Word: scrimshaws
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...showing guests as giant chess pieces. One shindig had a Venetian theme, complete with a gondola, which, in one photo, was being navigated in the pool by the largest shareholder of General Electric. 'He collects army tanks,' Marsala said, shaking his head and chuckling, as if the man collected scrimshaw or hermit crabs. 'He has about two hundred and fifty of them, right up the street...
Tuttle's small-scale aesthetic doesn't always translate well into larger formats. In a not-quite-sculptural work like Six--a palisade of sticks, some of them shrouded in cloth hoods--the scrimshaw intricacy of his little wall pieces is lost, and not much comes forward to compensate. As metaphor, the piece is illegible, and as an assemblage of materials, it's not much. But so much else of what he does is choice. If this is "less," let's have more...
...which a detail of Raphael's Sistine Madonna is made to appear within a massive close-up of a human ear--the ear of Pope John XXIII, no less, much enlarged from a magazine photo. It may not be more than a tour de force of craftsmanship, like scrimshaw. But what's so bad about a tour de force...