Ryman's Tact Author(s): Yve-Alain Bois and Thomas Repensek Source: October, Vol. 19 (Winter, 1981), pp.

93-104 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778661 Accessed: 30/06/2010 23:19
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Ryman's Tact

YVE-ALAIN

BOIS

translated by THOMAS REPENSEK The more closely you look at a word the more distantly it looks back. -Karl Kraus The question-despite its rhetorical flavor-must be asked at the very outset: why is it so hard to write about Robert Ryman's work? Aren't his paintings themselves-preeminently anti-illusionist, flatly literal-all the explanation the viewer or critic needs to penetrate their ineffable silence? Don't they reveal what they're made of, proudly, with a kind of routine generosity, thereby cutting short any attempt at associative readings? Simply, don't they seem to suggest their own commentary, to define their own discursive terrain? And if we ask Ryman what we should see in his paintings on corrugated paper, whether, for example, something could be further clarified, he says: "What the painting is, is exactly what [you] see: the paint on the corrugated and the color of the corrugated and the way it's done and the way it feels. That's what's there."' Why is it so difficult then, for me and others, to approach his work and express our excitement about it? Isn't it tempting, but tediously elementary at the same time, to compile a list of "what's there" in a work of Ryman's, a recipe ("the way it's made"), a checklist? Yet isn't this what he as the artist invites us to do? In Naomi Spector's lengthy essay on Ryman, she undertakes a systematic chronological description of Ryman's work from the point of view of process. Painstakingly, she establishes each painting as a procedural document, reconstructing Ryman's formulative process in the smallest detail.2 But how do I explain my hesitation to begin? Why this inertia instead of smartly stepping up to take my own turn as detective (the evidence: the paintbrush, the paint, the support) and insisting on my version of the facts?
1. 2. Phyllis Tuchman, "Interview with Robert Ryman," Artforum, vol. iX, no. 9 (May 1971), 53. Naomi Spector, Robert Ryman, Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, 1974.

Robert Ryman. Empire. 1973. Oil on linen. 96 x 96 inches.

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It's not as if the historical development of the process itself isn't of primary importance, or that Ryman's inventiveness doesn't express itself in the making; it should be clear that in this sense he drives himself to experiment, and the story of these experiments never fails to interest me. Yet there is a certain innocence in the systematic decoding of the how-it's-done. Like the hunt for sources that used to take place in literary studies, or the search for the motif in art history (find the improbable valley that was the source of inspiration for this engraving by Seghers or this drawing by Claude Lorrain), the narrative of process establishes a primary meaning, an ultimate, originating referent that cuts off the interpretive chain. That is, an aesthetic of causality is reintroduced, a positivist monologue that we

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thought modern art was supposed to have gotten rid of: A (paintbrush) + B (paint) + C (support) + D (these combined) give E (painting). There is nothing left over in this equation. Given E, ABCD can be deciphered, absolutely. By making the artist a kind of engineer who solves a problem of many parameters in his work (Ryman, the experimenter, does in fact often speak in these terms), the discussion of process in art is refitted to this heuristic mold. The object of this critical discourse then would seem to be: given the solution (the painter's "eureka"), find the problem. Thus, pretending to believe that visual thinking functions only as anamnesis-recovering a section of Lost Time-the narrative account of process allegorizes painting without admitting it, or without realizing it is doing so, conceiving of the painting as a rebus. According to the allegorized narrative of process, what we should see in Empire (1973) is not so much a canvas on which the subtle, white, all-over smoothness delineates three contiguous zones of fleecy horizontal bands, the intensity and rendering of each zone being scarcely distinguishable from one another, but a "reflection" of the "process of its creation";3 viz., among other things, that three paintbrushes were used to make this painting, which is an index of the artist's heroic exertions. It isn't that I disapprove somehow of this sort of allegorization, or that I experience no pleasure-aesthetic pleasure, that is-in finding out that the painting's three bands correspond to the durability of the three paintbrushes. But does this mean that Ryman's is a world without qualities? That the white of Empire is not, to our senses, brilliant, hovering, vibrating, and materially dense, before it is seen as a product? before, that is, we could possibly worry about how it was produced? Any attempt at commentary, especially when it addresses the visual "asceticism" of Ryman's paintings, even more when it examines them at very close range, becomes distanced from its object, or, rather, sees its object become distant. This is one of the meanings of the Kraus epigraph. The innocence of the processaccount stems from its believing itself capable of exhausting its object, of being able finally to state the truth about the truth, when it is in fact its object that exhausts it. The claim that the process-account is essential is more interesting to me than the narrative itself, because it is precisely this claim that Ryman questions. Thus the innocence of the process-account is its failure to think about its own claims to primacy. We know that Ryman sometimes makes prototypes of his paintings, that he discards many of them in the course of his work, that he is selective ("to obtain these thirteen panels Ryman worked on more than fifty," Barbara Reise wrote about the Standard series).4 Does this mean that his choice is a function of the legibility of process in the completed work? Nothing could be less certain. Who

3. Ibid., p. 24. 4. Barbara Reise, "Robert Ryman: Unfinished II (Procedures)," Studio International, vol. 187, no. 964 (March 1974), 122.

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would know, for example, looking at series III, IV, V, and VII, whose titles correspond to the number of panels they contain, that the more or less identical panels were actually painted in groups of three?5 And how could it be known, since except for the major exception of the first series (III), none of them is a multiple of three, nor is the total number of panels (nineteen), whether intended or not, divisible by three. Is this element of process then insignificant because it is concealed? No, because it generates (and thus "explains") the slight breaks in continuity, in the last three series, between the horizontal bands whose gestural rhythms should continue from panel to panel. But couldn't this slight discontinuity have been obtained by painting these panels one by one? No, because the semiautomatic breadth of gesture corresponds to the entire width of the original surface existing as a sort of frieze (the three panels that were initially juxtaposed
5. Cf. Naomi Spector, Robert Ryman, p. 19.

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extended over thirteen feet). Painting the panels separately would, of course, cause excessive discontinuity, or, rather, discontinuity pure and simple, which would signify nothing and be an empty sign, since it would not be in opposition to the continuity it interrupts. Therefore, since this element of process is not insignificant, why isn't it expressed? Because process doesn't interest Ryman as such. He attempts instead to construct a structure of oppositions: a paradigm. This is what the visual "asceticism" in his paintings is always ready to provide. The structural paradigmcontinuous/discontinuous-declined by the full series is clearly legible: the procedural record has nothing more to teach us; it may even lead to a concept of arithmetic accountability which is of as little value at this juncture as-to repeat my metaphor-the "correct" motif of a Seghers engraving. Another example is the Stretched Drawing, which demonstrates the tension characteristic of all painting mounted on stretchers (the drawing was traced first

Robert Ryman. III. 1969. Enamelac on corrugated paper. 3 units, each 60 x 60 inches. Left: Installation, 1969, Fishbach Gallery, New York.

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Robert Ryman. Stretched Drawing. 1963. Charcoal, pencil on cotton canvas. 15 x 15 inches.

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against a stretched canvas, was then unmounted, then restretched). Barbara Reise states that "[i]t is a 'drawing', not a 'painting', for dried paint-even on cotton canvas-cracks into non-adhesion during an accentuated stretching and restretching process. If Ryman were only 'into process', he might have used paint and accepted its disappearance.... "6 If he were a competent practitioner of process art, as there was reason to believe, he no doubt would have chosen this solution, accompanying the result of his experiment with a caption detailing the course of events. The presence or absence of the work would simply be a record of the process, an index,7 with no further exercise of the code, without recourse to a paradigm. But in fact we know that if he had undertaken such an experiment, Ryman would no doubt have considered the result a failure and would have destroyed it. This drawing, then, instantiates tension-an institution ordinarily naturalized (taken for granted) in painting-declaring it a historical code rather than a natural fact. Yet it does so indirectly. If Ryman were to content himself with a frontal attack on the institution of tension, he would, like many painters currently working in France, be satisfied by simply exhibiting his unstretched canvases in large sheets unrolled to the floor. Choosing instead to set tension in contrast with its opposite, Ryman reveals the following aporia: which comes first, the stretching or the unstretching? The aporia itself leads to a historical investigation. That is undoubtedly the other sense of Kraus's aphorism: the closer you look at a word, the more echoes begin to reverberate from the sedimented strata of its historical, etymological dimension, the deeper the geological cut that opens up. Isn't it possible, for example, following Ryman, to read modern art according to this new on the basis of that point among oppositional axis-stretched/unstretched-and, others, to establish links between, say, Bonnard and Pollock (both of whom painted their canvases before stretching them)? Finally, Ryman invests his paradigm with actual configurative power. We are tempted to say that the drawing was sketched on unstretched canvas; but can we in fact say that? The misshapen square that we see is not a sketch. It is not first and foremost the product of a freehand drawing. Nor even simply the act of stretching, unstretching, and restretching the canvas. But of the intervals between them. Now, the narrative of process is strictly additive, for it can never recapitulate more than one successive set of acts; it cannot reveal how the work stages their proliferation. Making the work the objective complement of a series of transitive actions (squeezing the paint, stretching the canvas, etc.), the process-account refuses to believe in the enigma of the work's potential intransitivity.8
6. Reise, p. 123. 7. See Rosalind Krauss's text on the index (and photography as a model for recent abstract art), "Notes on the Index, '70s Art in America," Parts 1 and 2, October, no. 3 (Spring 1977), 68-81; no. 4 (Fall 1977), 58-67. 8. There are many other examples of the interval. Jean Clay points out two: "It is like a work where Ryman will claim alternately to deconstruct something completed and complete something

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Returning, then, to the initial question: why do I find it so difficult to write about Ryman? Isn't it enough to describe and analyze not the process itself but the process of the process (not tension, but the stretchedness of the unstretched stretch)? This is exactly where the difficulty lies. We know that all of modern culture is characterized by a loss of innocence regarding what we call the means of expression, and that the entire modernist enterprise can be read along the axis of this reflexivity. That this is taken for granted today is the result of its articulation in what we call the theory of modernism. That it suddenly solidified, excluding from the pictorial pantheon all but a very exclusive group of artists, should not diminish the breadth of the qualitative leap it effected in critical discourse over the past forty years. If it seems to be accepted as a given today that the old masters, whatever they may have said, were much more concerned with painting than they were with history, literature, theology, or psychology, this perception is as much due to the efficaciousness of this theory as it is to the emergence of abstract painting, for which for many years the discourse of reflexivity alone was able to provide a theoretical base. Today's rush to deny the reflexive nature of the modern sensibility, to challenge the acquired knowledge of modernist critical practice, and at the same time, under the pretext of correcting the abuses of this criticism, simultaneously to represent all of modern art as a gigantic historical error and a terrorist mystification-all of this has only symptomatic importance. There will always be those who equate Bouguereau and Ingres, who prefer late de Chirico to early, who say that all the trouble started with Manet. That they are speaking very vociferously today and want us to think they are getting their revenge is only cant perpetrated in the name of history in order better to erase it. The same applies to practice: the anti-modernist (mistaken for postmodernist) reaction reflected in the dominant trend in current exhibitions (the schoolboy pranks of the Italian "transavant-garde," the Sturm-und-Drang-ing of so-called German neoromanticismeven though it was precisely German romanticism that sowed the seeds of modern reflexivity) is only an epiphenomenon. It is nevertheless true that the historical revisionism I have referred to, like the return to the figurative order we are now witnessing, are both symptoms of the crisis of modernist discourse today. So, too, is current modernist practice, which, in its own referral back to discourse, simply accommodates itself to that discourse. "I approach printmaking in the same way that I approach painting, from

uncompleted [cf. Reise, pp. 122ff], the completion of the uncompleted taking on meaning only in that it raises the question of the completedness of all painting. Or the exhibition of a nakedly frameless painting: Ryman attaches a canvas to a wall, frames it with a broad brush stroke, pulls it off, and fixes it in another location. Covered with hairline cracks and chipped, the painted frame adheres to the wvall, while the jagged outline and curled edges of the work evidence the act of unframing. Even if a frame were supplied, it would never be more than an unframed-reframed painting" (Jean Clay, "La Peinture en charpie," in "Dossier Ryman," Macula, no. 3 4 [November 1978], 173).

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the point of view of working with the basic possibilities of the medium," says Ryman, modernist in spite of himself.9 Is there anyone who doesn't see that this way of speaking is no longer enough? that it is vacuous because it applies in various ways to everything of importance that modern art has ever produced? Eighteenth-century connoisseurs, responding to Titian's sprezzatura and the debate over the best distance from which to see his paintings, began to "look at the painter's handiwork closely, admire his touch and the magic of his brush," to prefer the sketch to the completed painting because it reveals the making of the work, insinuates the spectator into the studio, makes available the secret of the gods.'0 The artist's skills were evaluated by measuring the distance between effect (the resemblance of a portrait, for example) and the means used to achieve that effect (a tangle of gestures). The sudden interest in brushstroke came from an opposition, a discrepancy: a paradigm. And undoubtedly it was this sensualist probing by the connoisseur that finally led to the theory of modernism. But strangely enough, as Jean Clay has remarked, neither Clement Greenberg nor his followers bothered very much with the material process of constructing a work of art." If they were never really interested in the pictorial process, it was because they saw no difference between the painter's formal intention and its realization, its visualization. So Clay continues, "It's as if, when speaking of Ryman, 'modernist' categories were grafted onto the pictorial components that Greenberg himself had avoided. 'Essence' would no longer reside in the ever greater coincidence between a delimited two-dimensional support and its painted surface, but in the specific qualities of texture, brushstroke, affixing elements, stretcher bars, etc., everything constitutive of painting itself, in its very nature."'2 And we have seen that Ryman himself speaks in these terms. Greenberg's interpretation of art since Manet defines the modernist program as being engaged in the elimination of nonessential conventions. What hasn't been eliminated, he sees as truly motivated; hence its logical place in the pictorial order. So far so good. But Ryman, starting from the same premises (there is something like a pictorial absolute),'3 shows that scarcely has a pictorial element been examined-given a motivation by virtue of its formative process-than that
9. Cf. Prints: Bockner, Lewitt, Mangold, Marden, Martin, Renouf, Rockburne, Ryman, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974, p. 49. 10. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York, Pantheon, 1960, p. 199. 11. Clay, p. 171. 12. Ibid., p. 183. 13. In the brief text he wrote for the catalogue of the Fundamental Painting exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975, Ryman himself speaks about an "absolute" in painting. Still more naive at the very beginning of his career, Ryman painted what appeared to be a programmatic work. The painting, dated 1958, is untitled, but written, white on black, in the middle of a long horizontal rectangle that stripes its surface are the words "The Paradoxical Absolute" (reproduced on p. 29 of the Ryman exhibition catalogue, InK, Zurich, 1980). Naive precisely because it makes a statement without constructing a paradigm, this painting implies belief in the immediacy of a paradox simply by virtue of its linguistic formulation.

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which was withdrawn as being arbitrary and unmotivated returns to threaten elsewhere. A given configuration of the surface is determined bh the shape of the frame and the choice of paintbrush. Except, how is the paintbrush chosen? where does the frame itself come from? and outside the frame, for example, what is the source of the light that illuminates it? The paintbrush depends on the size of the canvas, of course, but what determines the size of the frame? No requirement seems any longer to take precedence over any other, and when the painting-whew!interrupts this infinite regress (Roland Barthes's favorite game of hand-over-hand), what is there except this residue of arbitrariness that modernism (the reductiveness of modernism) would have liked to eliminate?'4 Valery remarked, "The forms: I think that I think that I think... I dream that I dream etc.... are limited to only two real states of remove."15 1 would say that Ryman has attempted to paint that he paints that he paints; that he has always wanted, by means of an excess of reflexivity, to outflank the tautological reflexiveness in which modernism has been locked. Further, his success is due not to having attained that literally unthinkable reflexivity, but to the fact that every failure of his audacious attempt removes him further from his object, driving him to produce objects that are increasingly enigmatic and indeterminable. In a sense each of his paintings revives Poe's statement about the mise en abyme: "Now, when one dreams, and in the dream, suspects that one is dreaming, the suspicion never fails to confirm itself, and the sleeper is almost immediately roused. Thus Novalis is not mistaken in saying that we are close to awakening when we dream we are dreaming."'6 That is, in this instance, by trying to solve the enigma, by trying to think painting, we always arrive, literally, at the same object or the same absence of object. This is what Ryman demonstrates again and again: there is a threshold of reflexivity beyond which the record is erased.

I have placed this text under the sign of Karl Kraus. If I may be permitted one last literary reference, I will return to him. Walter Benjamin writes of Kraus, "He, 'merely one of the epigones that live in the old house of language', has become the sealer of its tomb .... No post was ever more loyally held, and none ever was more hopelessly lost."17 In relation to modernism, Ryman is in the same position that
14. Thierry de Duve, assuming the relative irreproducibility of Ryman's paintings, clarifies some theoretical connections between them and photography and speaks about what there is of the auratic in them that is resistant to it. ("Ryman irreproductible," Parachute, no. 20 [Fall 1980], 18-27). Paul Valery, Cahiers, ed. La Pliade, vol. 11, Gallimard, Paris, 1974, p. 207. 15. 16. Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York, Random House, 1938, p. 683. Walter Benjamin, "Monument to a Dead Soldier," "One-Way Street," in One-Way Street and 17. Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London, New Left Books, 1979, p. 79.

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Kraus occupies in relation to the German language: standing guard at its tomb, like any sentry, he holds an untenable position. He is perhaps the last modern painter, in the sense that his work is the last to be able graciously to maintain its direction by means of modernist discourse, to be able to fortify it if necessary, but above all radically to undermine it and exhaust it through excess. This detour by way of Kraus, with whom objectively speaking Ryman has little in common, is not based solely on their parallel positions, but also on very the similarity of their arsenals. We are aware of the extraordinary polemical force of Kraus's writing, the untiring, devastating rage that sustained him in his solitary editorship of Die Fackel. Benjamin shows that "in a world in which the most shameful act was still the faux pas"-the Vienna of 1900-Kraus was effective polemically because "he distinguishes between degrees of the monstrous."'8 In this sense he set for himself a criterion-tact-"'whose destructive and critical aspect" he brought into play. "It is a theological criterion," Benjamin continues, "for tact is not-as narrow minds imagine it-the gift of alloting to each, on consideration of all relationships, what is socially befitting. On the contrary, tact is the capacity to treat social relationships, though not departing from them, as natural, even as paradisiac relationships, and so not only to approach the king as if he had been born with the crown on his brow, but the lackey like an Adam in livery."'9 What does Kraus make of this notion of tact? He does not use it to rise to the sacred, to its theological kernel, but to "dismantle the situation, to discover the true question the situation poses, and to present this in place of any other to his opponents,"20 knowing full well there is absolutely no hope of escaping history, which he conceives of as an apocalypse. If Kraus treats social relations without "departing from them as natural relationships," it is in order better to capture that very nature in its own trap, better to read, under the "naturali" the presence of history. And what of Ryman? Doesn't he demonstrate extraordinary tact concerning all the institutions of the act of painting, as well as a destructive tact that drives each of them back to its problematic condition? His criterion remains, certainly, theological (his essentialist manner of naming Painting, Engraving), but like Kraus, doesn't he refuse to set limits in his quest of law? In the same way that Kraus, the guardian at the tomb of language, knew that "mankind is losing the fight against the creaturely world,' 21Ryman also realizes that when the norms of painting are put to the test, what is arbitrary will have the last word. This is perhaps the source of the charm of his paintings, as it is of the difficulty one has in writing about them.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Walter Benjamin, Reflections, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 244. Ibid. Ibid., p. 243. Ibid., p. 245.

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"His reflection has contributed greatly to pushing back the frontiers of the pictorial field," Stephen Rosenthal writes of Ryman.22 I would say that, with respect to modernism, Ryman (perhaps without realizing it) works with a lethal delicacy; that simply reflexive discourse cannot be carried on with regard to his works; that in forcing reflexivity to reflect on itself he has moreover-quite simply-indicated the limits of our critical discourse more than he has pushed back those of his art, unless in the sense of a distancing of his object that is ever more irrevocable.

22. Stephen Rosenthal, "Notes sur le proces pictural," in "Dossier Ryman," Macula, no. 3/4 (November 1978), 158.