Page 40 - Studio International - March 1974

printing process and some similar compositional
(Top)
Untitled painting, 1969
As exhibited in Whitney Museum,
'Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials'
Enamelac on corrugated cardboard, 15 x 15 ft
(Bottom)
Installation of General paintings, 1971
Fischbach Gallery, New York
126
images and uses of earlier ones, the aquatints
have a more simple physical individuality and
independence from each other — both in
conception and in exhibition intention.
The problem of a work's physical parameters
is, in Ryman's hands, obviously not just a
question of the size of a static physical entity.
Ryman articulates the parameters of individual
works in terms not only of their physically
permanent parts, but also of their relation to
their physical environment and of the potential
change of environment in which they might
visibly exist. This gets into questions of
`installation', of framing, of dismantle-ability,
of physical changes in the work from one
instance of exhibition to another. Take the
painting which Ryman presented in the 1969
Whitney Museum's exhibition of 'Anti-Illusion:
Procedures/Materials' : unlike its related
Enamelac on corrugated cardboard paintings,
conceived and exhibited as sets of 3, 4, 5 and 7
isolated entities in his one-man show at the
Fischbach Gallery that year, this untitled
painting was made and shown as one enormous
whole whose brush-stroke overlaps overlapped
the tightly contiguous edges of the individual
5-foot-square panels. But that painting existed
as a physical whole only for that exhibition
(and in its documentation like the photography
reproduced here). Afterwards it was divided
into three works of 4 (the lower left square), 3
(the horizontal band at the top), and 2 (vertical
lower right) panels : the 'Whitney Revision
paintings' whose existence must be considered
with the once-exhibited 15-inch square as works
whose physical components might be
numerically constant but whose parameters
were differently determined over individual
place and time of public exhibition. The
difference might also be considered as a process
of considered dispersal from a whole : almost
opposite from the treatment of the General
paintings, whose clearly self-centred
individuality existed before and after their
one-time group exhibition in the Fischbach
Gallery in 1971. These fifteen paintings, as
physically alike as possible except for their
regular half-inch difference in stretcher size
from 48 to 55 inch square, were hung from an
equal height in a random order duplicating
that in which the transporters left the unpacked
paintings in the gallery before the show. As an
installation structure, such truly random order
was extremely important to the articulation of
the difference between the 'same' paintings,
accentuating paradoxically their individuality
as General paintings. And the acceptance of
others' processes as the (random) structure of
his own installation was a procedure entirely
congruous with Ryman's use of materials and
paint-application in other individual works. As
an installation procedure it is also potentially
repeatable as a bringing together of essentially
isolated entities : differing markedly from the
more permanent physical change of both the
Whitney painting dispersed to the Whitney