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Tuesday, 27 January 2009
For Marilyn
These works are a series of acts best comprehended in groups or as a
continuity. Except as a created revelation, a new experience, they are
without value. It is my desire that they be kept in groups as much as
possible and remain so. ... So I am in the strange position of seeking an
environment for the work and the small means wherein I'll be free to
continue the "act."
Houston's Rothko
Chapel is a small unremarkable building set just off a suburban
corner, adjoining a series of plain, low houses and a college campus.
Within it, however, is a world entirely itself, as real as the houses and
classrooms surrounding it but an enclosure of myth and tragedy. The
fourteen maroon-and-black canvases inside invite absorption into
the space, originally designed by Philip Johnson, dedicated to their
exhibition. Famously non-representative, they achieve the
distillation of myth and tragedy in the sense that Nietzsche wrote in
The Birth of Tragedy, the book that of all Nietzsche's work was
most influenced by Schopenhauer:
Insofar as the subject is the artist, however, he has already been
released from his individual will, and has become, as it were, the medium
through which the one truly existent subject celebrates his release in
appearance. ... Only insofar as the genius in the act of artistic
creation coalesces with this primordial artist of the world, does he know
anything of the eternal essence of art; for in this state he is, in a
marvelous manner, like the weird image of the fairy tale which can turn
its eyes at will and behold itself; he is at once subject and object, at
once poet, actor, and spectator.
Within this chapel, and within the bodies of work by artists such as
Wagner, Syberberg, Beckett, Feldman, Rothko and Barker, we find a new
definition for the tragic epic. Ordinarily the word "epic" is treated as
genre, or formal description, but more precisely it is the
representation of the will's noumenal cosmology through phenomenal
means. In this sense "epic" ties Homer's poems to Beckett's. As a
cosmology the body of work is necessarily precise and detailed, requiring
more than a mere story or anecdote – or a single painting – for
its full expression. It requires that imaginative extension besides.
Lest we balk at the word "tragedy" itself as mere genre, let us
consider it here as a dynamic, a consciousness, a perspective, rather than
a form. The epic artist insists upon tragedy's expression through lengthy
duration in time and and expansive extension in space. (Leaving aside for
the moment the idea of "comic epics," which will have far more numerous
defenders, unlike the tragic epic, which in post-capitalism,
unsellable, stands alone.) In terms of duration and space, the expression
is extensive. Wagner's Ring or Tristan und Isolde;
Syberberg's seven-hour-plus Hitler: A Film from Germany;
the four hours of Beckett's dramatic output after 1962 (these small plays
like canvases; arranged in a group, they display as epic a vision as
Rothko's Chapel); Barker's day-long The Ecstatic Bible and
other plays. The extension through time is deliberate. The description of
cosmology, especially as an aesthetic project, necessitates time and
patience.
Extension through space may be another matter. As impressive as it is,
the Rothko Chapel is not a large building. In a letter to Dominique de
Menil, Mrs. Gifford Phillips reported on a conversation she had with
Rothko: that Rothko had described to her his project of one-man
museums in "small, very simple buildings – made of cinderblock, I
remember that – scattered throughout the country in small towns. And
each building would be an homage to a particular artist. One would contain
Reinhardts, one Rothkos ..." The size of the arena seems to be
unimportant; what is essential is that the work seem to possess the
space entire, to blend with it: to express that all-encompassing
cosmos.
I have discussed before my affection for small spaces, for the
fifty-seat black-box theatre. Perhaps the root of my affection
lies in the ability for the work to more easily possess a small space than
a large one. The epic artist lays siege not only to contemporary
consciousness but to environment as well. Barker's exordia, the
preliminary mise-en-scene which he presents to the
audience entering the performance space, is a means of possessing that
space, of breaking the continuity between foyer and playing area. The
foyer to the Rothko Chapel is plain and functional. (As is the foyer to
the theatre possessed by that other epic artist, Richard Foreman, who has
spent the last few decades working in a similarly small space, smaller
than Rothko's Chapel; Foreman also presents a stage picture to the
audience as they enter, a sculpture of objects and setting that the
audience can begin to explore.) Syberberg's sole setting is a soundstage;
bereft of exteriors, the film takes place in a world as
self-contained as the crystal ball containing Edison's Black Maria
that forms a motif to the Hitler film.
These artists invite us in to these cosmologies, these worlds. In the
case of Rothko's Chapel, these cosmologies are shorn of traditional
figuration to reveal the essence of tragedy: beyond names and story (so
many artists make the mistake of thinking that a mere recycling of a story
or the use of a name like Oedipus is a means of confronting the tragedies
that lay behind these stories and figures; these artists lay claim to them
in a desperate attempt to lend their own work significance), but inherent
in the very real instruments of the art form: the pigment, the canvas, the
body, the sound. The substance lies in the real, the world of the
phenomenon. Rothko warns of this fetishization of story and name:
If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them
again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to
express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's
primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time,
changing only in detail but never in substance. ...
Our presentation of these myths however must be in our own terms which
are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves. ...
The myth holds us, therefore, not thru its romantic flavor, not thru the
remembrance of the beauty of some by gone age, not thru the possibilities
of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in
ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give
them life.
In his late work, Rothko's titles too were shorn of mythic resonance,
often mere descriptions of the colors within the painting. But he still
insisted upon the tragic resonance. And his work was prone to the same
kinds of misunderstandings as Beckett's. Once, an observer called Rothko's
canvases of bright yellows and oranges optimistic "celebrations." Rothko
responded that these colors, to him, were the colors of an inferno. (This
is something I must remember the next time somebody describes the "hope"
that Beckett's work elicits from them.)
The contemporary epic, tragic vision is rare. The comic can be sold;
everybody likes to laugh and have a good time; I do too. But the more
lacerating self-scrutiny that tragedy invites is of a different
nature and inheres in this cosmology: in the imaginative creation of a
world like the Rothko Chapel, of a space in which we can feel those things
that have remained foreign or hidden to us in the spaces outside the
chapel or the theatre. What emerges is not some vague abstract sense of
hope or happiness, but the sense of life's possibilities: ecstasy in
recognition. On my first visit to the chapel I carried in my arms my new
daughter, far too young to know where she was or why she was there; she
will not remember this visit. But I hope (with a true, fleshed, real hope
born of that recognition) that, when she's older, she will vaguely sense
that, one day early in her life, she experienced those canvases, that
silence, that dim light. And that early in her life she will have
experienced, will have been given access to, will have been encouraged to
seek out such consecrated aesthetic spaces that give her entry into her
own unexpected imagination of the world.
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
I'm not interested in relationships of color or form or anything else.
... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy,
ecstasy, doom, and so on – and the fact that lots of people break
down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I
communicate these basic human emotions. ... The people who weep
before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I
painted them, and if you, as you say, are moved only by their color
relationships, then you miss the point! ...
***
A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes
of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore a
risky act to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by
the eyes of the unfeeling and the cruelty of the impotent who would extend
their affliction universally!
Mark Rothko
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by George
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