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Radiant dispersion: Robert Ryman's Philadelphia prototype, 2002 - multipanel paintings
ArtForum, Sept, 2002 by Jeffrey Weiss
These elements of process, surface, temporality, space, extension, and light are the genetic source of content in Ryman's work, which concerns itself with the primacy of these means in painting of any kind. Almost uniquely unattached to iconogruphy or conventional imagemaking, they are laid bare. Ryman frequently describes a certain aspect of his own paintings--something that he first admired in Rothko's canvases beginning in the late'50s--as a quality of "nakedness." By this characterization he means to identify a kind of visual and physical openness (partly resulting from the unframed canvas) that situates the work in the realm of the beholder. It is an idiosyncratic word choice, which is why we stop short when we come upon it in a prose piece by Mallarme, his preface to the first publication of "Un Coup de des." In this essay, the poet accounts for his "blanks" (blancs, in French), the empty white spaces that occur throughout the radical typographical distribution of lines across the gutter in a succession of two-page spreads. Versification, he explains, has always historically required such blanks, which hold the lines "like a surrounding silence"; with his new poem he does not mean to "transgress against this system, but simply disperse it." Visually, as he explains, the empty spaces of the double page shape the temporal experience of the poem, successively inducing the reader to speed up, slow down, or scan; moreover, they also permit "some simultaneous vision of the Page," which has now replaced the stanza or the line as the quantifying unit of the poem. The text, in turn, moves in depth through the space of the page, surfacing and dissipating "as the writing shifts about around the fragmentary halts of the sentence." In this regard, "everything happens by a shortcut hypothetically; storytelling is avoided." These means, and the sense of the poem as it is read through them, constitutes for Mallarme a "naked use of thought" (emploi a nu de la pensee).
Mallarme's exposure--spatializing the text by opening it up to the physical and visual space of the book, thereby allowing sound and meaning to be experienced in multiple dimensions at once--is literally and figuratively an expansive act. Likewise, when a painting is made to adhere itself to the wall through a workmanlike action of the brash that joins both surfaces, thereby initiating a latent and logical yet entirely unforeseen extrapolation of the properties of the medium, then a system--one that underlies the historical practice of painting--is not being transgressed but dispersed. When the act of reading painting across intervals of wall plane (the gutter) makes available a simultaneous apprehension of independent yet reciprocal surfaces that are themselves contained by a larger ground of ambient space (the blank), then attributes that have always been embedded in both panel painting and fresco painting are extricated from "storytelling" and are laid out across the work's conceptual plane. In Ryman's "re alism"--a focused, delighted attention to the dynamics of the medium and the condition of its own being--the means of painting are liberated when they are allowed to represent themselves at play. So self-evident has this move been over the years that, without ever having recourse to rhetorical flourish, the dynamics of Ryman's work can now deepen, yet effortlessly command an entire room.
