I like white paintings, and this gives me anxiety. Kazimir Malevich. Robert Ryman. Michael Buthe. These makers of white paintings are synonymous with high art made by white men in the tradition of minimalism that has come to be regarded as pretentious, elitist, and transcendent. What does it mean for a racialized queer woman like me to like white paintings?  

I was recently reading the poet Kazim Ali’s new and selected works, Sukun, and was relieved to find that he too likes white paintings, specifically those by Agnes Martin, the Saskatchewan-born, Vancouver-raised, America-educated artist known for her “grids” – large square-shaped canvases primarily featuring horizontal lines. In the poem “The Agnes Martin Room” (referring to the room in DIA Beacon, New York) Ali writes:

                     What is a question to someone who practices years of silence?

                     Stones skim the water’s surface, shimmer there, lost. 

                     In the window sound of last year. 

                     Swim dimmer there.

                     After four days without speaking, I don’t ask questions anymore. 

                     […]

                     On white, the wishes, the whispered accounts,

                     a little autobiography, littered on the surface. 

                     Where we listen. Were we here.

                     […] (p.13)

Ali’s “window sound” is a sound-image that implies reflection; a stone skipping the surface of the water, leaving pliant ripples before disappearing. In the documentary, Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World, Martin insists on solitude and says that “you just can’t be an artist if you can’t be alone,” echoing the reflective quality of Ali’s meditation. While white is traditionally associated with solitude, transcendence, and silence - think of burial shrouds and hotel room towels, or milk for example - Ali recognizes the complexity of these dynamics in Martin’s work, its “little autobiography” and “whispered accounts.” 

When I first saw Happy Holiday by Agnes Martin at the Tate Modern in London, I thought of the beach. This painting, completed in 1999 is 5x5 feet long and wide. Horizontal bands of colour alternate between a foggy white and a muted peach. Entering the Artist Rooms (currently dedicated to Martin’s work) from the connected Painting with White room, Happy Holiday felt like looking at the shore and the sea for the first time after winter; waves of sand and water coming into view only after your eyes have adjusted to the blinding whiteness of the sun. 

Ali writes, “I find her canvases deafening in their concurrent embrace and refusal of simplicity, their motion, their restraint. You only think there’s nothing there, but there’s something there, something solid and real” (p. 304). It is precisely this nothing-something that draws me to white paintings like Martin’s, where projection and reflection are the name of the game, and here I must speak about myself and Jim Jarmusch. 

There are many ways a person can be read by others. One of these is race. Recently, I was mistaken for being Italian (I’m not Italian). In the past, I have been mistaken for being Serbian, French, and Spanish. I am constantly surprised by the assumptions that people have of me. A privileged older white man considered me to be naïve until I left the organization, after which he changed his mind and apologized. A younger woman of colour thinks of me as an outgoing person who brings people together. A stranger presumed I was tired from travelling when I simply didn’t want to talk to him. These kinds of judgements are often a form of psychological projection, where a person attributes their own thoughts and emotions to another person (in all cases, the people who thought I was Italian etc. respectively identified as such themselves). 

When I become aware of the dissonance between how I perceive myself and how others perceive me, I often think of white paintings. White paintings are the epitome of projection. They perform a tabula rasa, where nothing seems to be there, but in fact something “solid and real” is there, as Ali says. Like a white painting, I am not really white. Like a white painting, I am in fact “solid and real,” though it may seem as if “nothing” is there because – I don’t know – I am calm and don’t let anything disrupt my chill? Like a white painting is what it is, I am what I am. 

The 2009 film Limits of Control is built on such quandaries. I think it’s about the creative process, but director Jim Jarmusch says that his first idea for this film was about “a very quiet, very centered criminal on some sort of mission.” The plot follows a lone man who visits strangers of all kinds in international locales and receives little cryptic notes from them towards the said mission. Towards the end of the film, after the assassination is complete, the actor Isaach de Bankolé sits on the edge of his bed, staring at a white sheet hung on a white canvas. He also takes off the grey suit he’s been wearing in all scenes to don the more casual attire of a football jersey, after which the film ends. Whether or not he’s getting changed for the next mission or slipping into his “real” life post-mission is irrelevant. The fact is that there is something that exceeds the frame, something that is withheld. Like a white painting, he is what he is.

My first book, Port of Being, was written in the wake of being stalked by someone who stole my phone and laptop. I continue to receive messages from him through spam numbers, some of which are astounding in their judgements of me. I gradually realized that I was a fitting picture for a fantasy he needed to play out. He was living in “the window sound of last year,” if I can adapt Ali’s phrase to talk about the projection and reflection involved in this situation. In the same way that white paintings are looked at, he sees what he wants to see and cannot see a person clearly, beyond the limits of his experience and imagination. All he can see is a reflection of himself and his pasts.

Agnes Martin loved horizontal lines, but she painted her horizontals vertically so that the paint didn’t drip. You can glimpse her brilliant mathematics in the scale and proportions aspiring to “perfection,” as she says in the documentary by Mary Lance, but also her reverence for the human touch, since her lines are not rigid. She often waited for inspiration to strike and encouraged a softer approach as opposed to a hard go-getter stance: 

“I gave up facts entirely … in order to have an empty mind for inspiration to come into. If your mind is full of garbage, if an inspiration came, you wouldn’t recognize it, so you have to practice a quiet, empty mind.”¹

The lone man in Limits of Control practices such silence. He speaks very little and visits works of art, meditating on the white one hanging in his room. In the last third of the movie, the assassination target (played by Bill Murray) asks him how he got inside the heavily guarded complex to which he responds: “I used my imagination to get in.” 

The imagination can be a hall of mirrors where reflection becomes reality, but only if you don’t know where you stand. The lone man completes his mission and drops the suit, but he still holds the same kind of quiet power afterwards. We don’t know what he’ll do next and whether he’s returning to his real life. We don’t know what he’s like. We can only project.

Martin has said that lots of painters paint about painting, but her work is “about meaning.” However, meaning does not equate to representation: “Anything can be painted without representation. I don’t believe in influence unless it’s you, yourself, following your own track.”² 

For years it has relieved me that the actor in Limits of Control is a Black man. I didn’t understand why until I realized that he is being projected onto for the entirety of the movie but is still intact at the end. He never wavers from his mission, which is beyond his assignment and beyond our understanding. 

Martin says that “human beings can do anything that is repetition. If it’s been done once, anybody can do it again. But for something new, you have to have inspiration.” The “window sound” that Ali writes of is echoic and plinking, like a white painting that could be anything you want it to be, reflecting your own projections – a perfect repeating mirror. But the reflection is not the reality if you have enough of an “empty mind” to “follow your own track” like the lone man in Limits of Control. If you know where you stand and what you stand for, whiteness, emptiness, and blankness is none of these things, not even colour. Just as white light is a combination of all the colours in the spectrum of visible light and cannot be glimpsed unless seen through a prism, a white painting holds its secrets.