“As Cage demonstrated in 4’33”, a piece for piano inspired in part by the White Paintings in which nothing is played for that exact duration, there is no silence in music that is not also an opening to sound of other sorts, and so it is with these monochromes: the visual realm is opened up even as it appears to be evacuated. The Black Paintings also point to a space outside painting, which Rauschenberg called the ‘gap between art and life’, and it was capacious enough to contain the Elemental Sculptures as well as the Combines – combinations of painting, collage and sculpture – to come.”