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Chelsea Picture

January 29, 2025

Figure 1. Robert Ryman. Phoenix. 1971. Dia Beacon.


Figure 2. Robert Ryman. Phoenix (detail). 1971. Dia Beacon. 


Throughout Western history, and especially from the Renaissance onward, paintings have been conceptualized as windows. But paintings, and pictures more broadly, are rarely windows. They are almost exclusively opaque, with many of even the most self-critical paintings veiling their wall interfaces. Robert Ryman’s works incorporating fasteners are exceptional for their interrogations of the project of attaching pictures to walls (see Phoenix, 1979 [figs. 1-2]). In what I’m calling Ryman’s ‘fastener works,’ screws are often the dominant subjects; their heads protrude from the painted metal surface while their shafts plunge through the surface and into the wall. The screws are the element of the painting that’s physically doing something––pulling the metal toward the wall––and to which something was-done by the installer, calling our attention to the historical moment of installation. 

Ryman’s fastener works are not windows. Closer architectural analogues would be shingles or siding or even light switch panels, objects serving protective functions and pulled into walls by screws. Paintings as windows function as portals. Even when depicting this world they are illusions and fictive. Ryman’s fastener works are nonfiction, and the truth of a metal panel screwed into a wall rejects the penetrative gaze we indulge when looking at most paintings.  

Right below where eleventh avenue begins, a panel of transparent acrylic is attached to a metal door with six pieces of double sided tape (figs. 3-4). The acrylic panel was originally two times as long and folded over itself to sheath letter-sized pieces of paper in ‘portrait’ orientation. Now, the jagged bottom edge is a reminder of the sound the plastic made when its outer layer snapped off. A fragment of white paper stuck to the acrylic emblematizes the lost functionality of the vessel; installed to eliminate the need for an adhesive when displaying pieces of paper, the acrylic is now useless without one. The acrylic’s only purpose now is to make it easier for users to tape paper to this building’s entrance, as plastics are––unlike metals––generally gracious hosts to tape.


Figure 3. Chelsea Picture.
 

Figure 3. Chelsea Picture.


Whether the acrylic was attached to the door in its current distressed state is uncertain. In Google Street View, Chelsea Picture appears for the first time in August, 2021 and resembles what it looks like today. The preceding round of Street View images at that location is from August, 2018, when there was nothing on the door at all. In every batch of Street View images since 2021, Chelsea Picture appears unadorned as it does in Figure 3. The site is a service entrance for BASIS Independent Manhattan Upper School.

Chelsea Picture nods to a conception of pictures as windows while maintaining Rymanesque pictorial nonfiction. It does this with a literal window that shows exactly how it is supported and the metal surface it covers. A key difference between Chelsea Picture and Ryman’s works is the sequence of layers on the wall. In Chelsea Picture, the adhesive member occupies its own layer, unlike Ryman’s inter-layer screws. Discretely stacked, Chelsea Picture schematizes the picture-wall relationship of every picture that has ever hung on a wall. 

Adhesives are inherently sticky and generally adhere to surfaces with ease, whereas screws are not inherently compressive and will do nothing unless a very specific force is applied. When screws are used, they are ‘screwed,’ necessarily penetrating whatever they fasten and integrating themselves into the adjacent materials. But tape is adhered by hand with minimal exertion and does not have to shear what it interacts with. This quality of autonomy is on full display in Chelsea Picture, with the six black strips not visibly interacting with any other surfaces. They are both nebulous and dumb. On a molecular level, something pretty magnificent is happening, but there’s absolutely nothing happening visually. They’re just there. And we can know that the pieces of tape are sticky and that they support the window, but we cannot see the stickiness. We cannot see the mechanical interlocking, electrostatic adhesion, or whatever chemical interaction is taking place to suspend both the tape and the acrylic.

If Chelsea Picture has a fiction, it’s the illusion of simplicity. We create the fiction when we write off as ‘stickiness’ the chemistry that we don’t understand. We can see what is happening in Ryman’s fastener works, but the adhesive mechanism is invisible in Chelsea Picture, prompting us to imagine the phenomenon we cannot perceive. So, in traditional pictorial fashion, Chelsea Picture is a window into another realm. It's this realm, just subvisible.