Writing

Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting is considered a foundational contemporary work, defying modern pillars of subjectivity, authorship, and artistic signature through three achromatic canvases. Its curation at SFMOMA features a bench, a detail as integral to understanding the piece as the canvases themselves. Inviting viewership in the form of presence, White Painting's absence of color, lack of conventional artistic technique, and sheer simplicity encourage introspection and metacognition. The genius lies in the unseen. Rauschenberg described the paintings as reflective “screens," an alternative clock inspiring environmental awareness through light and the passage of time. The immaterial work becomes as much an examination of the viewer’s state of mind as it is an object to be observed, creating a dialogue between subject and object. Prone to evolving perceptions and trains of thought, White Painting changes with the viewer. In this way, it asks something of its audience: reflection, effort, and belief.

In an even more extreme exploration of immaterial art and its dependency on viewer participation, Italian artist Salvatore Garau sold Lo Sono, a sculpture devoid of physical form, in May 2021 for the equivalent of $18,300. Garau challenged viewers to confront their physical, philosophical, and abstract systems of belief, encouraging them to think outside the box, quite literally. Atop a 5-by-5 foot pedestal rested absolutely nothing—an invisible work resisting conventional form and viewership. Evidencing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Garau advocated the substantiality of Lo Sono: Empty space is not nothingness, but an unseen energetic force filled with theoretical properties that define the universe.

Like White Painting, Lo Sono requires the viewer’s creative engagement to survive. Belief predicates its existence. Through imagination, sculpture is made tangible. Garau argues that viewer interaction even intensifies the work’s vitality, as thoughts and attention condense at a single point. Translating to “I am," Lo Sono explores existentialism and prompts contemplation of the self as part of a larger material continuum. By stripping sculpture to its most minimal form, Garau shifts attention away from the object and toward the act of perception itself.

Though seventy years apart, White Painting and Lo Sono mark provocative moments in the public’s reexamination of art. Both pieces sparked controversy: critics renounced them as effortless or exploitative while traditional artists felt their own labor and creativity were being devalued. Yet these reactions were, in many ways, evidence of the works’ success. Neither Rauschenberg nor Garau was primarily concerned with producing an object. Instead, both sought to transform viewing into participation. By requiring reflection, imagination, and even skepticism, their works relocate art from the material realm to the psychological one. What remains is not simply a painting or a sculpture, but an encounter—one in which the viewer becomes an active collaborator in the creation of meaning. In doing so, both artists challenge the necessity of material form altogether. The canvas and pedestal become mere points of departure, while the artwork itself unfolds within the viewer's perception. Immateriality is not an absence, but a transfer of artistic weight from object to consciousness.

The noise pierced the sky with the ferocity of lightning. Guttural, thunderous. A final explosion of implosion, the shedding of a child's raw experience. She wanted food. Now. A confluence of rain pooled at her neck, obedient to gravity’s laws. Puffy dimples colored rouge with vitality. She felt that which we feared—self-candor. So much backstory in a single moment—the buildup of turbulent thoughts, clouded perception overcoming to release. Overwhelmed, she screamed. But it wasn’t out of fear, it was out of motivation. She didn’t have to think before she felt. The daintiest hand kneading for refuge in the palm of my hand. She knew what we didn’t—that consciousness in some ways reduced us. Her loyalty to temperament life's elixir. The innocent beauty of feeling as a first instinct, the unfolding of life right before my eyes, past meeting future at the edge of time, presence. 

Then she looks, and just like that the moment is over. Nature’s purity is suspended by the scent of my stroopwafel. Noise turns to anti-noise, the glaring absence of sound leaving us lonely, uncomfortable for a brief instant. Silence brings a recognition of sound. I shift my thoughts with intention, watching her temperance meet its match out of the window, the storm subsiding with relief. She watched the last drop force its path down the pane, missing another drop before sliding off, alone. I swallowed my waffle whole.