Mark Rothko – No. 14
What does this, and other Mark Rothkos colour field paintings, say to us or ask of us? The experience of looking at one of these abstracts is so different from the ideas and feeling evoked by say a Renaissance religious artwork or a Victorian narrative painting or even an impressionist or post-impressionist canvas. But in what does that experience consist and is it completely subjective, different for me than for you?
Like all great art from whatever period, a work like this is arresting and it asks for your time and undivided attention. Unlike today’s algorithmic trap of social media images and reels, those clips which foster the infinite scrolling prompted by the ‘variable reward’ mechanism, a Rothko asks that you slow down, indeed that you stop. But more than this, if you open yourself to it, it will unfold to speak about the very strange concept of time itself. Some of this work’s captivating quality is to do with scale. It measures 2.91 x 2.68m – it is big, almost but not quite square and so there is absolutely nothing cosily domestic or prosaically decorative about it its size and radiant impact. To be near it is to feel enveloped by it, captured by its mysteriously plasmic aura. I saw it many years ago at SFMOMA and have never forgotten its intensity. Its red-orange glow is what you might imagine it to be like if you could stand to look inside an active volcano or maybe into the apocalyptic ‘silent drop’ of a China-syndrome nuclear reactor - as desolately thrilling as it would be deathly. Could you even dare to look away though? To move on casually to look at the next thing would be inconceivable.
Below the orange rectangular form, a cobalt blue one hovers as if it were some weird antimatter, an absorber of light more than a reflector of it. It is smaller than the orange, but it emits a different, invisible energy – more like gravity or hypermagnetism say, than light. It feels like a void, unsettling in its stillness, an annihilating obverse of the fieriness above it. Both forms are painted onto an aubergine background, a colour often associated throughout art history with introspection and solemnity, highly charged events or august people. I’m thinking of the theatrically caput mortuum colour in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch or as connoting gravitas in Velasquez’ La Coronación de la Virgen. But here, while that colour supports the other two, it also adds weight, seriousness and emotional profundity – it signifies, for me at least, mortality and melancholy.
The colour forms are not solid. They are scumbled from spirit-thinned washes of oil paint and achieve a translucency that makes them seem mistily occult. The over-layering effect of this is paradoxically to make them seem both provisional and also assertive, saturated – they are like ephemeral ghostly apparitions - but at the same time they exist insistently and ineradicably. The technique gives a depth and haunting presence to the forms that they would lack were they painted as straightforwardly solid. They sometimes remind me of ‘buff blocks’, those areas of painted-over graffiti where building owners or local authorities prefer to see patches of tag-obliterating paint rather than street art but which themselves start to speak their own aesthetic language of negation and effacement. The perimeter of the orange-red block in No. 14 in particular seems foggy but unyielding. Both the colour and the quivering margins can also put one in mind of a pulsating, living, breathing entity, abstracted (in the sense both of it being stylised or non-representational, but also of it being extracted) from an even greater organism.
But for all such comparisons, there is no one answer to the common question, ‘what are these shapes?’ or ‘what are they meant to be?’ It seems that while Rothko thought that viewers would commune with his works, in a kind of quasi-religious manner, he refused to ascribe them specific meanings. In a way, they renounce the very idea of rational explanation and invite instead a kind of surrender. As with the precepts of mindfulness, the colour fields are not there to be judged – like our thoughts, they are there to be observed and experienced rather than wrestled with. The idea of any mimetic attribute is just irrelevant to their aim of their simply being. They exist beyond the realm of language (the title No.14 provides no narrative clue to meaning) to dwell in the domain of undefined emotion, of ineffable and numinous quiddity.
You can read this painting as a study of vastness. Just as painters of the Romantic era wanted to capture a sense of the sublime – for example Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow or John Martin’s The Great Day of his Wrath - so Rothko’s pictures give us not so much the awe-inspiring immensity of a landscape but rather the infinite expanse of the psyche, the boundless ocean of the mind, a place of terrors, triumphs and occasionally, transcendence.
Commentators often write about the ‘immersiveness’ of Rothko’s colourfields and ‘immersive’ is probably the best adjective to characterise an encounter with them, a descriptor of the unspoken mental dialogue that can exist between artwork and viewer. But I am suspicious of the word’s connotations, particularly since its current usage to describe the meretricious digital projections of artworks such as van Gogh’s (https://vangoghexpo.com/) that bombard the senses, those gimmicky Instagrammable and over-sensationalised spectaculars that commodify art as a means to generate revenue rather than serious appreciation.
By contrast, Rothko’s art does the opposite by instilling in the viewer an urge to look within. Granted that this contemplation may be stimulated by colour and amorphous form at scale, but unlike the theme-park-style visual rides that take you nowhere, Rothko’s work can lead you to places which are metaphysical, in the literal sense of beyond the physical. They shift attention inwards, to an examination of the soul. This might sound overly mystical to the rationalists out there, but the ‘soul’ can mean many things and here I want to let it stand for a certain interiority, and even a process of personal and wordless ontological enquiry.
It might seem remarkable or even unlikely, that coloured pigment on canvas can achieve such outcomes, but of course we bring as much to the artwork as the work brings to us. It is in this reciprocity that the genius of the art lies. Although the painting has a finite boundary in real space on the gallery wall and so remains seemingly circumscribed, its ‘subject matter’ is inexhaustible. Rothko insisted the works be shown unframed so that no barrier stood between viewer and the experience of them, no impediment to what becomes a collective consciousness shared between artist and spectator, a mutual and atemporal awareness of the very basic idea of what it is like to be alive, and to benefit from subjective, and never fully comprehensible, at times unquiet, at-oneness.
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