THOMAS EVANS | DATE 6/22/2011

Richard Tuttle: Perceived Obstacles

A note to Tuttle fans, booksellers, collectors and artist's book aficionados: the Artbook | D.A.P. warehouse has received a very small quantity of Richard Tuttle's extraordinary artist's book Perceived Obstacles, first published in 2000 and out of stock since 2008.

The outsize proportions of Perceived Obstacles--one foot tall and three feet wide--are not gratuitous, but entirely particular to the volume's contents. Perceived Obstacles reproduces 80 Tuttle assemblages and drawings at 1:1 scale, printed (on pale gray newsprint) with such eye-popping clarity that the delicate and colorful sculptures seem about to topple from the page. Few three-dimensional art works are as well served by the book form as these.
Furthermore, the reader's movement through the book is wonderfully underlined in the physical labor of turning the pages, so that the 'read' unfolds as a curious, beguiling and decidedly book-specific alternative to the gallery experience of looking, walking a few feet, stopping, looking, walking again, etc.

Richard Tuttle monographs have a habit of disappearing quickly (and selling for steep prices once out of print), so the six copies currently in our warehouse won't hang around very long... also look out for Triumphs, a great new Tuttle monograph published for the artist's winter 2010 show at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Triumphs releases next month.