That mediocre artists borrow while great ones steal is a well-worn cliché, dating back at least to William Blake. That younger artists must always contend with the art of the past while struggling to move beyond it almost goes without saying. Its a burden that literary critic Harold Bloom dubbed, The Anxiety of Influence.

But while the problem of artistic influence may not be new, what artists choose to steal, and from whom, can bein that its a reflection of their times.

Artists of a few generations ago enacted their oedipal strife with papa Picasso; then, it was Warhol who had to be wrestled. (In the 1980s, the anxiety lessenedas appropriation and quotation became the norm.)

So who is it that the young artists of today have to grapple with?

Richard Tuttle and Mike Kelley are undoubtedly two of the most powerful forces of influence on emerging art. This was abundantly in evidence at Kelleys multi-ringed circus at Gagosian gallerys vast Chelsea space, where Day is Done played to huge crowds before closing on Dec. 17; and at Richard Tuttles remarkable career survey at the Whitney, on view through Feb. 5.

Im not the only one whos noticed the impact of these two artists.

I see a lot of children of both Tuttle and Kelley, jokes James Fuentes, former Deitch Projects director and now an independent curator.

Sharing a deadpan sense of humor, Kelly and Tuttle staved off some of the worst conceits of post-Minimal art and of 1970s and 1980s painting in general. And in doing so, they pulled off a Duchampian gambit that most emerging artists would love to repeat: making important art out of supposedly non-art materialsthings such as butt-plugs, bits of wire, and ephemeral detritus. A lot of emerging art still tries simultaneously to provoke and innovateoften with the same materials.

Using what he calls these crummy materialswire, cloth, bits of cordTuttle revitalized the possibilities of sculpture. Yet the backlash directed at Tuttles 1975 show at the Whitney was so harsh, it led to its curator being fired.

That sort of vituperative response is all but impossible to imagine todaybecause the ethos of Tuttles work from the early 1980stheatrical, hand-made, expressivehas saturated the minds and studios of so many emerging artists (as well as the curators, galleries and collectors who so eagerly support them).
 
"Tuttle's work reminds me of how Bruce Lee once described his philosophy of martial arts: it's like water. You put water in a cup and it becomes a cup. Tuttle has this nimbleness that makes him a shapeshifter, but he never compromises the integrity of the genres he weds," says Kambui Olujimi, an emerging multimedia artist based in New York, currently featured in Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. "Plus, Tuttle's use of materials is 'gangsta,'" Olujimi quips.

Mike Kelleys art belies an almost devotional sense of saving things from the dustbin; you might call him the godfather of the handicraft aesthetic, the redeemer of all things shabby and abject.

As Fuentes points out, father Kelley has spawned a large family of imitators. The kind of low-brow referents thrown together at the artists Gagosian extravaganzafreak-out videos, disco lights, sequins, kitschy paintingsare to be found in scores of galleries from Santa Fe to Salzburg.

I think people are kind of attracted to Kelleys kind of underdog, rock-and-roll, blue-collar sensibility; his is art for the masses. And hes a master of the integrated arts: performance, video, sculpture, video, drawing.

The attitude adopted by Kelley, his scatological jokes groping for the sublime in the ridiculous, was a direct confrontation with neo-conservative 1980s America.

Kelleys antic, but deeply felt response, however, is now appropriated as only a posture, a style. A lot of contemporary video art looks like Mike Kelley could have made itbut its emptied of the social and political resonance of the original.

Philip Larkin once said of William Wordsworth that the poet had achieved a rare feat: He shaped the taste by which he came to be savored. Its an apt way to describe the kind of influence Kelley and Tuttle have on emerging art.




Images (top to bottom): Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York, Photography by Fredrik Nilsen (2); Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York; Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, Collection of Lambert en Avignon, France, © Richard Tuttle, Photograph by André Morin; Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, National Gallery of Art, Washington, © Richard Tuttle; Courtesy of The Whitney Museum of American Art, Collection of Douglas S. Cramer, © Richard Tuttle, Photograph by Tom Powel, courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York.