Flat Photographs

I always thought Robert Ryman was fucking with me. I was introduced to Ryman as the artist who makes white paintings. I wasn’t shown any images of his work, just given the formula for his practice. In that instant, as a distrustful twenty-year old, I could only see him as a quintessentially insincere artist trying to con his audience. That he could do something so simple and mindless and be accepted for it was the basic reason people rightly distrusted Art. What I eventually realized, not through looking at Ryman’s work but attempting to understand art on my own, is that art’s simplicity is at times what makes it so obtuse to the larger world. My mistrust of Ryman wasn’t because of any misdeed on his part but from my own reticence to interpret what was happening. The uncertain bet that Ryman made in becoming the guy who makes white paintings, is the one that artists always make, in hopes that their concerns are important enough to have some meaning to the rest of the world. This is the same chance anyone takes when they have the privilege or the courage, to choose how they will spend the time remaining in their life. Ryman’s work forefronts this decision in a simple and legible way. Perhaps what makes it important is that it forces a confrontation with such a basic choice that it inevitably appears unsettling if we begin to understand its implications.