The question-despite its rhetorical flavor-must be asked at the very outset: why is it so hard to write about Robert Ryman's work? Aren't his paintings themselves-preeminently anti-illusionist, flatly literal-all the explanation the viewer or critic needs to penetrate their ineffable silence? Don't they reveal what they're made of, proudly, with a kind of routine generosity, thereby cutting short any attempt at associative readings? Simply, don't they seem to suggest their own commentary, to define their own discursive terrain? And if we ask Ryman what we should see in his paintings on corrugated paper, whether, for example, something could be further clarified, he says: "What the painting is, is exactly what [you] see: the paint on the corrugated and the color of the corrugated and the way it's done and the way it feels. That's what's there."' Why is it so difficult then, for me and others, to approach his work and express our excitement about it? Isn't it tempting, but tediously elementary at the same time, to compile a list of "what's there" in a work of Ryman's, a recipe ("the way it's made"), a checklist? Yet isn't this what he as the artist invites us to do? In Naomi Spector's lengthy essay on Ryman, she undertakes a systematic chronological description of Ryman's work from the point of view of process. Painstakingly, she establishes each painting as a procedural document, reconstructing Ryman's formulative process in the smallest detail.2 But how do I explain my hesitation to begin? Why this inertia instead of smartly stepping up to take my own turn as detective (the evidence: the paintbrush, the paint, the support) and insisting on my version of the facts?