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  • Review of Robert Ryman

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    Manoel Friques
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    Robert Ryman

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    Robert Ryman

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    23 vues9 pages

    Review of Robert Ryman

    Transféré par

    Manoel Friques
    Robert Ryman

    Droits d'auteur :

    © All Rights Reserved
    Téléchargez comme PDF ou lisez en ligne sur Scribd
    Signaler comme contenu inapproprié
    sur 9
    Ryman’s Poetics The Robert Ryman retrospective now at the Museum of Modern Art shows that his white paintings are not pure or disembodied but contain many nonspiritual traces of the “ereaturely world.” BY CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD © Janaary 1908 acting intellets traditionally mistrust colored paint. “The most beautiful colors,” Aristotle observed in his Poetics, “laid on at random, give less pleasure than a black- nd-white drawing.” Kant dismissed eolor outright as an element of a painting’ “harm,” recognizing drawing alone as *the proper object ofthe pure judgment of tate. Color is roretricious, narcotic, manipulative, deceitful. The thinking viewer—if we are to believe ‘the philosophers—is secretly dreaming ofa white canvas. Lately there have been plenty of pale paintings on display in New York. In 1992, the Whitney Museum staged the critically aclaimed Agnes Martin rtrospective. Last summer and fall, the Guggenheim SoHfo hung “Singular Dimensions in Painting,” a show in which ‘the whites of Martin, Rauschenberg and Ryman were juxtaposed to the more glamorous blacks of Reinhardt, Stella and Serra. And this fll the Museum of Modern Art exhibited an ‘nti eareer's worth of white work by Robert Ryman, more than 80 paintings. Those exhibitions appear to belong to a more general reappraisal and re-embracing of ‘monochrome and Minimalist painting, Yet, in all this activity, there has been surprisingly little theoretical enthusiasm of the sort that radical colorlessness and emptiness once inspired. This time around, the absenee of color and image is not provoking grave existen- tial reflections. And the Christian-Romantic tradition of metaphysial interpretation seems ‘to have ll but petered out. No longer is painting a miror for self-seratiny or a luminous ‘Robert Ryman: Untied “Stay Tor Grasse 197, polymer palat om ving on mason, 10 panels each 21 Inches square. PhatoD. James Dee. Courtesy Pace Gallery. A sensual In is evoked by Ryman’s buzzing flurries of brushstrokes, his opaque ponds of wet-looking pigment and the threads emerging through his paint. ‘Many American viewers seem relieved to confess delight in Ryman, and in monochrome painting in general The objets are no so puritanical and pretentious after al: they are plaful dos rather than domineesing Jeans. man's pictures lok more and more at home alongside those af his exact contemporaries Jasper Jon and Gy Two. Tey belong in spirit tothe late 1950: the precise moment betwen the dissipation of ‘Abstract Expressionist dreams and the assumption ofthe fll Pop swas- fer. In fact, the work at MOMA closest intone to Ryan's was hanging nly few yards away: Johns's White Number (1957) By contrast, nt ing could be more remote from Ryman than MOMA's lofty Barrett Newman called The Voice (1850, another white pining in close physcal proximity. And inthe wake of Ryman’ strange combination of fasttious esthetcism and disenchanted pragmatism, even Agnes Martin stat to Took more and more searching, pious, rusting TLisironie that a corpus of radically abstract and nearly colons ‘works should become a major site ofthe acknowledgment of pleasure in United, 1950, i om canvas, 8 by 8 inches. Collection Lacy R.Lippard. aperture onto ‘he divine. No one is philosophizing the blankness, Quite tothe contrary, most of the talk around Ryman these days is about the sensual tition of encounters with his surfaces. And, in truth, the overwhelming impression of the MOMA exhibition isthe fervd plea sure provoked by Ryman's wrought whitenesses, the buzzing Murries of ‘brushstrokes, the square opaque ponds of wet-Joking pigment, the trac- ery of iterglss threads pushing up through sallow skins of pint. ‘Ryaman's camer moves across an entire gamut of such eects na tight, t savory group ofsquare paintings from 1950-6, inching Unidd (1958), = — : Ine ustaposes corse white strokes and exposed suppor ther axen-el United, 1959, casein, graphite pencil red low canvas or tan paper. By the mid-1960s, Ryman had established his ‘rayon and ballot pen on tracing paper 08 distinctive sty, focusing on various permutations of white paint (with board, on wood, 10 by 8 nches Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. ‘ocasional oy lint of color) on square canvases, involving variations on theme, serial, close attention to materials and exclision of figurative references. Inthe 1970s he started working on metal: for example, ‘Gntided (1973; a group offre copper squares each wih a comer blocked ‘out in baked white enamel in each case, ground and figure are avid by a lutd stripe f green oxidation, with the untreated metal support con trasted to the obdurate milky gloss, Later in the "70s, Ryman began caperimenting with metal hardware and mounting devices. These works have the feel of sculpture; they procaim, rather ceremoniously, their ‘weight, poise and precision, The painted surfaces, upstaged by the set confidence of te hardware, snk back int a smoot, obliging hush. Philosophy is mortified by these wordy traes. The white painting was supposed to Iberate te image fom its body shel Instead, the beholder ho takes pleesure in applied white paint broaches an it chaos of convulsive, colorful meanings, These various metaphorical afiitions of pain o actual things inthe word disrup the detached evel of meita- tion that the pictre ought to support. The white painting that seduces the viewer (even with antiseptic color and cold metal hardware) betrays itself ike a painted idol that overlays the features of Eros onto its repre attd, ce. 1962, ot on tne, 6 inches square sentation of the true god, Soarteng Pace Gallery 6 January 1998 Untted, 1956, ot om cotton caneas, 48 incher square, Courteay Museum of Modern Ar painting, But against the fo ofall the righteous, joyess art recent in the public eye this seems to have become one of the functions of mono- home painting, Ofcourse you really wanted to tink about brushwork and desire, you could always goto the Met and look at an old master ‘ailing, But the works of ntreto of Rubens ar laden with imperious ‘cutural and symbole associations. es much les awkward to stat all ‘over again, with Ryman, at the beginning ofthe rainbow. he Ryman retrospective a the Modern is exactly the place to conduct this inquiry. The show pursues an unusually consistent career over ‘our decades, fom the mid-1B50s to the present, It surveys the fall range ‘of Ryan's briolagy, his frou tinkering with paints, brushes, supports and mounting hardware, Ryman proceeds prudent ffom one idea tothe next, and from one she in the paint supply store to another. The visitor tothe exhibition silenced bythe sterile tran of specially constructed win- dovsess white rooms, uncontaminated by wall labels or teats, sips easly into Ryman’s glacial pace and his starchy, phlegmatic temper. The ‘hythm of the show is punctuated by several powerful multipaneled works: VII (1968), for example, a set of seven compositions in generous, breathy, flowerchild strokes on large squares of corrugated cardboard ‘mounted dioctly on the wall or Untidled (1973), the set of five enameled ‘copper panels. Both works were lent by the Stedelifk Museum in Amsterdam, Meanwhile, Srjace Vl! 11 and 11 (1970 and 1971), huge ‘eanvases recently acquired by the Guggenheim from the Panza collection, are given a closed room of thelr own, imposing but perhaps abit too much like a chapel. Ryman risks introducing meaning whenever he works ona ‘monumental scale. Dimensions are not neutral: any beholder would be ‘cowed by a12-fot white square. ‘This is Ryman's first fullscale American retrospective, succeeding & string of Buropean tributes: Amsterdam in 1974, London in 1977, Pris in 1881 and again in 1991-92 The MOMA show (which actualy opened Ist, February at the Tate) is more comprehensive than the Dia Art Foundation's installation of 1988-89, which inchaded 33 works, mostly from the 1980s. The Dia hanging emphasized the conceptual and archi tectural aspects of Ryman’s works. It was also highiy mannered and provocative: smal pictures side by side with very larg pictures, for exam- Die, The current retrospective i, by contrast, more straightforward, and ‘emphasizes—even eels in—the painterly side of Ryman, ‘The exhibition, a collaboration of sors between Ryman and MONA curator Robert Stor, is a partial coneretization of the shadow retospoc- tive that Ryman keeps on the wall of his studio, in the form of '8.y-10-inch photographs of his work. One has the sense that he would. like to have kept all te paintings for himsel, Ryman clearly begrudges the open-endedness of the works reception. He labors quit to control that reception by helping to hang his exhibitions and by dousing brush fires of interpretation in his interviews. Ryman also paints with an ‘unusually keen sense of his oeuvre asa whole, of the relationship of each new part tothe whole, The pictures work best when they can interpret «ach other. Hung ami other artists’ paintings in the permanent collee- tions of museums, Ryman's pictures are often thrown off balance. Artin America 65 Avupre | Untte,1062, ot and cing on Linen, 62 by 65 inches, Courtey Mascum of Modern Art ‘These paintings are vulnerable in another sense: they are frankly rot- ed in matter, in earthly stfl. Inthe earlier andthe more recent works, especialy, Ryman only minimally transfigures matter. The path from the picture back to the paint tube or the hardware store is easly retraced ‘And even the overprotective Ryman does acoopt that his works will have 1 physical history, that they wil age and change colo. Because te ple- tus are stil so close to raw material, they look exceptionally mortal And agains ll the sanitary whiteness, the signs of aging and decay are doubly conspicuous. Untitled (1958), for example, was painted on jute sacking, and the seams ofthe cloth push ug through the paint surface and participate in the picture. [focused onthe the uppermost layer of paint, where a vert cal hairline crack snakes along the left edge. In other pictures I found nyself pursuing the web of craquelure in arbitrary counterpoint to the ‘sift joitngs of the loaded brush. One picture bore the scars of previous ‘exhibitions: Adelphi (1967), an $-oot square of unstreiched linn ean- vas with a waxed-paper “rame," staplod to the wal. The many empty staple holes in the paper frame are like a historical record of the pi lure’s past extibons. panting on metal had suffered an angular dent ‘atthe lower I, Two hairs about an ineh long were trapped in the paint in Surface Veit I (1971), otherwise pristine. On another of the paint ings on metal I found an eyelash... and blew it amay ‘Ye-Alain Bois has written eloquently about the reentry of the “crea ‘urely worl into the ostensibly closed and self-referential orbit of Ryan's paintings For Bas, the redueiility ofthese paintings to mere 8 January 1904 ‘matter is simultaneously a termination and a redemption ofa basically noble and idealistic historical episode: painting's dream of rotlessness, autonomy and self-sufficieney. The binding stammer of Ryman's brush, his ingenious autism, revealed to Bois the flaw in the modernist argu: ‘ment. Paint and brush stil belonged tothe world Bos ealled Ryman the “last modernist." It is easy to share Boiss elegiac ambivalence. One repudiates the dream only with regret. But the dematerialized imago— Platonic, Christian or modernist—was always a contradiction, an impossibility. There ino way to bleach out matter from an ol painting. yyman's paintings are some of the simplest paintings imaginable They reside atthe core ofthe practice of painting But atthe same time they occupy a vantage point outside the tradition. For Ryman's oeu- ‘re itself constitutes an implicit poetis of painting: systematic, almost didactic analysis of the structure and rhetoric of the art form; something along the lines of Aristotle's Poetics, but in pant rather than words. Paintings meaningfulness since the Renaissance has rested on fairly stable conventions of structure and presentation. It was only after the Jegitimacy of the cradidonal sured image had been shaken that the familiar modem way of framing, mounting and signing was established, ‘These conventions fixed the painting's precise place inthe worl, its rapport with its immediate surroundings its derivation from an author, its dstinetion from other sorts of artifacts. Medieval frescoes and altarpeces hd blended conceptually into their architectural habitats—paintings, windows, walls and furniture formed Frankly rooted in matter, rthly stuff, Ryman’s pictures have a physical history of aging and color change: their whiter jooks exceptionally mortal altemibracing settings for worship ot publi ritual, The modern “eabinet picture,” by contrast, extracted from this niche and relocated in domes- tic spaces, needed to be distinguished from the merely functional or decorative objects around it, The modern frame did not simply attach ‘the picture to the wall It actually sealed the panting off fom everyday life. It marked the ieture field as the lous of feton, figurative meaning and gratuitous beauty. The signature, meanwhile, Inked the work to a governing inteligenoe and an executing hand, Frame and signature thus became the defining conditions of the categories *art,” “work” and ‘artis.” They aro the equivalent to the modem literary conventions of typeface, page layout, tiling, binding and copyright, which were also established in the Renaissance, Such conventions make it possible for the portable painted canvas, regardless ofits setng, to be all the various things we are accustomed ‘twits being fiction, allegory, confession, polemic, propaganda, medita- tion, esthetic icon and so forth. And they make it possible for beholders ‘tw interpret paintings intelgbly. Interpretation as a socal activity must, ater ll, rest on convention of some sort. Ryman’s career is an unfolding, slow-motion demonstration of the conditions of possiblity ofthe painted work of art. He has expended con- siderable energy for example, dismantling and explicating the institution ‘of the frame. Nomaly, artists paint works before they are framed; the ‘work is putatively complete without its fame. Yet once the work is hang- ing on a wall the viewer's eye inevitably takes in the frame—and even. the bit of wal surmunding it—together with the picture fel, Frames are thus much more than mere furniture, or mounting devices. They are liminal zones that belong simultaneously tothe work and to the sur- rounding space [Ryman exposes this multivalent nature ofthe frame by forcing it in ‘one drvetion or th other, inward toward the center ofthe picture or ‘outward foward the architocture. In Adelphi, the waxed-paper frame is literally disposable; it openly belongs to the world. Yet atthe same time ‘we are encouraged to see the paper frame as a beautiful substance Ii salvaged and transformed by mere physical contiguity to the painting it surrounds. In other pictures, meanwhile, the bolts and brackets that attach the work othe wall are solidly part ofthe work. There is no poss ity of mistaking them for run-of-the-mill hardware provided by the museum, In some cases, for instance in pander (1985), the bolts have actually migrated to the interior of the picture field. Such a frame doesnt provide muh insulation from the world, And yet the bolts and brackets resist complete transfiguration into art. The hardware is meant to look industrial and manly For the welded-steel support-cum-trame of Archive (1980), Ryman chose a flat red-brown paint, a disingenuously “neutral” color that reminded me of Joseph Beuys's preferred pigment, Braunkrevz, A more recent painting, Jowrnal (1988), demonstrates the imperfect fit between, the literal frame—te earpentry—and the conceptual frame, Two sight Jy bowed panels are mounted on metal flanges one above another so that they join at the mille and ean against the wall. The transverse seam is hidden by a horizontal band; in effect a strip of frame that has been ‘swallowed into the interior ofthe painting. Aeross that band, in widely, ‘evenly spaced block eters, runs the signature "Ryman 88." ‘Signatures on anes belong, in principle, only incompletely to the work. ‘They gloss the work from a measured distance. But beeause Journal is a painting tured inside out, the curvy, childish letters ofthe signature become design, purctuation, practically the subject of the picture. Some see a = Eee beeps E aa ne Unite, 195 on nn, 1 inches qr Court Pac Eatery. ati 1 1965 ol on tnen canvas, 1 inches ‘are, Courteny Maseum of Modern Art. of Ryan's eary works carry two signatures, In Unie (1950), a collage ‘on a 10

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