I’ve been thinking a lot about repetition lately. Not just the kind found in art or music; but the quieter, more insistent repetitions of daily life. The way mornings return with their routines. The way certain thoughts circle back long after we’ve tried to outgrow them. The way memory replays, not always with clarity, but with rhythm.
When I look at Gordon Walters’ Untitled, I feel that rhythm made visible. The painting isn’t expressive in any conventional sense. It’s structured, geometric, stripped of illusion. Just rows of black bars, each terminating in alternating black and white circles, moving left to right, right to left, across the canvas. Yet something in it pulses. Not with emotion, exactly, but with presence. It’s as if the painting is breathing. Or maybe I am, and the painting simply reveals it.
But what is it revealing? Why do I keep returning to works that give me no answers?
Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians does something similar. It unfolds in loops and pulses, eleven chords circling back across an hour of tightly controlled movement. There’s no story. No dramatic shift. And yet I find myself listening to it as if something is about to be revealed—something essential, maybe even spiritual. But the revelation never comes. Or perhaps it’s always there, in the act of listening itself.
Why do these works feel full, when by all appearances they are empty of meaning? Why does the absence of overt content feel more honest than the presence of symbols or messages? Is it that I’m tired of being told what to think; or that I no longer believe in the promise of being told?
I’ve read enough Camus to know that the absurd isn’t a defect, but a condition. That meaning is not discovered in the world, but created in response to its silence. Still, that feels more like a hypothesis than a comfort. If art like Walters’ and Reich’s demands meaning from me, am I always equal to the task? Or do I sometimes just want it to tell me what it’s about?
And yet, perhaps this is why I’m drawn to them. In the middle stretch of life, when routines harden and stories simplify, these works refuse resolution. They resist the arc. They ask me to attend, to participate, to give shape to what will not shape itself.
Beckett once wrote, “To restore silence is the role of objects.” I come back to that line again and again. Walters’ painting does not speak, but it makes me listen. Reich’s composition does not narrate, but it holds me still. Maybe that silence is what I need now—not because I have nothing to say, but because I am no longer convinced that the most important things can be said at all.
So what, then, is the role of art that offers nothing but form? What does it mean to find beauty in pattern, when so much of life feels like repetition without progress? Are these works mirrors, or are they invitations?
I don’t have answers. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the task now isn’t to resolve the meaning, but to keep asking after it. To sit with the rhythm. To notice the space between the bars. To hear the silence beneath the sound.
***
Link to album: https://open.spotify.com/album/1w9O7mS9WEp5xlZUpYbDt9?si=dU3m9TngR7OxpbTpMcZJfw