CURATED LIBRARIES

Contemporary Sculpture Library

When Richard Tuttle made his first dyed cloth pieces in the late 1960s--subtracting from painting not only paint itself but also the frame and stretcher--he summed up the total dismantling of the boundaries between sculpture and painting that, in the wake of Minimalism and assemblage, was already well underway. "It is not possible to say whether a Tuttle is a painting or a sculpture," wrote Scott Burton, in the catalogue for Harald Szeemann's legendary When Attitudes Become Form show; "it uses properties of both and is probably neither." Some 50 years earlier, Alfred Stieglitz had photographed Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" specifically to elucidate its sculptural properties--much to Duchamp’s dismay--broaching the frisson of industrial finish later to return in the 1960s via Minimalism and again in the 1980s with (for example) Haim Steinbach's basketball/Yoda head shelves. Assemblage is a third strain that informs the scope of present-day sculpture, reaching back to Dada and the impact of Lautreamont's