Richard Tuttle
Betty Parsons Gallery
Richard Tuttle’s show of hardly definable canvas octagons at the Betty Parsons Gallery was impressive in the quietest and most radically undermining way. His crumpled, then flattened-out pieces of canvas, hemmed along their irregularly proportioned contours, and dyed through both faces of the fabric—stretched without armature onto the walls or placed on the floor—are not paintings in the narrowest physical sense, nor are they sculptures, nor even “hangings.” They defy pinpointing (as all art of high quality probably should), and challenge one’s preconceived notions about what constitutes “