank as Tuttle’s most distinctive contribution to art history. Each end of a length of ordinary florist wire is inserted into the gallery wall. The protruding wire is variously bent and angled, and it projects several inches (never more than a foot) from the surface. Thin pencil lines drawn on the wall seem to have been made in a number of ways. The wire was a linear template that the artist traced. Or a wire’s shadow cast by the gallery lights was followed. Or some pencil lines that don’t seem to correspond to the shape of the wire or its shadows could be a record of earlier forms the wire took, before the final shape was settled on.

This is floral wire, after all, and it’s springy and malleable. Who’s to say Tuttle didn’t change its shape while the piece was being installed?

And who would be looking at something like this in any circumstance other than a designated art context? A painting is easily identified as art even if it’s out in the parking lot. But a zigzag of wire? Figuring it out just requires scrutiny -- and a willingness to participate.

As you examine the wire pieces, your body sometimes gets between the wall-work and the light source, and the shadows get interrupted. The pencil lines take their place or not, but you become acutely aware of being in illuminated space. The physical reality of the wire differs from that of the pencil line and the shadow, but all of them seem to be uncanny reflections and intimations of each other -- and of your experience of them. Viewing becomes active, not passive, and engaged perception kicks in.

The condition of mortality

It’s difficult to explain how affecting this is -- how much it heightens sensitivity. The fragility of Tuttle’s materials is crucial because it underscores the work’s ephemeral nature. His perennial subject is the condition of mortality within which life is lived. And in this, none of us is alone.

The Abstract Expressionist painting that dominated the late 1940s and 1950s had similar themes. But it asserted the primacy of individual intentions and singular human lives.

Tuttle’s art derives from painting. Early works like “Chelsea” and “Drift III” are solid blocks of dusty, acrylic color painted on shaped plywood, turning the marks made by a paintbrush into physical objects. “Silver Picture” (1964) is a long line of milled plywood spray-painted silver, which dips down at one end. It recalls nothing so much as a graphite pencil line drawn on paper, but exploded to gargantuan size. Tuttle might emphasize three-dimensional objects in illuminated space, like sculptors do, but his work always stands in relation to the wall, as painting does.

One amusing moment in the chronologically installed show comes in work from the late 1980s, when Neo-Expressionist painting was being trumpeted as a long-awaited return of the figure to painting. Free-standing works like “Four” and “Six” are assembled from strips of wood draped with stained and marked fabric -- the materials of painting -- arranged in ways loosely suggestive of birds, animals and other animated characters. It’s as if an Expressionist figure painting had jumped down off the wall to strut and parade around the room.

There are some rough spots in the show, which is very large and beautifully installed. (The artist participated.) A baroque phase that begins around 1989 finds him incorporating electric light into crummy assemblages of stuff -- tree branches, Styrofoam, crumpled paper, etc. -- as if trying to draw attention during a particularly overheated art-world moment. But the cluttered arbitrariness overwhelms it.

Tuttle’s mature art arrived in the wake of Abstract Expressionist monumentality. It emerged in the 1960s simultaneously with the big statements of Minimalist sculpture, the brashness of Pop and the bold geological scale of Earthworks. In that context, the wispiness of using bits of florist wire, some pencils and a few shadows has the power of a refreshing breeze.

And rather than the alienation of an earlier era, this work vigorously embraces art as a social structure -- worldly, secular and cosmopolitan. If there’s another American artist Tuttle brings to mind, it is Arthur Dove, who worked in the very different milieu of the first half of the 20th century. Dove was indifferent to nature’s outward forms, yet his art poetically evokes its spiritual power.

That energy is contained in a grain of sand, as much as in a mountain range. And it turns up everywhere you look in Tuttle’s engrossing retrospective.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

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‘The Art of Richard Tuttle’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art,

250 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Ends: July 30

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org