The recipe of a work of art — its ingredients — how to make it — the formula.
- There must be a clear preoccupation with death — imitations of mortality … Tragic art, romantic art, etc., deals with the knowledge of death.
- Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is a lustful relationship to things that exist.
- Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
- Irony. This is a modern ingredient — the self-effacement and examination by which a man for an instant can go on to something else.
- Wit and play … for the human element.
- The ephemeral and chance … for the human element.
- Hope. 10% to make the tragic concept more endurable.
— Mark Rothko, “Address to Pratt Institute”, November 1958
My recent return to the Rothko Room at Tate Modern was prefigured by a renewed interest in his work that I had acquired back in Newcastle.
With the majority of my life already packed up in boxes, ready for the London move, there were not many books at my disposal. One that I kept out of storage and by my desk, for reasons I could not name, was a 2008 exhibition entitled Mark Rothko: The Late Series.
I think I went to the exhibition, also held at Tate Modern, but I can’t remember it. The catalogue itself was “borrowed” from my secondary school almost twenty years ago and I guess I forgot to return it…
What follows are some ruminations that grew out of that catalogue and its texts, which have come back into focus for me over the past few days.
The Unnameable
What has fascinated me about Rothko since my adolescence is his ambiguity or – it may well amount to the same thing – his dance with the sublime. His paintings depict a profound “nothing” that becomes all-encompassing. They are revelatory in this way, which is to say that they are revealing, but of what it is hard to say.
Abstract art in general is too often reduced to some sort of Rorschach function, but the power of Rothko’s work is that whatever it elicits is hard to put into words. Indeed, for all its ‘anti-expressive’ nature, what is being expressed could only be expressed in a painterly manner. As it was for Deleuze: “If philosophy expects something from painting, it’s something that only painting can offer it”, but certainly not in the same terms that philosophy (or anything else for that matter) employs for its particular epistemologies.
Rothko’s late works instead confront you with an unnameable something – perhaps something inside yourself. In this way, they have a ‘spiritual’ quality. The fact that there is something unnameable within, reflected from without, is the revelation on offer. Any resulting clarity is yours alone. Rothko only beckons you into a fog – one that may or may not be familiar already. It may only be a feeling, and that feeling may remain ambiguous, but it is all the more sublime for that reason.
This quality announces Rothko as a painter who mastered his discipline in a marvellous way. Although the works are “relentlessly abstract”, each captures that decisive moment when he decided to stop, before moving onto the next; when out of the nothing, presumably an affect emerged. You feel “it” too, and from there an intimacy arises.
The sensation of an artist reaching out across the future and imparting something to you is cliché, but with Rothko, it arrives with a new intensity. He becomes a sort of Nietzschean Last Man, but far from unburdened of risk-taking at the end of everything, Rothko keeps painting thresholds between worlds. As his friend, the poet Stanley Kunitz, once wrote, “the way backward and the way forward are the same”, and so Rothko too paints and enlarges minute details from art’s past and future as he steps into a new modality beyond all representation.
Reflecting the ultimate decomposition of a modernist tradition specifically, right before abstract art’s enduring era of zombie formalism took over, what is abstracted in Rothko’s work are entire histories. To cast your eye over them, in order to find anything to cling onto, you find shades of art’s millennia in the oily strata. Everything, reduced to almost nothing, is still everything.
Rothko’s late-modernist attempts to “make it new” thus situate him as both undertaker and midwife; both absurdist and tragedian. His paintings are beset by a profound calm, whilst the artist himself was often described by his peers as restless and impatient. All of these sensibilities are visible in his paintings if you look at them long enough.
Faithful Commitments, Aesthetic and Political
These sensibilities may be ambiguous, but they are undergirded by principles that are exacting and well-established. Indeed, moving further against any suggestion that, in its abstraction, in its anti-expressionism, Rothko’s works are beyond language and thus humiliate description, for his friend Dore Ashton, things are not so simple:
Rothko was an intellectual among painters. His mind was nurtured within a certain intellectual frame and his great task was to translate his principles into the nondiscursive language of painting with its secret emanation.
She notes further that:
there were many who regarded such an idea as pretentious, as an intellectualizing approach to a genre of painting that lacked content […] But it was precisely the quest for a kind of truth, a kind of transcendence of petty and temporal arguments, that ruled his moral universe – the universe of his work.
She aligns this moral universe to Rothko’s politics, where his “free-form” paintings – not free of form, but forms freed – take on:
the message of the old anarchists, whose vision of unity in freedom was, in practical terms, probably impossible. Still […] his dream was to be a labor leader, and the vision of social transformation remained uppermost in his mind. The subsequent transformation of himself, from a social rebel to an aesthetic rebel, occurred no doubt because he was innately and unavoidably drawn to the arts. Yet his struggle was always marked by impatience with tradition and a longing to find and enforce an ideal in his life which, by his mid-twenties, had become wholly art. His was a temperament that sought commitment.
This sense of commitment is more often translated into a kind of “faith”. Many may, at this point, think of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas – a non-denominational space of reflection and worship that, rather than aping religiosity, can instead be seen as a space of meditative contemplation resistant to all dogma and institutionalised power. To the contrary of this power, Rothko’s faith, his commitment, is to freedom above all else, even in its impossibility.
The approach reminds me of Alain Badiou’s notion of a “truth-procedure”. In a blogpost from 2014, Levi Bryant writes:
A truth-procedure is not representation, but a composition, an activity of building […] So long as we believe something is impossible and act accordingly, we will ensure that it is impossible […] The valences of truth as Badiou uses the term are therefore “fidelity” and “infidelity”. You bear fidelity to a truth procedure when you keep working towards making something a reality despite all of the odds stacked against you. You fall into infidelity whenever you betray that work, bowing to the exigencies of what is possible and abandoning the project.
This notion of a fidelity to truth is extracted from the writings of St. Paul by Badiou. Bryant explains:
Truth, for Badiou, is a commitment to something that cannot be proven in the present. It is not, as we say, a “commitment to truth”, but is rather a sort of project or activity. In this respect, it is very similar to what Paul describes as “faith” in the epistles. Here we have to be careful, for “faith” has come to signify “belief or conviction without evidence.” However, when you read Paul, this is not what faith sounds like. Rather, faith sounds like a sort of activity; in particular, an activity involved in construction. What is the work of faith? What is it constructing? For Paul, what is being constructed appears to be a society based on love, not law, that does not require tribal identity (being Jewish, Greek, or Roman) for membership or participation. The work of faith is the ongoing activity of building that community.
What, then, is Rothko’s truth-procedure? His activity, obviously, is painting. What is the truth which it so impossibly contains? It may remain something like love – love of form, love of sensuality, love of tension, love of irony, love of wit and play, love of the ephemeral and chance, love of hope. Above all, perhaps it is his love of an intimacy drawn from the infinite.
Rothko once reflected that, whilst he recognises the weight of tradition behind producing very large paintings, which often wish to convey something “grandiose and pompous”, he is attempting to instead convey something more “intimate”. His works are inherently contradictory in this way, and rather than seek to hyperbolise the experience of looking at them or explain it away, the attraction is more simply a secular reclamation of an experience religion has long tried to monopolise.
The anxious calm that emanates from the spaces where his work is held beckons to the “faithful” of all stripes – those who have faith in standing in the light, knees trembling. This faith in truth is not the same as a faith in certainty. I never know what I will feel when I look at a Rothko painting, but I return to Tate’s Rothko Room again and again, having faith in its anxious calm and the moment of reflection it will provide.
Some people take themselves faithfully to church each Sunday. I take myself to the Seagram Murals every few months or years. Rothko too once said:
If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again — exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it.
Foggy Introspection
It’s hard not to think about my occasional bursts of blogger energy when reading the above quotation. Manic is how I presume they appear. But writing grounds me. It is a way to self-soothe. The self-elected task of putting this word or that in front of or after another helps put something else in order vicariously.
Entering some sort of flow state displaces whatever is troubling me into the background. It helps me cope better with some emotional blockage – most likely grief – that I cannot shift from front and centre. Better to work at expressing something else – some encounter with art, or a book, or a song – than the inexpressibility of grief in all its forms. But as Wittgenstein once put it: “the inexpressible is – inexpressibly – contained in what is expressed.”
Whenever I seek to bring thoughts on the periphery into view, they seem to pass through the obstacle as if by osmosis. The act of writing soon amounts to a chase, a game of cat and mouse, between the expressible and inexpressible, especially when it is repetitive. Even after I’ve chosen to stop my pursuit for the time being, perhaps because something vague has been encapsulated through the manic meander, it’s never too long before I take up the charge again. Even when the subject matter is the same, revisited again and again, pondering the same memories, pursuing the same sensations, there is a sense of purpose that arises unexpectedly.
I am not suggesting that to read what I write so repetitively may evoke a feeling that is anything like a Rothko painting, but at its best, the act of writing does evoke something similar, if only for me.
I used to feel self-conscious about how often I would turn to this blog whenever some unnameable feeling overtook me, and all I would end up doing with it was writing about writing. Most of the time, I don’t even start to write because I have had an idea, but simply because I feel like writing. Ideas crystallise on the journey. Forms emerge from what is formless. I have faith that writing will rescue me from my troubles because the act of construction always helps to alleviate something, even if only in part. So, whenever I feel a fog descend, rather than let myself be suffocated by it, I set about writing until something – anything – comes into view. When I’m finished, I often feel empty. I have to come back again. I have to re-enter the fog.
The beauty, the sublimity, the profundity of a Rothko painting is its quiet testament to this sort of experience. Rather than only being inferred through what is expressed, Rothko works in the raw inexpressibly. In fact, no other painter, to my mind, has ever come so close to expressing creation’s inexpressibilities in this way. It goes to show how generative our faith in the impossible can become…