ontology and Robert Ryman
This past July my girlfriend and I took a trip to New York and New Jersey, mostly to see art (she has an art history degree) and of course to do some touristy stuff like see a Broadway show, Ground Zero, the High Line, Chinatown and St. Patrick’s Cathedral, among other things. After four intense days of New York City we had plans to drive an hour upstate to Beacon, NY to see Dia: Beacon, a huge museum dedicated mostly to large-scale artworks such as those of Donald Judd, Michael Heizer, Fred Sandback, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Richard Serra and others.
Dia: Beacon also has a significant amount of work by Robert Ryman, a painter whom I had underappreciated as a sort of academic, theoretical painter; no one with much relevance to my own ideas on painting. Having been there to see several of his pieces in real life and really think about them I have changed my tune completely. He is one of the most important painters alive and it’s unfortunate that more students, artists and “civilians” are not enlightened to his work. I don’t know what’s going on in art schools today but he was never mentioned in the entirety of my undergraduate education, save for a small piece of his being included in a university museum show of contemporary abstract painting.
The initial reaction by most people to his work is, naturally, “It’s all just white!” and that’s mostly true, except for his very early work, but what I say to people to get them to re-focus their attention on what his work is really about is to compare it to how a blind or a deaf person experiences the world. When you remove one sensory experience, the others become heightened, more attuned to the ontological (the philosophy of reality itself as opposed to how it is mediated by our senses) reality around them. Ryman’s paintings use only white paint because he is essentially painting everything except color (although technically white is a color). We are force to look at what paint really is: surface, volume, molecules, to imagine what it would be like to touch it, how light reflects off of it, how it was applied, how it interact is various ways with its support surface and apparatus. Ryman has painted in innumerable different ways in order to fully enlighten us on all these factors and perhaps to make us realize just how arbitrary our typical methods of painting really are, such as “acrylic on stretched canvas” or “oil on panel.”
Why white? It’s not only the most neutral or “absent” color, Ryman makes it beautiful in a way no one else has. In art school I make a giant spaceship-like structure using only cardboard and kraft tape, and one of the revelations of the project was to really see the color of cardboard. It’s orange! I had never thought of that before. Similarly, Ryman makes us see color in a whole new way when he removes it, and only it, from our experience of painting. It’s a simulation of an ontologically pure object, as close as we can get to “seeing” without looking.
That epiphany this summer yielded many others on the seemingly arbitrary components of painting: Why is it viscous? Why is it on a flat surface? Why does it dry faster or slower? Why do we apply it with brushed or rollers, or other tools? Why oil or acrylic or gouache? It is much easier to contemplate all the dimensions of painting: hue, value, viscosity, texture, opacity uniformity, surface (both optic and haptic) and therefore make better, more informed decisions about how to paint, when you remove a dimension you are used to having around all the time.
