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Wednesday, 02 December 2009
Recently my daughter celebrated her first birthday, and to mark that
occasion I wish to repost below an entry from the Organum, which
was originally published on 27 January of this year. It has been slightly
revised.
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. In music, Morton Feldman's six-hour Second String
Quartet and 75-minute Triadic Memories are works to
explore from within rather than merely listen to. And there is
Schopenhauer's own The World as Will and
Representation — the tragic epic in the form of philosophy, its
1,100 pages a majestic cathedral of bitterness, brute honesty, poetry,
caustic humor and finally a sublime love and compassion. 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 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.
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Superfluities
Redux home page
George Hunka
home page
theatre
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Theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum
II (2008-2009)
Critique of
Tragedy (2010-continuing)
Notes
Howard Barker
1
Howard
Barker 2
Samuel
Beckett 1
Samuel
Beckett 2
Bertolt
Brecht
Richard
Foreman 1
Richard
Foreman 2
Je Suis
Sang
Sarah
Kane
Music
Marilyn
Nonken
Saint Oedipus
Contact
geh@panix.com
Copyright © 2003-2010
by George
Hunka
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