"Robert Ryman for metaphysicians"

by Fabrizio Trifiro'

Robert Ryman for metaphysicians Reflecting on the meaning of Robert Ryman's paintings leads directly to the core of metaphysical inquiry, the old ontological question "What is there in the world?". In fact on the stance towards this notorious philosophical issue depends the answer to the question "What to say about Ryman's painting?" Before giving an answer to this question, let's see how we are lead to the ground of metaphysics. When we ask ourselves about the meaning of an intentional object, an object charged with an intentional content, we look for the intentions the person who presented it to us wanted to communicate with it.

Then, what are Ryman's intentions behind his works? Obviously the best way to answer this question is to address Ryman himself. Well, when we ask Ryman about the meaning of his works he answers that in them "there is never a question of what to paint, but only of how to paint. The how of painting has always been the image" 1. Recalling when he first started painting he said that all that he wanted to see was "how the paint worked, and how the brushes worked..…..using the paint, putting it on a canvas board and see what that was like."2 Since then his interest has always been to experiment with the painting's means of expression, "to paint the paint"3 as it were, without any worry about matter of subject or representation. "The painting is not a picture of or about something"4 , "what the painting is, is exactly what you see:…....the way it's done and the way it feels. That's what's there" 5. Then, what Ryman tells us is that we do not have to look for any meaning in his paintings because he did not want to convey any meaning at all by painting them, he just wanted to experiment with different combinations of different painting's tools of expression and see what that was like. The only representation -image, or subject- to be found in his paintings is that of the particular assemblage of means of expression they are made of, that is to say that their only representation is the representation of themselves. This means that Ryman proposes them to the viewer as they are, as objects. Then the only intention Ryman has in painting them seems to be to convey what they convey without anyone having added intentions to them, to convey what they convey as mere objects.

Once the meaning of his paintings has been made to collapse in this way into the representation of themselves taken as mere objects, the question "What to say about Ryman's paintings", "What did Ryman want to convey with his paintings?" collapses into the question "What to say about Ryman's paintings taken as objects?" "What do these objects convey?". Well, an object can convey any sort of things, it can convey all that anyone might take it to convey, all that might flash in someone's mind to say about it. When we look at clouds, for instance, we can see faces, we can think of the transitority of life, we can think about or/and have a sensation of freedom, we can recall the softness of wool, we can feel lightness, we can notice their shade of colour and how dark or lucent they are etc.; many things can come to our minds, the clouds are there indifferent to us and we can react to them in any way we like.

So, do we have to take Ryman as giving us this same kind of freedom before his paintings, as giving carte blanche to us concerning what to say about them? Are Ryman's paintings to be taken as mere occasions for free thinking as clouds can be? No. "I have no control over what someone sees" says Ryman, "you can fantasy about things. You can look at clouds and see faces in the clouds, that kind of thing. That's not really there; it's just the imagination of the viewer"6 .

An element was then missing in our account of Ryman's intentions behind his works, and it is this element that introduces us in the domain of metaphysical inquiry. What the last quotation tell us is that Ryman after all wants to convey something specific with his own paintings; that if we want to be faithful to the author's intention we cannot say whatever we like about them. Then what is that Ryman wants to convey? What can be pertinently said about his paintings? What the last quotation tell us is that Ryman's intention behind his paintings is to communicate what's really is in them; to communicate their essence.. If we want to be faithful to the author's intentions in talking about Ryman's works then we have to be faithful to their essence. And with this we enter straight into the core of metaphysics.

Now, as it's well known even outside philosophy, there has never been agreement on metaphysical questions, on questions concerning essences. Each philosophical system has proposed a different view about what is in the world, what is the essence of things, and none of them seems to have come out with a definite demonstration of the correctness of their conception. Then it's not enough for Ryman, in order to be able to put a limit to what can be said about his paintings, to simply refer the viewers to the essence of his paintings, because there can be as many view about essences as there are persons. He has to take a metaphysical stance and say what is the essence of objects like his paintings, what really is in his paintings. And he does take it. His stance is in part already present in the last quotation. In fact what the last quotation also tell us is that all the figures we might see in his paintings, all the representations they might make us think about, are not really in them, are not part of their essence, part of the content Ryman wants to convey in doing them, but just part of our imagination. Well, this is the negative side of his metaphysical commitment towards what has to be considered in the objects, the side that tell us what is not them; but what is the positive side? What does Ryman think there really is in objects? What does Ryman want to communicate to us? We have already seen him answering this question: "What the painting is" he says "is exactly what you see: the paint on the corrugated and the colour of the corrugated and the way it's done and the way it feels. That's what's there". What Ryman wants to communicate then is the colour and the feeling of the particular combination of paint, panel, way of putting the paint on the panel etc... which are his paintings, these are what their essence consist in. But different people can see different colours, or at least different shades of colours, in the same object and even more can experience different feelings before the same object. We are here in the same situation we were before when Ryman referred us to what there really is in his paintings. There can be as many ways to see and feel his paintings, as there are persons. Then, does he wants to communicate any colours we might see in them and any feelings we might have in front of them, or just a particular colour and a particular feeling? In this case too Ryman seems to want to put a limit to what we can say about the right message of his paintings, and this limit bring us back to the seemingly unsolvable question about essences. He wants to communicate just a particular colour and a particular feeling, in fact he wants to communicate the essential colour and the essential feeling. It is here that lies his full commitment to metaphysics, to the belief in essences, as it is expressed in the following remarks: "The poetry of painting has to do with feeling. It should be kind of a revelation, even a reverent experience. If you can tune into the frequency of what you are experiencing, you come away feeling very good, you feel sustained"7 "Whether it is abstract or representational, that's what painting is, that's what it does. Everything else about it -the why of it, the what and the when. the technical aspect of it is interesting and necessary for deeper understanding. But that's not the purpose, or the goal of painting. The primary experience is the experience you receive of enlightenment"8

Ryman's metaphysic is metaphysics of feelings. He thinks that there are feelings that essentially belong to objects. He thinks that there is an objective way of experiencing objects; that objects convey a determinate feeling, or range of feelings, and that if we do not get them, if do not get tuned into their frequency we have the wrong experience, we miss the enlightenment we can only have when we reach the essences of things, the enlightenment we can get from the reverent experience of the feelings that are objectively delivered by them, the experience of their essence.

And here we are back again into the metaphysical troubles. We have to ask again: What are these essences? Can Ryman tell us what the objective feelings of the objects are? Can he tell us how to reach their essence, how to have the reverent, enlightening experience of their essence? Can he resolve the controversial ontological question about the essence of things? Again, if he can' t, if he just refer us to the objective feelings without specifying what they are, then he has to face not only the fact there could be different conceptions of what those feelings could be, but also the question why he think that there are objective feelings in the first place after all, that is: Can he shows us that there are feelings which belongs to the essence of objects? And with this question we have reached the basic problem that Ryman has to face for having been committed to metaphysics, the price to pay for doing metaphysics. It is the same problem that he would have to face even if he would be able to tell what feelings he beliefs to be the objective ones. It is the problem of showing that they are the objective ones, that what he says to be the essence of things is really the essence of things, namely the problem to show that his metaphysical position is the correct one.

He never tells us what the feelings that he wants to convey are, what the objective feelings of his paintings are, but he does say how to recognise them. They are the feelings that make us come away from viewing his paintings feeling very good, that make us feel sustained. Now this seems a very subjective criterion for the detection of objective feelings indeed. Different people can and in fact usually do come away feeling good with different feelings. Anyway he still should show us how the criterion of 'feeling sustained' is the right one for individuating essences. He still have to show that what he says about what there really is in the objects is really what there is, and how we have already said before, each metaphysical system maintains to be the right one, there is no agreement in metaphysical issues.

Let's sum up a bit before starting to draw some conclusions concerning what to say about Ryman's paintings. What we can get from what Ryman says about his works is that what he wants to do is to make paintings by combining together in different ways the different means of expressions of painting without attaching any content to them but the content they have as mere objects, their true content, their essence. What this essence consists in for Ryman is their objective perceptual qualities, their objective colour for example, and more important for artistic purpose, for "the poetry of painting", the objective feelings they deliver. Any kind of representational, intellectual content is not part of their essence but it's something added by us to the objects and so it is not part of the message he wanted to convey. He does not give us criteria to distinguish objective perceptual experience, and for what concern feelings he just tells us that the objective feelings are those feelings which make us feel satisfied in some way. I think that he believes that not all the colours, for example, that we can say to see in the objects are their objective colours, and the same for the feelings we could happen to feel, but since he does not give us criteria for objectivity he cannot say to people reporting the different feelings they get from his paintings and the different colours -even if more unlikely different given the large agreement in our language games of colours- they see in them that they are not getting the essence of the paintings. But the limits he intends to put to our possible reports to his works are going to stretch even more when we turn to the fact that he owes us not only a clear definition of what has to be considered a sense perception, what a feeling and what an intellectual content, but above all a demonstration of the rightness of his metaphysical position which pretends to include in the essence of objects both sense perceptions and feelings and to esclude intellectual contents.

This lack of demonstration and the absence of any kind of agreement in metaphysical matters finally results in making of Ryman's homogeneously white paintings, despite his intentions, a metaphor of the relation all his works have with the viewer: they give carte blanche to the viewer to say what he feels like to say about them. The lack of a demonstration of his metaphysical convictions would not be a problem if Ryman would not have presented them as metaphysical, that is if he would not have pretended to move away from the hermeneutical plane to the ontological one, treating his paintings as non-intentional objects by saying that what he wants to communicate is their essence. In fact in this case we would not have needed to turn to metaphysics to settle the question of their content, and he could have just simply said that his intention in doing his works is to communicate sensual perceptions and feelings -whatever they might be since he never says which perceptions and which feelings he wants to communicate-; he could have simply said that he wants to see what sense perceptions and feelings the different ways of combining painting's means of expression convey. And this would have been the end of the story .9 But he talks of reverent experiences and enlightenment as revealing the right content of his paintings, he talks of the essence of his paintings as the only intentional content to be found in them. He collapses his intentions onto the pretended essence of his paintings, so that the answer to the question 'What did Ryman want to convey?' finally depends on the particular metaphysical conception of the single viewer. Viewers with different metaphysical beliefs will say different things about his paintings and Ryman would not be able to say that what they say is not part of the content of his paintings because he does not give us any criterion for catching the right essence, he does not demonstrate that his conception of what an essence consists in and the criterion he gives us for detecting the objective feelings are the right ones.

He might not have any doubt that his criteria are the right ones, but so would do people who think different from him, people who might maintain that the essence of objects does not include feelings at all or that it includes representational content after all. The issue concerning the content of his paintings coinciding with the metaphysical dispute about the essence of objects acquires all its characteristics. Now, there is a way of seeing this dispute that takes distance from it, that it is not from a particular point of view involved in it, but from outside. It is the point of view articulated by those philosophers that wanted to cut short with metaphysical inquiry itself, with any question and dispute about essences. From this point of view there is not agreement in metaphysics not because we have not reached yet the right demonstration of what reality really is, not because we have not reached yet that reality, but because we could never reach that reality at all, because metaphysical questions are questions which cannot answered at all. It's not possible to settle the dispute about essences because we could never have at our disposal that true reality upon which to match the different conceptions of it and see what is the right one. We cannot reach that reality because our knowledge of it is supposed to be a pure knowledge, a knowledge in which the object known present itself directly as it is in itself without our subjectivity interfering with its reception. It is supposed to be a knowledge without presuppositions and it is this very fact that these anti-metaphysical philosophers maintain to be impossible, the fact of getting rid of all of our presuppositions. This is an impossible task that would coincide with our own annihilation, in fact we cannot get rid of all of our beliefs without at the same time blowing up our very capacity of thought. At the core of this point of view outside metaphysics lies the holistic approach expressed in the conviction that we cannot believe something without believing many other things as well, without taking for granted other things. "One could not have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things as well", stressed Wilfrid Sellars in his attack at the 'myth of the given', the myth that the world gives itself to us in all its purity. The chain of our justification soon or later come to an end, used to say Ludwig Wittgenstein to mean that "as foundation of the founded belief there is always the unfounded belief".10 "The track of the human serpent is overall"11 was the way in which William James put forward the conviction that Nietzsche expressed in the rhetorical question "Is living not precisely valuating preferring, wanting to be different?"12 . The conviction that at the heart of our activities there are always our values, our ungrounded stance towards the world, the conviction that human beings cannot get rid of their ungrounded beliefs and values and get at the heart of the metaphysical reality.

We cannot obtain the knowledge of the pure essence of the world, we cannot get pure sense perceptions or pure feelings. Then if we are asked about that essence, about those pure sensations and pure feelings, we are asked about something of which we will never have an idea of, we are asked about nothing at all, and so we can answer saying whatever we like. In fact there is nothing that could tell what is wrong and what is right to say. We can say whatever we like about Ryman's paintings because he refers us to their essence when we ask him what he wanted to communicate painting them. We can take his homogeneous white paintings as giving carte blanche to the viewers to say what they like about all his works because he refers us to that 'paradoxical absolute'13 he once painted, and from a contradiction anything follows.

Though from the point of view outside metaphysics I've sketched it does not follow from the fact that we can say anything we like about essences that we can say whatever we like about everything we met in the world. It does not follow from the bankrupt of metaphysics the bankrupt of our normal practices of distinguishing between right and wrong, true and false, good and evil etc.., the bankrupt of our critical faculties. It only follows that our judgements stand upon ungrounded assumptions, that when different judgements conflict one with the other it is not possible to settle the dispute in a non-prejudicial way because there is not a neutral ground we could turn to. It follows that we should put aside questions about essence once for all and turn finally our attention to the only things we can deal with, our everyday practices of knowing, believing, perceiving, feeling, communicating and interpreting meanings etc... When we find ourselves before an object then, even if we cannot -or can, which is the same- say anything about its essence, we can still say many things, all the things that the practices of knowledge, perception, feeling, interpretation etc.. which we are grown up in allow us to say. Therefore from this anti-metaphysical point of view when we find ourselves before Ryman's paintings we can say about it all the things that our practices allow us to say about things of that sort. We can say what material qualities they have, and in doing this we will follow our own practices for attributing material qualities. We can talk about the feelings we have before them and we will do that in the way proper to the practices with which we talk about feelings. We can talk about their meaning and we will do that following our particular hermeneutical practices. There could be practices that refer to what the author's said about them, there could be others that refer to author's unconscious intentions behind them, and others that think that we are free to see the meaning we want in them, and there could be many others practices as well.

Interpreting Ryman's works I tried to stay as close as possible to the author's intentions. On my reading Ryman's intention is to make paintings by combining different kind of -mainly white- paint and other materials and see what they are like. Painting them Ryman wants to convey what they convey as non-intentional objects, in particular the way they feel. He does not attach any representational content to them. What I maintain is that if in talking of what we see and feel in objects he would have stopped here without going all the way down to metaphysics, he could have legitimately said that not all that might flash in the mind of the viewer is pertinent to his works, as he would like to say, because it would not be pertinent to his intentions. But by referring us to the essences of things he makes the interpretation of his intentions, and so of his paintings, a matter of pertinence to those essence, a matter of metaphysics, and as much controversial as metaphysics is. To the question "What's the meaning of Ryman's paintings" there could be as many answer as there are metaphysical positions. Included the anti-metaphysical answer that says that we can say whatever we want before all that whiteness because it aims at conveying the paradoxical absolute, and this is completely silent, indifferent and permissive towards all the possible voices and noises, as that same whiteness is.

Fabrizio Trifiro' is currently collaborating in a theatrical project to be presented both at the Theatre Garagen in Bergen (Norway) and at the Cappella Marvasi in Bologna (Italy) in Autumn 2000. Since October 1999 is working as free lance translator for Time Research (London, UK) and for Research Partnership (London, UK). He is currently attending an Phd in Humanities and Cultural Studies at London Consortium (Birkbeck College, ICA, Tate Gallery, Archiectural Association).

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