Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Tuttle's Thumbs and A Point in Space



Last night Richard Tuttle was speaking to me about art
depending upon the origin of a point in space and then
connecting that point in space with another point.
At that point in the conversation he very specifically
positioned his thumbs like the diagram above. I instantly
thought, "Rope Piece!". He then posed the question,
what if one of the points was taken away?

10 comments:

* said...

did you eat or drink anything unusual before you dreamed that?

if so I want some.

Ken

John Tallman said...

I had some coffee and deep fried cheesecake but I wasn't dreaming.

On Monday R.Tuttle gave a lecture at Lipscomb Unv. in Nashville and after his talk, I had a chance to speak with him.

You know truth is always stranger than fiction, Ken!

* said...

That's great! Sorry for assuming which level of consciousness it occurred on.

Also-- deep fried cheese cake!?!

Ken

Anonymous said...

Typical of something that Mr. Tuttle would say:
If you have two points and take one of them away what you have is 'zen' - all possibility. Part of the unscripted scriptures: Page 9, where latitude meets longitude, halfway down, Verse 5 [nano-zen] Bob meets the Monkey on the Road to China. Great stuff!

John Tallman said...

Another thing he kept coming back to was making work "with no qualities"...

LXV said...

Well. my father (a scientist) likes to tell the story of how when Annie, my little sister was really little, he was trying to help her with her math, specifically odd and even numbers, and he held up his fingers just as you depict and asked her what she saw and she said "three", because, to her, the space counted just as much as the fingers. Go figure.

Anonymous said...

It's said here that Only intelligence used to the full is worth throwing away.It's very tricky. There are a couple of rocks up a bit in Kyoto.
Very mysterious.
If when you ask 'what's it all about?' you get the answer! 'Rocks!'
'Yeah but they are universal rocks?' Reply is 'no local rocks'.
When something is what it is it becomes mysterious, fills up with meaning, and then necessarily falls flat and empty. The rock, mind you is always a rock as long as it exists.

How people approach a rock changes not the rock.

Anonymous said...

Lady Xoc, love it!

Like how do you connect four dots with one straight line? Some kid comes up with a marker with a two inch head and draws right through the four points.

'There!' she says, 'And don't bother me with your quibbles!'

String does a similar thing. Simple model has your dots, all possibilities within a dimension. And then to get to the next one you start with a dot again. So simple! You start with a dot that encompasses all the previous dots, or possibilities, as they call them.

Eventually you can't dot any higher. And that's the end of it - the theory - strings!

Thanks John, for this... luv it!

LXV said...

It's funny, I never got the idea of infinity until I began to think about the numbers between the numbers, instead of the numbers way out at the end. My father used to tell us about numbers like googleplex and I couldn't grasp the immensity even when he told me how many zeros and what power it would take and that I wouldn't be able to count up to it in my whole lifetime. Of course, contemporary demographics and economics use numbers that are beyond human comprehension, but we bandy them about with great familiarity. There is an infinity between anything and anything else. And there are infinite anythings. And you don't even have to go to outer space for it.

Forgive me, I am not a young person and my ideas may seem a bit backward. We just didn't know as much then.

John Tallman said...

Thanks for the discussion!

I think it's the nature of Tuttle, his work and how he talks about it that opens up to this kind of dialogue.

It's kind of a tangent and then it keeps circling back, using its own logic, vocabulary and rules.