978-1572305441

Justin 43
shading and shadow. Just white paint, simple but applied with care and
considerable thought. There were no obvious references to outside influences,
no narrative. There was no grand expressive artistic gesture,
no inflection of affect. He had painted literalness itself. Through simple
repetition and a careful process of elimination, he brought to the spectator
an acute sense of the physical substrate of the world, a world beneath
the layers of language and metaphor. He had managed to see infinite
variety in something so simple as the color white.
Viewing these paintings, I could see the potential variation inherent
within sameness. I could see how one could be perpetually interested
in visual detail and not be bored. This was a world of pure sensation,
no more profound meaning than the diversity of the simplest
things. For a brief moment, I suppose I had come to see the world in the
same way as a person with ASD. The pleasure I experienced at seeing
these white paintings must be analogous to the pleasure experienced by
Justin listening to thunder and by Chris watching the trees sway in the
wind. This artist had access to a level of perception that is commonplace
among people with autism and AS. I know that Ryman is not autistic.
On the contrary, he appears as typical as the rest of us. And I know that
most people with autism are not artists. But Ryman has discovered, if
not by design then by serendipity, the kind of world people with autism
and AS live in. He has opened a door for us and allowed us at least to
look in.
The crucial difference is that the artist can go back and forth between
the world of perception and the social world. He has a choice.
People with autism have no such choice; they are locked in that world.
A life without metaphors is not without cost. People with autism and
AS cannot reflect on their experience; language gives us distance from
the perceptual and the freedom that comes with it. Metaphors free us up
from the literal. Language even gives us the means to control the world,
sometimes at our peril. The ability to see the perceptual world is inherent
in us all, not just in Justin and Chris. This perceptual life has been
released and probably magnified by the neuropathology of autism. In
us, this ability is under constraints, chained to language and metaphor
and social convention. But we can see it on occasion and so appreciate
the mysterious ways in which human development can go awry.