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White rabbit hole

April 27, 2025
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Artist Robert Ryman (1930-2019) made a career with his white paintings. Over and over, he applied white paint to canvas, paper, or board, always with some degree of change in application or tint or texture or shape. 

Two years before his death, he donated 21 of his pieces to the Dia Art Foundation in New York. Before its closing in 2014, the Hallen für Neue Kunst in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, had a collection of 29 Ryman white paintings. So, there have been a lot of them. 

Three Rymans, L-R: from 1959; 1962; 2012

His work has been accepted into many museum collections, but there has been a backlash. 

“Aspects of Ryman’s work definitely stink of seeing what he could get away with,” wrote one critic. Another said, “Ryman is the undisputed master of showing precisely which part of the wall you are supposed to stare at.”

Robert Ryman

There seems to be a widely held belief in the general public that a good portion of art being made these days is a sneaky attempt by artists to put something over on them. That art — at least that art being sold for millions at auction — is a scam. And that artists are hucksters laughing at us all meanwhile getting rich as Scrooge McDuck through our collective gullibility. 

“A literal blank canvas? That could symbolize the artist’s emptiness.” And, of course, “If my 5-year-old could do that with his eyes closed, it’s not worth a fortune.” 

I am not going to try to defend the rarified world of the art market, nor of any particular trendy piece of celebrity art. One should never, ever confuse the art market with the art. The art market is not a function of the the art world, but of the financial world, where people with too much money buy and trade what is currently valued by the market, as investment or even to launder questionable dollars. Very few artists have anything to do with this crawling underbelly of financial worminess. And even less is fluctuating market value a measure of esthetic worth. 

The art and the market are parallel universes, and let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of working artists don’t become rich, and in fact, often have to work other jobs to pay for their need to make art, since their artwork cannot support them. A few solid and successful working artists make a living, but seldom making over a decent middle-class income. In other words, they are working stiffs. 

When they were young, probably at a university art program, they get caught up in various trendy ideas about art and get lost diving down this or that rabbit hole, thinking all the while that they are in the process of transforming the history of art. If they have any real talent, they outgrow these fantasies when out in the world attempting to make a living as commercial artists, product designers, advertising artists, or even fine artists, struggling to make ends meet. They are an indulgence of youth. 

But is will say that, as a working art critic for most of my adult life, who has known many artists and been friends with them, I have never ever come across one who thought he or she was pulling the wool over the public’s eyes. To a person, they were sincere, sometimes heartbreakingly so. 

I don’t mean to defend a lot of the goofy art that ventures out into the world. A lot of it is bad or at least mediocre. And a great deal of it is derivative: imitations of what earlier artists have done.

Artists can develop cockamamie ideas, have brainstorms of breathtaking stupidity, or at least monumental unoriginality or brilliant vapidity. But they are not trying to scam the public. They actually take these things seriously. 

I remember seeing a production where a local Arizona artist wore a coat made from pork chops. (And she assured us the meat was past its sell-by date, and would have been thrown out, so she was not wasting food). 

Another hung a 3-foot cube of ice from the ceiling by a wire and watched for two days as the weight of the melting ice pulled it through the cutting wire till it dropped to the floor. 

And if I never see another painting of nude lesbian vampires flying out of erupting volcanoes, it will be too soon. Who knew that was a trope? 

Every one of these artists was dead serious about their ideas. (And not one got rich from the work.) But please remember that over the whole course of human existence, most things that were done were either made badly or aspired to a level of mediocrity. The work in the art history books is skimmed from the top surface of what boils up from the bottom. 

Getting back to Ryman, he was not the first to make a white painting. In 1918, Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevitch made White on White, with a tilted white square on a larger, whiter square. (A few years earlier, he had made a completely black painting, called Black.)

L-R: Malevich; Rauschenberg; Manzoni

In 1951, Robert Rauschenberg made a series of white paintings, using a paint roller to apply flat white wall paint to panels of canvas and joining several panels together to form larger works. For Rauschenberg, the idea was that the blank canvases would change appearance depending on the light hitting them, the shadows in the room, the number of people in front of them, and so they were meant to be visually active — at least to those who were willing to pay attention to them and the take them seriously. 

Another avant-garde artist, Piero Manzoni, offered up a canvas plastered over in kaolin clay — the white clay of porcelain — in another series of “Achrome” or “colorless” works of art, made from white wool, rabbit skin or phosphorescent paint. 

(Manzoni is probably most famous for allegedly canning his own feces (Merda d’artista, it said on the cans). In 2015, one can sold at Christie’s for the equivalent of about $240,000. As for artists getting rich off fraudulent art, Manzoni originally sold the cans for $37 each. It was the auction house that got rich, along with the owner who offered it up. All of which rather made the artist’s original point: He made the shitcans as an intended critique of consumerism and the waste it creates). 

And in many cases I have come across, the artist’s idea is genuinely worth exploring, even if the non-artist public may scratch their heads. Artists see the world differently from civilians. They worry about things that never occur to normal people. 

Like: If a piece of white paper sits with a shadow over a corner of it, is the whole page white? What is white? What do we mean by white? 

How may whites are there? Paint companies offer dozens of paint cans, each labeled in some form as white, and each different. Whites come in cool and warm varieties, as ivory, as snow, as off-white. 

White is not a single thing. If we take a piece of white paper and shine a high-power halogen lamp at it, it gets whiter. So, would a stronger light make it even whiter than that? Like temperature, whiteness is more a judgment than an actual quality. 

And so, Ryman seems to have wanted to investigate how white survives in various textures, matte or glossy surface, in contrast with other whites, compared with neighboring colors. All those different white paintings were not just repeats of the same blank canvas. 

It may not be that Ryman’s art is world shaking. I’m not sure he himself thought of them as the last word in the evolution of art history. But he was quite serious about seeing what he could find out about the universe of white. 

Adrian Searle of The Guardian newspaper explained in his obituary of the artist, “Ryman worked with white, and the different kinds of whiteness different paints and pigments produced throughout his career. Lead, zinc, barium and titanium, chalky whites and hard industrial whites, silky whites and bone whites, kitchen whites and shroud whites, numinous whites and dead whites. Whites that seem to spread outward and emit light as we look and whites to fall into. The variety of their opacity, depth, brilliance and dullness all interested him. We apprehend them all differently, and differently again depending on the materials they are painted over and how they are applied, what their binders are and how much they are diluted all make a difference.”

Art, of course, isn’t a single thing. If you think painting is about making pictures of things, then white paintings don’t count. If you think they about expressing emotion, you may look in vain to find much of it in bland white; if you think art is primarily about beauty, you must acknowledge it in the eye of the beholder — remember that scene in the film American Beauty, when Ricky Fitts plays his camcorder video of a plastic bag blown about in the wind and says it is “the most beautiful thing” he has ever seen. When our attention is focused on the bag, we can suddenly see its beauty. It is the direction of focus that awakens our awareness. 

Many artists attempt to show us what we habitually ignore, to make us pay attention. Awareness — the sense of seeing the importance of the things of this world — is one of the goals of a certain branch of art. And attention must be paid, even to white. 

One of the most famous examples, that has been a whipping boy for the crowd that thinks art is frivolous, is the piece of music titled 4’33” by John Cage. For its performance, a pianist sits at his piano for the four-and-a-half minutes of the piece and does nothing. The aural equivalent of a blank canvas. 

For those without ears to hear, it is a lousy joke, or a scam pulled by the composer. But Cage’s point was that what filled the concert hall was never silence, but a cacophony of random sounds — programs rustling; people coughing; the air conditioning cycling; perhaps a police siren on the streets outside the hall; and even the sound of the blood pumping through the audiences’ ears. There was something to be paid attention to. 

I had scoffed at the idea of this music for years, until I heard it performed live and its meaning hit me like a ton of bricks. 

Admittedly, it is not a revelation that one can repeat. Once you get the message, you have it and don’t need to be jerked awake a second or third time — which makes the many imitations of Cage’s piece, such as the Two Minutes Silence track on the John Lennon-Yoko Ono album, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions rather a pretentious knock-off rather than a meaningful experiment. 

It is easy to misunderstand art when it doesn’t play by the normal rules, or tries to get the viewing or listening public to experience the world in a new way, or understand an otherwise wordless idea. 

Perhaps the most famous (somewhat) recent example of this was the anger and outrage expressed in the late 1980s when Congressional Republicans attempted to defund the National Endowment for the Arts over the photograph called Piss Christ by Andres Serrano. The artist received death threats, the work was frequently vandalized when exhibited. 

It was described as a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine, but there was no jar to be seen: All it was was a crucifix in a glowing golden light and a few bubbles. It was quite beautiful, if you could forget the title. 

But what few of its critics recognized was that Serrano was a pious, believing Roman Catholic Christian who was looking at his faith in a way perhaps only an artist would, to emphasize the corporality of the incarnation: God becoming flesh. 

I say, “only an artist would,” but I could also say, “an artist or a child,” for I remember when I was a boy, various Catholic friends of mine, in the sixth grade, wondered whether Jesus ever had to defecate or urinate. Did the Christ sweat? Could he produce semen? These were questions that naturally occurred to boys just on the verge of discovering their own bodies. 

Serrano’s art often used bodily fluids, like milk or semen or urine, as reminders of the humanness of the god-become-man. I met with Serrano when I was an art critic in Phoenix, and there was no mistaking his sincerity. “Maybe if Piss Christ upsets people, it’s because it gives some sense of what the crucifixion actually was like, he said. “I was born and raised a Catholic and I’ve been a Christian all my life. The piece  was intended as a serious work of Christian art.”

If there was no doubting his sincerity, we may still question his naïveté over whether the public would easily understand. Most people have a rather lumpen and literal way of understanding figurative or symbolic imagery. A picture of a house should be a house, dammit. But artists, on the whole, are more interested in the things undefined. That could be color, line, shape, scale; it could be symbolism; it could be what the viewer brings to the experience. 

Ultimately, you will get the most from the art if you forget what you know and attempt to see what is actually happening before you. As Robert Irwin famously said, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing you are looking at.”

One final note: An awful lot of current art is awful, puerile, badly crafted, poorly thought out, and just plain ugly. Of course, it was the same a hundred years ago. I am not defending it as good or important art. And everyone has their own taste; you are free to like or hate any art you want. I am not making an argument that any of this art is genius that will last through the ages. Please, like what you like. 

But understand that the artist is very, very rarely just trying to trick you. They tend to be a very serious and thoughtful lot. They are artists because the see things and think things normal people don’t. And if you in turn take seriously what they have made, you may discover something that will enrich your life. 

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Canticum mundi

May 12, 2023
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Now that it is well into spring, I like to sit in the back yard and just soak up the experience. On a chair on the patio, I can sit for a half-hour or so and just listen to what is going on around me. Often, I just close my eyes and enjoy the bird calls, the distant lawnmower, the occasional and distant roar of a passing jet high in the air. It is my form of meditation. 

It affords me great pleasure to hear all the sounds, and more, to hear them all at once, piled up in counterpoint, like so many voices in a Bach fugue. Indeed, I try with the same effort to be able to hear all the parts simultaneously. It is great training to hear the more traditional music of the concert hall. 

For, in any decent music, there are many things going on at the same time. Not only in dense Baroque counterpoint, but in all music. There is melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture — to say nothing about a bass line. If you listen only for the tune, you miss so much else. 

And so, in the concert hall, I often close my eyes and concentrate on taking in all the bits. It takes some practice, but it is possible to hear multiple lines of melody at the same time. At the very basic, to hear the tune on top and the bass line at the bottom playing off one another. 

In my back yard, I enjoy the stereo effects of a cardinal squawking to my right, while a chickadee yawps to the left, while the mower sounds two blocks away and a dog barks somewhere behind me, down the hill. There is always traffic on the main road, about a quarter-mile up the hill, and the breeze shuffles the leaves on the trees that ring my yard in an aleatory rhythm that serves as bass line to the rest. The mockingbird has his repetitive medley of greatest hits. You can’t fool me. I know it is you. 

Listening to it all tells me the world is alive. It is animated and bustling, and it sings an earthy chant. 

I am reminded of John Cage’s infamous 4’33’’ — the piece where the pianist sits in front of his keyboard for that amount of time and plays nothing at all. Often seen as a hoax by those unwilling to take Cage at his word, and feeling they are being cheated, such a listener misses the point. The composer intends for his audience to actually hear the sounds of the hall — the rustling of programs, the passing truck outside, the AC unit clicking on, the throat clearing and feet shuffling — and appreciate them as a kind of music of their own.

It is one of the primary functions of art, and music included, to wake you up to the world, to see what is usually ignored, to hear what surrounds you, to feel what is churning inside. It all boils down to paying attention. 

The world is full of miraculous sound. I remember Kathy Elks, from eastern North Carolina, telling us of when she was an infant, just after World War II, and would hear the propeller sounds of an airplane too high in the sky to see, and how she always thought that buzz was “just the sound the sky makes.” 

Or Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” Or the “good grey poet,” Walt Whitman: “Now I will do nothing but listen,/ To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it./ I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals…” 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the Ancient Mariner: “A noise like of a hidden brook/ In the leafy month of June,/ That to the sleeping woods all night/ Singeth a quiet tune.” 

“Listen to them. Children of the night. What myoosik they make,” says Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931). 

Beethoven included a quail, nightingale and cuckoo in the slow movement of his Pastoral symphony. Messiaen wrote whole symphonies built from transcribed birdcalls. Charles Ives built the sounds of his Connecticut village into his music. Rautavaara’s Concerto for birdsong and orchestra. Vivaldi imitates birds in his Spring concerto. Alan Hovhaness And God Created Great Whales, with its whalesong sounds buried in orchestral texture. 

Gustav Mahler said the symphony must embrace the world, and he included cowbells, hammer blows, distant military bands, bird calls, the memory of the postillion’s watery horn call, and even begins his first symphony with seven-octaves of unison A-naturals, almost a tinnitus of the universe — the music of the spheres — interrupted by a cuckoo in the woods. His own defective heartbeat was the opening of his final completed symphony. 

Bedrich Smetana wrote his tinnitus into his first string quartet, “From My Life,” in the form of a long-held high “E.” 

 The same world of sound that fills all this music waits outside my back door, waiting to be organized into coherence. The first step is paying attention. Engagement is the secret to unlocking the world. The ear is a gate to paradise. 

Some years ago, when I was still regularly penning verse, I wrote about this:

Silence

March 25, 2023
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Upon this wintry night it is so still, that listening to the intense silence is like looking at intense darkness.

—Charles Dickens, Bleak House, chapter 58, “A Wintry Day and Night”

When I was a boy, maybe eight or nine, I could wake up early on a winter morning and know instantly that there would be no school that day — it was quiet. Overnight snow had left the landscape eerily silent and I could hear that silence even before I looked out the window. It was a palpable silence. A silence that filled up the air. 

Later in the morning, there would be the scrape of the snowplow on the street pavement, the glee-screaming of kids on their sleds and, if a sunny day, perhaps the sound of dripping meltwater from the eaves. But for that first moment, a signal from the natural world that the day was different. 

We may think of silence as an absence of sound, but when paid attention to, silence is a presence. As “there” as the sunlight or the children. 

Silence is something we largely miss in the busy world. When I wake up now, normally I hear distant traffic noise or the sound of an industrious neighbor on her mower shaving her lawn. This morning I opened the front door to hear the rattle of a woodpecker and a crow’s caw-caw. The world is noisy. And that’s not even counting the TV that fills the air with its constant carnival barker reminding us of the world’s clattering presence. 

Silence lets us hear our own thoughts. It is the reason Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, and Moses and Elijah both sought solitude on Mt. Horeb, the Buddha spent five years alone in the forest, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra shunned human contact in his cave. In several Native American cultures, a part of growing up was to leave the community and spend time quiet and alone until you had your vision. 

Silence is the midwife of spiritual or intellectual awakening. It needn’t be the desert or woods; it might be a library, that other source of quiet. 

The quietest I ever remember was a press tour to the Karchner Caverns in Arizona when they were first opened to the public. A group of a dozen or so journalists, both print and TV, were taken into the cave and shown the wonders. And at one point our guide asked us all to stand several feet apart and be quiet. She had all the lights turned off and we were a hundred feet underground with no light and no sound. 

Even in the nighttime, there is light from the moon and the stars. City lights, no matter how distant are reflected back off the clouds and make nighttime at least a dull glow. If I wake up at night, my eyes adjust to the darkness and I can still make out the shadowy shapes in the room. 

But in the cave, there was no light at all. Utter and complete blackness, so that you had to trust your vestibular system and proprioception just to remain standing upright. And in that blankness, no sound intruded. The black nothingness was the visual equivalent of the utter silence.  It was as if you could have a memory of your own death — or your existence before you were conceived.

The Buddha said the only response to the “14 unanswerable questions” is a “Noble Silence.” 

Twentieth Century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said (breaking his own admonition): “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

And the Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi, said, “The only language able to express the whole truth is silence.”

John Cage wrote in his book, Silence, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time.” It is the thought behind his most famous or infamous composition, 4’33”, in which the pianist sits in front of a piano and doesn’t play anything for the designated amount of time.  

For the unthinking, this is a stunt, and further, proof that modern art is a fraud perpetrated on its audience by slick snake-oil salesmen. But for those who understand what is being offered — like the lotus the Buddha gives his student — it is an offer to hear the genuine music of the world — a direct connection with the now. No concert hall is completely silent, but we ignore the extraneous sounds while the piano is playing. If the piano remains tacet, we can — if we are aware — hear all the buzz of reality that is actually filling our ears. 

“Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise,” he wrote in Silence. “When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments.”

(Cage was not alone. Several serious composers have written silent music, including Georgy Ligeti and Irwin Schulhoff, although most of these were written at least a bit with tongue against the cheek. And in popular music, Wikipedia list more than 70 songs made of empty air, including by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, but also Wilco, Soundgarden, Brian Eno and John Denver. There have been whole albums, too, including the 10-track Sleepify by Wulfpeck and a 1980 “spoken word” album called The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan — Side 1 is “The Wit” and Side 2 is “The Wisdom;” both sides completely blank. But none of this has the serious and meaningful intent of Cage’s 4’33”.)

When we think of silence, it is usually of the soundless variety. But there is also a very noisy silence, made up of an unconsidered attempt to fill emptiness with meaninglessness. When I listen to most TV news, I hear very little news and a great deal of jabber about the news, a chewing of the cud, so to speak — this is noise to fill space and time and is, in essence, another manifestation of silence, or at least a filling of time and space with nothingness. 

I make a distinction between a silence of avoidance and a silence of engagement. Distracting noise — much of modern culture — is really an avoidance technique so we don’t have to deal with the often uncomfortable realities around us. But the silence of the monks and zen masters is a silence that engages directly with the most meaningful portions of existence. It is a silence to be sought after. 

Such silences are not identical. There is the silence of paying attention rather than speaking; the silence of the pause in the business of living; the silence of spiritual seeking; and silence of finding the center of one’s self. The idea comes up often enough: There’s the silence of God; the Silence of the Lambs; Omertà, or the silence of the made man; there’s the Blue Wall of Silence on the other side; the Silent Majority; the Sound of Silence; a deafening silence; an embarrassing silence; a moment of silence; the right to silence; radio silence; the silence of the grave. 

In some forms of meditation, the purpose is to quiet the mind so one isn’t thinking of anything: silence of thought. Our minds tend to idle at 2000 rpms, with ideas, images, tunes or emotions running random through the braincase, like so many maenads dancing in the woods. It can be hard to get them all to shut up. But the silence achieved is revelatory. 

Debussy said that music was the silence between the notes. And music is certainly what is found in the silence: It grows from out of the silence into what can express what words cannot. 

I remember a late-fall camping trip to the Kittatinny Mountain ridge near the Delaware Water Gap and waking up in the morning to find the tent sagging under the weight of the night’s heavy, wet snow, and the familiar silence of the woods. The snow makes an anechoic landscape very like an empty recording studio: The quiet muffles the ears. 

Now, in my senescence, silence is especially hard to come by, not only for societal reasons, but because there is always a slight tinnitus ringing in my ear, and even when that quiets down and it is otherwise silent, I can hear my own heartbeat. 

Silence is a great seasoner of thought. When it is quiet, you can hear yourself think, and the thoughts flow uninterrupted by extraneous disruption. Silence is worth a great deal, all the more for its scarcity.

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This is an expanded and rewritten version of a posting that first appeared Nov. 1, 2021 on the Spirit of the Senses website.