Friday, April 10, 2009

Robert Ryman

Undertaken as a form of resistance against the historical forces threatening to penetrate the domain of the work - either from the left, by contaminating its purity with elements of social ideology and utility, or from the right, by corrupting its materiality with the signs of privilege, specialized skill, etc. an artist's withdrawal into the grid of the monochrome is if only implicitly, an acknowledgment of those very forces.(Foster/Krauss vol.2 399)